At the end of the 1950s, the pharmaceutical company Grünenthal advertised its new sleeping and sedative drug in Germany with the note “without major side effects”. “Contergan is able to promote rest and sleep”, and it is “safe” and “non-toxic”. The drug is “as harmless as sugar cookies”.
Rarely has an advertising campaign for a drug been more wrong. At least 5,000 children were born in Germany alone with severe malformations because their mothers had taken “Contergan” or “Softenon” during pregnancy. Advertising and doctors had recommended the drug with the active ingredient thalidomide, especially against the typical nausea in the early stages of pregnancy.
Nuclear Weapons Testing or Thalidomide?
The first victim of the teratogenic effect of thalidomide is a child whose father, a Grünenthal employee, brought his pregnant wife a sample of the drug, which has not yet been approved for the market. It was born without ears, while others had shortened or missing arms or legs. By the early 1960s, the number of children born with such malformations had increased, but was the statistically noticeable increase a coincidence? Could it be that the then hotly debated above-ground nuclear weapons tests were the cause?
One of the first scientists to point to thalidomide as the cause was the Düsseldorf neurologist Ralf Voss. He reported to the thalidomide manufacturer his suspicion that two cases of severe nerve damage could be traced back to taking thalidomide for several months. But “Grünenthal was never interested in my cases,” he later told the news magazine “Spiegel”. Finally, he made his fears public at a neurology conference in Düsseldorf on February 15, 1961, 62 years ago.
Shortly thereafter, the director of the Cologne University Psychiatric Clinic Werner Scheid Grünenthal and the human geneticist Widukind Lenz also pointed out the possible side effects of thalidomide at a specialist congress. In Australia, too, the doctor William McBride noticed the typical malformations associated with thalidomide and not only warned the public in a letter to the editor in the medical journal “The Lancet”, but also Grünenthal about their Australian partner company. Nevertheless, it was not until the end of November 1961 that Grünenthal finally took the drug off the market.
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