Court to Decide Whether Merck's Pet Microchip Causes Cancer in Cats
A Massachussets woman's lawsuit against Merck (MRK), claiming the company's Home Again lost-pet-retrieval microchip implant caused cancer in her cat, Bulkin, could trigger more unwelcome publicity for PositiveID (PSID), the troubled Florida company that makes microchips for humans.
Until recently, the notion that microchips cause cancer has been the province of the sort of people who believe that "they" want to create a One-World government in which we're all slaves to Big Brother. The reality is that the sole company that actually makes makes chips for humans -- PositiveID, formerly known as VeriChip -- is chronically unprofitable and has mostly shelved the portion of its business that dealt with identification chips for humans and their medical records. It has plowed ahead with a business using microchips to monitor blood glucose in diabetics, however.
A 2007 paper, presented to the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, found an anecdotal link between chips in pets and cancers:
Eleven articles were reviewed in all, with eight investigating mice and rats, and three investigating dogs. In all but three of the articles, researchers observed that malignant sarcomas and other cancers formed around or adjacent to the implanted microchips.
However, the author is Katherine Albrecht, a radio host (pictured) who is not a scientist. Although she has a master's degree from Harvard, it's in education, not medicine. (You can read a longer version of her paper here.)The other person who believes chips might cause cancer in humans is Bob Boyce, who claims his doctor discovered a VeriChip device in his shoulder when removing a tumor. Boyce claims he does not know how the device got there. He also claims to have invented a device that creates energy for free, so you can make your own judgements about that.
If the Bulkin suit survives summary judgment, it could allow the plaintiff Andrea Rutherford, to conduct discovery inside both Merck and co-defendant Digital Angel (DIGA), the company that makes Home Again. Digital Angel is the company which spun off PositiveID, so the suit could gather in information about the latter company also. Those documents -- as they relate to pets or humans -- ought to make some interesting reading. (Bulkin survived, by the way.)
And finally: When I reported recently that PositiveID's attempt to acquire Digital Angel had failed, I also noted that I failed to locate any information about Health Plexus, the company that PositiveID says bought its Health Link medical records chip implant business for $1 million. Since then, a representative of Digital Angel told me that he has no information about Health Plexus either. And PositiveID has not filed any information disclosing the deal with the SEC, even though the price of the deal -- $1 million -- is greater than its entire revenue for the last quarter. I'll update these items if any evidence of the existence of Health Plexus is brought to my attention.
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