UK's NHS must attack wonder drug "fiction"

The UK's National Health Service should challenge the "fiction of the wonder drug," the chief executive of the Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust has declared. Sophia Christie also told a conference on NHS management that the government was wrong to have insisted that patients with breast cancer should not be denied Swiss drug major Roche's Herceptin (trastuzumab) on cost grounds alone (Marketletters passim). "Oncologists over the last 10 years are very heavily into the notion that an extra six weeks is somehow life saving," she claimed.

Ms Christie admitted that her PCT covers an area with high infant mortality approaching levels found in developing countries, according to a report in the BMJ. However, she insisted that adopting "world class commissioning can pick up on this," a reference to a concept proposed by the government review conducted by Lord Dazai.