HPV vaccines can cause severe adverse effects on recipients
A woman decided to sue the Irish government to compel it to withdraw the license for Gardasil, Merck’s HPV vaccine, after her daughter allegedly suffered from “horrendous adverse effects,” following the latter’s vaccination under the Irish school vaccination program. Continue reading
A billion-dollar system in which charitable giving is profitable.
In August 2015, Turing Pharmaceuticals and its then-chief executive, Martin Shkreli, purchased a drug called Daraprim and immediately raised its price more than 5,000 percent. Within days, Turing contacted Patient Services Inc., or PSI, a charity that helps people meet the insurance copayments on costly drugs. Turing wanted PSI to create a fund for patients with toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that is most often treated with Daraprim.
Having just made Daraprim much more costly, Turing was now offering to make it more affordable. Continue reading
(graphic: Bull’s Eye/Imagezoo/Getty Images)
From the campaign trail to the halls of Congress, drugmakers have spent much of the last year enduring withering criticism over the rising cost of drugs.
It does not seem to be working.
In April alone, Johnson & Johnson raised its prices on several top-selling products, including the leukemia drug Imbruvica, the diabetes treatment Invokana, and Xarelto, an anti-clotting drug, according to a research note published last week by an analyst for Leerink, an investment bank. Other major companies that have raised prices this year include Amgen, Gilead and Celgene, the analyst reported. Continue reading
Johnson & Johnson is being sued by more than 1,000 women who developed ovarian cancer after using the company’s Baby Powder product. The lawsuit is based on the assertion that the company knew their product was associated with an increased cancer risk but deliberately withheld that information from the public. Continue reading
Major pharmaceutical companies have been feeling intense political heat in the past year over skyrocketing drug prices, with some lawmakers and politicians threatening congressional or administrative action to rein in those costs. Continue reading
The average annual retail cost of specialty drugs used to treat complex diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis now exceeds the median U.S. household income, according to a recent published report.
The study of 115 specialty drugs found that a year’s worth of prescriptions for a single drug retailed at $53,384 per year, on average, in 2013 — more than the median U.S. household income, double the median income of Medicare beneficiaries, and more than three times as much as the average Social Security benefit in the same year. The report was prepared by the AARP Public Policy Institute to highlight the impact of drug prices on seniors. Continue reading
By now, you probably have come to realize that something is not quite right with the current health care system that dominates today. It has become a dictating, disease managing, and complicated mess that has generally left more people sick than healthy. Sure, it’s great for emergency and acute care, but when it comes to eradicating disease, it hasn’t even sniffed the coffee yet.
So when other options exist, such as alternative medicine, that have proven track records for helping people actually uproot the cause of their suffering, why has conventional medicine typically deemed it as quackery? Continue reading
A disturbing report from the front lines of the war on cancer.
We have cancer therapies, Vincent DeVita says, that could cure another hundred thousand patients if used to their full potential.
CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
In the fall of 1963, not long after Vincent T. DeVita, Jr., joined the National Cancer Institute as a clinical associate, he and his wife were invited to a co-worker’s party. At the door, one of the institute’s most brilliant researchers, Emil Freireich, presented them with overflowing Martinis. The head of the medical branch, Tom Frei, strode across the room with a lab technician flung over his shoulder, legs kicking and her skirt over her head. DeVita, shocked, tried to hide in a corner. But some time later the N.C.I.’s clinical director, Nathaniel Berlin, frantically waved him over. Freireich, six feet four and built like a lineman, had passed out in the bathtub. Berlin needed help moving him. “Together, we pulled him up, threw his arms over our shoulders, and dragged him out through the party,” DeVita writes, in his memoir, “The Death of Cancer” (Sarah Crichton Books). “Out front, Freireich’s wife, Deanie, sat behind the wheel of their car. We tossed Freireich in the backseat and slammed the door.”
Half a century ago, the N.C.I. was a very different place. It was dingy and underfunded—a fraction of its current size—and home to a raw and unruly medical staff. The orthodoxy of the time was that cancer was a death sentence: the tumor could be treated with surgery or radiation, in order to buy some time, and the patient’s inevitable decline could be eased through medicine, and that was it. At the N.C.I., however, an insurgent group led by Frei and Freireich believed that if cancer drugs were used in extremely large doses, and in multiple combinations and repeated cycles, the cancer could be beaten. “I wasn’t sure if these scientists were maniacs or geniuses,” DeVita writes. But, as he worked with Freireich on the N.C.I.’s childhood-leukemia ward—and saw the fruits of the first experiments using combination chemotherapy—he became a convert. Continue reading
Five-year-old Alexander Prentice, of Burton, Mich., smiles as he searches for items at the bottom of a sand bin at Genesee Health System’s new Children’s Autism Center in 2014. (AP Photo/The Flint Journal, Jake May )
The number of autism cases in the United States appeared to jump dramatically in 2014 according to new estimates released Friday, but researchers said that changes in the format of the questionnaire likely affected the numbers.
The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics shows that the prevalence of autism in children ages 3 to 17 went up about 80 percent from 2011-2013 to 2014. Instead of 1 in 80 (or 1.25 percent) children having autism — a number that has alarmed public health officials in recent years and strained state and school system resources — researchers now estimate that the prevalence is now 1 in 45 (or 2.24 percent). Continue reading
It leaves people bed-bound and drives some to suicide, but there’s little research money devoted to the disease. Now, change is coming, thanks to the patients themselves. Continue reading
During my university years, I used to frustrate my parents by throwing away egg yolks and eating only the whites. No worries, I thought, as my parents just didn’t know enough to realize that I was reducing my risk of heart disease by avoiding cholesterol. Looking back, I’m sure that my parents were wondering how I could so easily toss away precious egg yolks that they were able afford only a few times a year when they lived in Korea.
Today, I am grateful to have a better understanding of the relationship between cholesterol and health. How about you? Are you afraid of having high cholesterol? Are you throwing away egg yolks because you think they’re bad for your health? Are you taking cholesterol-lowering medication or considering starting on one? Continue reading
A gang of 14 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, has threatened to file a class action lawsuit against the dietary supplement industry for supposedly selling herbal products that don’t contain the listed ingredients.
According to Reuters, an investigation led by New York’s Schneiderman turned up results suggesting that dietary supplements sold by four major U.S. retailers, GNC Holdings Inc, Target Corp, Walgreens and Walmart Stores Inc, failed to meet efficacy standards, because they allegedly do not contain some or all of the plant materials listed on their labels. Continue reading
A pharmaceutical drug developed by the United States Army as a supposed treatment and preventive agent for malaria is instead proving to be an ineffective, deadly, psychotropic poison. The drug, known as mefloquine (or Lariam under its brand name), is reportedly causing British soldiers to develop severe depression and mental illness, and some political leaders are now calling for its removal from the official military drugging schedule. Continue reading
Healthy skepticism needed for some scientific claims.
Independent researchers couldn’t reproduce the findings of more than half of 100 experiments previously published in three prominent psychology journals, a new review reports.
This review should fuel skepticism over scientific claims, particularly if those claims are based on shaky statistics, said one of the new study’s authors, Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Nosek is also executive director of the Center for Open Science, the non-profit group that coordinated the project. Continue reading