The controversial painkiller is being cited in a growing number of deaths in Spain despite warnings about dangerous side-effects

The controversial painkiller is being cited in a growing number of deaths in Spain despite warnings about dangerous side-effects

On an October evening last year, Summer Moses stood at her partner’s bedside in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Spain and agreed the life support systems could be switched off. Her partner, Mark Brooks, lay under a transparent cover surrounded by tubes and machines. His body was swollen, blistered and broken.

Moses was in a state of shock. Just six days earlier, Brooks had been enjoying a game of golf in eastern Spain in bright sunshine near his home. He sought treatment the next day for shoulder pain, and was given a painkiller injection of the drug metamizole at a local clinic.

Two days after the injection, he was admitted to hospital in the town of Torrevieja in Alicante province with suspected depleted white blood cells. Three days after the jab, he was in intensive care with failing organs. Five days after it, he was dead.

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    0•10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    On an October evening last year, Summer Moses stood at her partner’s bedside in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Spain and agreed the life support systems could be switched off.

    ADAF is taking legal action over the use of the drug in Spain and briefed a British consul from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on the case in November.

    Brooks, 42, a handyman and gardener who lived in Ciudad Quesada in Alicante and was originally from Chesterfield in Derbyshire, suffered a suspected reaction after the metamizole injection at a local clinic.

    Spain’s medicine and health products agency, the AEMPS, says the risk of agranulocytosis from metamizole, in which white blood cells are severely depleted, is very rare, in the range of one to 10 cases per million users.

    A 2009 study at the Costa del Sol hospital in Marbella concluded: “Dipyrone-related agranulocytosis is an adverse effect more frequent in [the] British population, and its use must be avoided.”

    Vicente Palop Larrea, a doctor specialising in fibromyalgia who helped set up the Valencia region’s pharmaceutical safety authority in the 1980s, said: “Metamizole continues to be dispensed without a prescription.

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