NewsTrust - Pharmaceuticals - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

Michele Bachmann says HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Angie Drobnic Holan, Louis Jacobson - Sep. 16 (Fact Check) - After criticizing Texas Gov. Rick Perry for mandating a vaccine for school girls, Rep. Michele Bachmann added some scary charges: She claimed to have just met a woman whose daughter suffered mental retardation from the vaccine, that it has "very dangerous consequences" and that it puts "little children's lives at risk." In the CNN/Tea Party Express debate in Tampa on Sept. 12, 2011, Bachmann blasted Perry for mandating a vaccine for school girls to guard against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer. The vaccine can prevent the virus, but the virus is sexually transmitted, which makes ...

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House GOP Proposal Seeks $285 Million in FDA Cuts

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

foodsafetynews.com - By Marler Clark - May. 24 (News Report) - A new budget proposal put forth by House Republicans Monday would cut the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's budget for Fiscal Year 2012 by $285 million, an 11.5 percent reduction from FY 2011, just as the agency moves to implement an ambitious new food safety law.

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Controversial Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding"

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Jason Leopold, Jeffrey Kaye - Dec. 01 (Special Report) - The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding."

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The Overuse of Antibiotics in Livestock Feed Is Killing Us

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Martha Rosenberg - Jan. 27 (Special Report) - "These precious drugs aren't even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America."

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Swine flu “false pandemic” seems to be biggest pharma-fraud of century

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

rt.com - Jan. 13 (News) - The Council of Europe will launch a probe into pharmaceutical companies after reports that vaccine manufacturers pressured the World Health Organization into declaring swine flu pandemic seeking increase in profits.

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Fake Pharmaceuticals

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

pubs.acs.org - By Sarah Everts - Jan. 04 (Special Report) - Putting false active ingredients in fake drugs is just one trend in medicine counterfeiting. Bogus pills used to consist primarily of blanks because counterfeiters focused mostly on making the pills look like the originals. But these days, counterfeiters are increasingly adding all sorts of active ingredients to phony tablets. They slip mild pain relievers such as acetaminophen into pills just to make patients feel like they might be getting better, as was the case in fake Tamiflu seized from U.K. pharmacies in 2007. Sometimes, they add small amounts of the correct active ingredient to dupe testers who may not have equipment to accurately quantitate ingredient levels. More worrisome, some counterfeiters substitute life-threatening chemicals for the real McCoy, such as the antifreeze component diethylene glycol to replace glycerine. The toxic substitute ended up in cough medicines that killed hundreds in Nigeria, Panama, and Bangladesh in recent years.

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“Drugs-evaluating data is generally inadequate” – health journalist

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

rt.com - Dec. 11 (News Report) - A study published in the British Medical Journal has found no evidence that Tamiflu lowers the risk of flu complications. Doctor Fiona Godlee, BMJ editor-in-chief, says this case shows that the entire system of drug evaluation needs radical reform. “The research shows two main things: one is that drug seems to be less effective than was previously thought and that it doesn't seem to be clearly effective in reducing complications in healthy adults. It also shows that data available for evaluating drugs generally is inadequate, because drug companies hold on to data that needs to be publicly available,” Godlee said.

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Health care reform: A simple explanation

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Angie Drobnic Holan - Aug. 14 (News Analysis) - From death panels for the disabled to euthanasia for Granny, blatantly, patently wrong information about health care has gotten a lot of attention. (See our Greatest Hits list for the ones we found most significant.) But set aside the shouting, and there are still many legitimate areas for debate. Details on health care are very much works in progress, and Congress is considering a number of measures. With President Obama and the Democrats largely on the defensive, a lot of the debate has focused on what the bills are not. Here, we'll explain what's actually in the bills, and where the genuine disagreements lie.

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Internal Memo Confirms Big Giveaways In White House Deal With Big Pharma

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Ryan Grim - Aug. 13 (News Report) - A memo obtained by the Huffington Post confirms that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly agreed to precisely the sort of wide-ranging deal that both parties have been denying over the past week. The memo, which according to a knowledgeable health care lobbyist was prepared by a person directly involved in the negotiations, lists exactly what the White House gave up, and what it got in return.

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Prescription drugs easily acquired from rogue Web sites

Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

tampabay.com - By Stephen Nohlgren - May. 24 (Special Report) - People can't buy heroin or cocaine online, but a few clicks of the mouse get them darned close. For every CVS, Walgreens or Costco filling legitimate prescriptions over the Internet, dozens of shadowy Web sites sell painkillers and other powerful drugs to addicts, pushers and kids looking to get high. They run sites out of Mexico, computer servers out of Russia and distributors out of India.

