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Watchdog risked career over pet-drug warning
Speaking up about risky medicine sparked Senate inquiry, got vet demoted
 Leslie E Kossoff / AP Dr. Victoria Hampshire examines a canine patient in Rockville, Md. Hampshire was removed from an FDA oversight job when a drugmaker complained about questions she raised over the pet drug Proheart 6. |
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BETHESDA, Md. - The first hints of trouble came with vague warnings from the outer reaches of the bureaucracy.
She was “pushing too hard.”
She was “alarmist.”
But it was something else — a clumsy bid to call her off the scent of the dangerous veterinary drug she was tracking — that really galled her. Maybe that was her last possible moment to keep soundless and safe.
“When enough dogs die, this product will take care of itself,” a colleague said.
Her reply tumbled out like a boulder that, once rolling, will no longer stop. Victoria Hampshire heard herself say: “I don’t know what I’m doing here, then.”
What she was doing — trying to do, at least — was her job: She kept count of side effects from animal drugs for the Food and Drug Administration. She made tallies, analyzed numbers and alerted supervisors when something seemed amiss.
And something seemed amiss that spring of 2004.
A big drugmaker had crafted what seemed a star performer in Proheart 6, a 3-year-old injected drug to prevent heartworm, the common parasite in dogs. Hampshire’s numbers showed, though, that dogs were dying at alarming rates.
What happened next — and the price she paid for speaking up — have spurred a U.S. Senate inquiry and shined a spotlight on the complex topography of drug safety, where interests collide like tectonic plates and squeeze decisions from all sides.
On this landscape, the government’s watchdogs come in disparate breeds, too. Some whimper at approaching trouble; others bark gamely.
And some, like Hampshire, won’t give an inch.
Not ‘a real subtle person’
While dogs were dying, her dad’s heart was failing.
Gifford Hampshire was an FDA press officer in the 1960s, when the agency firmly held the public trust. There was no Vioxx scare, little fuss about taking money from industry.
His daughter Victoria — everyone called her Tory — now worked as a veterinarian at the same agency. She grew up on a Virginia horse farm, where her mother raised basset hounds, and learned to treat animals with compassion. She once crafted little sleeping bags from cloth to help mice recover from surgery.
Her dad was so proud of her. She’d worked hard on her government career. Then age 44, she was smart and upstanding in everyday life, too, someone who points out undercharges and never speeds. But she wasn’t timid. When she’d stare over reading glasses, it wasn’t always fun to be her focal point.
“I could feel like I’d get an honest opinion from her, without brownnosing,” says Dr. Judith Davis, her former supervisor at the National Institutes of Health. That meant Hampshire was not always “a real subtle person,” says Dr. Linda Tollefson, who was deputy head of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine.
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