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THURSDAY, May 23, 2019 (HealthDay News) — The World Health Organization’s pain care guidelines contain false claims about the safety of prescription opioid painkillers and should be withdrawn, two U.S. lawmakers say.<\/p>\n
The United States is struggling with an opioid crisis and the WHO guidelines could result in the same type of situation in other countries, according to U.S. Reps. Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, the Associated Press<\/i> reported Wednesday. The representatives said a 2011 manual and 2012 guidelines on opioids from the WHO were influenced by people with financial ties to Purdue Pharma, which makes the opioid painkiller OxyContin.<\/p>\n
“We have come to believe that Purdue has leveraged its financial ties to successfully impact the content of the WHO’s guidelines,” Clark and Rogers wrote in a letter to the international public health agency. “As a result, the WHO is, in effect, promoting the chronic use of opioids.”<\/p>\n
The WHO did not change its guidelines after Clark sent a similar letter in 2017. “We have received the most recent letter from Congress and are reviewing it point by point,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said Wednesday, the AP<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n