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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: JAN-FEB 06

Wyeth begins shutting down first & biggest pregnant mare’s urine drug manufacturing plant

ROUSES POINT, N.Y. ––Breeding horses to collect pregnant mares’ urine is far from done, but the Wyeth drug empire is soon to halt Premarin and Prempro manufacturing at Rouses Point, New York, hub of the PMU industry for 60 years. The staff has already been cut from more than 1,600 to barely 1,200. The plant is to close in 2008.


Sales of the PMU-based products have reportedly fallen by half, from more than $2 billion a year, since the National Institutes of Health disclosed in July 2002 that among each 10,000 women who take Prempro for one year, there are eight more cases of invasive breast cancer, eight more strokes, eight more blood clots in the lungs, and seven more heart attacks, than among women of the same age and state of health who do not take the drug. The NIH told 16,000 participants in a nine-year Women’s Health Initiative study of Prempro that their health would be safer if they quit taking it.


Prempro combines estrogen with progesterone. Premarin contains only estrogen.


Wyeth set up at Rouses Point, near the northern end of Lake Champlain, to be near Quebec, then the major source of PMU, as the last part of North America where most farm work was done with horses.


Surplus foals bred so that their mothers would produce PMU went to a long-gone glue factory at LaColle, just to the north, or to slaughterhouses near Trois Rivieres.


As the PMU industry grew, and Quebec farms mechanized, horse breeding for PMU production shifted to Ontario. Humane concerns rising in Ontario about the treatment of the mares and their foals eventually drove the breeding end of the industry west again, to center in Alberta, but manufacuring remained at Rouses Point.


This work will now be done at other Wyeth plants, operating on a smaller scale.


The Wyeth decision to leave Rouses Point, announced in October 2005, came three months after the International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified hormonal menopause therapy from “possibly carcinogenic to humans” to “carcinogenic to humans.” This significantly limited the chances of Wyeth expanding Premarin and Prempro exports to compensate for the loss of U.S. sales. The Inter-national Agency for Research on Cancer is part of the United Nations.


Earlier in 2005, former University of Montreal, University of Vermont, and University of Maryland professor Eric T. Poehl-man agreed to plead guilty to civil, criminal and administrative chargesfor falsifying studies that promoted Premarin and Prempro use; to pay $196,000 in fines and attorneys’ fees; to accept a lifetime ban on seeking or receiving federal funding or participating in federal health programs, and to issue at least 10 retractions and corrections to papers he published in scientific journals.