Investigation into three deaths linked to weight loss injections Tim Ramsay wanted to lose weight so he could confidently walk his daughter down the aisle. But the 58-year-old died just 19 days after he started taking Saxenda. His family wants further investigation after a coroner ruled his cause of death as undetermined. “I don’t believe that anybody should die without an explanation, you just don’t expire, there has got to be a reason for Tim’s death,” Tim’s wife, Sue, told 60 Minutes . “19 days between his first injection and the day he left us, alarm bells in our heads, in the TGA’s heads, and the coroner’s head should be ringing,” Tim’s daughter Elyse said. Leonie Margetts knows the distress Sue and Elyse feel. ‘She was a week away from turning 40 and that’s a big thing for any female, she was feeling very vulnerable’ Her daughter Naomi died after taking Ozempic injections she’d ordered online. The 39-year-old was desperate to be a mum and was told she needed to lose weight to have any chance of falling pregnant. “You just do not expect to find your daughter on her knees in front of the toilet bowl dead,” Margetts said. Margetts is angry at the ease in which her daughter accessed Ozempic, despite Naomi being an experienced nurse with an expert knowledge of drugs and their side effects. “She was a week away from turning 40 and that’s a big thing for any female, she was feeling very vulnerable,” Margetts said. The Therapeutic Goods Administration’s Chief Medical Advisor, Professor Robyn Langham, told 60 Minutes the TGA has a responsibility to the families of those who’ve died, all in similar circumstances. “It’s a very serious and a very tragic problem for the families that are concerned and we don’t wish to minimise that at all,” Langham said. She said the regulator is carefully monitoring reports of severe gastrointestinal side effects caused by the medication. “If we do see that there is a need to change the messaging or the information that goes with the drug or even in some cases to withdraw the drug, then we have the power to do so,” Langham said. Professor of medicine and endocrinologist Dr Katherine Samaras said she’s never seen a drug explode in popularity the way Ozempic and weight loss injections have. “I liken this to when the [Model] T Ford was first invented and suddenly we had changes in transportation and the horse and cart went,” Samaras said. But with so much promise in the fight against obesity and other chronic conditions, Samaras warns Ozempic is only approved in Australia for diabetes and should only be used when closely monitored by a doctor. “We don’t leave matches in the hands of children,” she said. “We shouldn’t leave these drugs in the hands of people, it has to be supervised.” Watch the full episode of 60 Minutes on 9Now .
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