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Biotech firms outsource to Asia

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Tom Abate - May. 18 (Special Report) - The global financial crisis has hurt biotechnology, an industry in which it can take a billion dollars and 10 years to create a marketable medicine. But a survey of worldwide industry trends suggests that the funding shortage hitting North American and European market leaders could benefit emerging biotech clusters in Singapore, India and China.

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Study: Range of Pharmaceuticals in Fish Across US

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Martha Mendoza - Mar. 25 (News Report) - Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.

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The Bipolar Bamboozle

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

csicop.org - By Stephen Ray Flora, Sarah Elizabeth Bobby - Feb. 20 (Investigative Report) - “Bipolar disorder,” originally known as manic-depression, has been acknowledged as a problem for centuries. However, until very recently, it was considered a very rare and severe condition. Now diagnoses of “bipolar spectrum” disorders are reaching epidemic proportions. Nothing has changed in humans’ biology or natural environment to account for this rise in diagnoses. What does account for the increase is a “softening” of the criteria needed to diagnose a person with bipolar, an increase in aggressive marketing of new profitable prescription drugs for bipolar, and psychiatrists “upcoding” problems to get higher insurance reimbursement rates. A likely outcome of this increase in labeling people “bipolar” is not that more people in need of help are getting it but instead that millions of people are unnecessarily being put on powerful antipsychotic medications. As the name suggests, people labeled bipolar are believed to alternate between the emotional extremes, or poles, of mania and depression. Prior to the publication of the third edition of psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in 1980, a patient would have to be hospitalized with a manic episode before a diagnosis of manic-depression was made. At that time rates of mania were estimated to be 0.4 to 1.2 percent of the population; prior to that, rates were estimated to be even lower. Currently some estimates of bipolar are as high as 10 percent of the population (Angst, et al. 2003), but rates of hospitalization for mania have not increased. What happened?

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Crops absorb livestock antibiotics, science shows

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

environmentalhealthnews.org - By Matthew Cimitile - Jan. 06 (News Report) - “Around 90 percent of these drugs that are administered to animals end up being excreted either as urine or manure,” said Holly Dolliver, a member of the Minnesota research team and now a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. “A vast majority of that manure is then used as an important input for 9.2 million hectares of (U.S.) agricultural land.” Manure, widely used as a substitute for chemical fertilizer, adds nutrients that help plants grow. It is often used in organic farming.

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Methamphetamine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wikipedia - Sep. 15 (Special Report) - Methamphetamine enters the brain and triggers a cascading release of norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin. To a lesser extent methamphetamine acts as a dopaminergic and adrenergic reuptake inhibitor and in high concentrations as a monamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI). Since it stimulates the mesolimbic reward pathway, causing euphoria and excitement, it is prone to abuse and addiction. Users may become obsessed or perform repetitive tasks such as cleaning, hand-washing, or assembling and disassembling objects. Withdrawal is characterized by excessive sleeping, eating, and depression-like symptoms, often accompanied by anxiety and drug-craving.[2]

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Patients Shortchanged by Big Pharma

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

genengnews.com - By Marc-André Gagnon - Feb. 15 (Special Report) - According to Bill Burns, chief of Roche’s pharmaceutical division, the dominant business model in pharmaceuticals is the “me-slightly-different-marketed-like-hell” model. It is a model based on overpromotion of me-too drugs in order to transform them into blockbusters. It is also a model, according to Burns who was quoted in a 2005 Barron’s article, from which the industry has to depart. In the meantime, expensive new drugs with low therapeutic benefits continue to flood the market. “Today’s medicines finance tomorrow’s miracles,” says GlaxoSmithKline’s advertising slogan. Pharmaceutical firms remind us endlessly that the high price of drugs is justified by the high costs of therapeutic innovation. The exceptional profit rates of this industry are thus, frequently justified by the hope they give sick people. Profits, we are told, are the key to R&D, and R&D promises to bring better health.

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Prime Destination for Unethical Clinical Trials

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Inter Press Service - By Keya Acharya - Dec. 14 (Special Report) - Lack of regulation, accountability, low costs of operation and wide availability of target participants are reasons why multinational drug companies, researchers and institutions are increasingly basing their clinical trials in India. An estimated 40 percent of all clinical trials now take place in Asia, Eastern Europe, central and south America. "There is no compulsory registration system for clinical trials in these countries and many do not follow European directives in their operations", says Dr. Jacob Sijtsma of the Netherlands-based WEMOS, an advocacy health organisation tracking clinical trials in developing countries.

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