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A seven-year-old girl with a rare illness is being kept alive by four doses of Viagra a day.Medics thought Natalie Archibald was suffering from over-excitement when she collapsed after opening her presents on Christmas Day two years ago. But she was later found to be suffering from the lung condition primary pulmonary hypertension and was referred to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Doctors prescribed Viagra, better known as a treatment for male impotence, and the drug has since transformed her life. Her mother Janis, from Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, said that she was surprised to learn the nature of the...

We have been spending our days getting all our ducks armed for bear and in a row--all of our anti-Gardasil ducks, that is. From checking my various areas on the internet, to finding moderators to listening to the tragic and painful stories of victims of the Gardasil vaccine, it has been a very busy time for me and my team. Gardasil, as you should know by now, is an HPV vaccine sold by Merc, a vaccine with a flawed marketing campaign targeting young girls. The premise is that the vaccine will protect young girls from cervical cancer, as well as...

Fear Factor Accompanies Generic Drugs Made In China By ROBERT COHENWASHINGTON — First, it was inexpensive toys, apparel, footwear and electronics that flooded the U.S. market from China. The next Chinese export to reach American consumers will be lower-cost generic versions of brand-name medicines. Although it will take at least several years before Chinese-made generics are available here in significant numbers, the prospect already is raising safety concerns, given China's history of substandard drugs at home, the recent scandal involving contaminated ingredients in the blood thinner heparin, and other safety problems, from tainted pet food to toothpaste. "We should be...

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that it was investigating whether four drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other immune system diseases might increase the risk of cancer in children. The F.D.A. said that it had received reports of 30 cases of cancer over 10 years among children and young adults treated with those drugs, which are sold by Amgen, Abbott Laboratories and other companies. But the agency did not make clear how many children had taken the drugs or whether the cancer incidence among them was higher than would be expected. And it said that for now,...

CHICAGO — ... Are we winning the war on cancer? The inquiry has been recurring since December 23, 1971 when President Nixon signed into law the National Cancer Act, called the "War on Cancer" by those who backed it in Congress and the White House. At the signing Nixon declared, "I hope in the years ahead we will look back on this action today as the most significant action taken during my Administration." The Act made the National Cancer Institute separate from the rest of the National Institutes of Health, with the NCI director reporting to the President. And it...

Wondering what ails you and what medication you should take for it? Just plug into electronic or print media for a barrage of pharmaceutical marketing hawking a wide array of medications for many illnesses, some of which you may not have known existed. Healthcare professionals try to maintain a balanced view of these advertisements. "I see good and bad with it," says Buddy Ogletree, who has a doctorate in pharmacy and is an instructor at the University of Mississippi Medical School (UMC). "Sometimes it helps people realize what's going with them, and that it's a medical condition that can be...

Morristown, NJ - The manufacturer of Digitek digoxin tablets is recalling the product, saying that it may have accidentally released pills that are double the normal thickness, carrying twice the normal dose [1]. Digoxin is used in the treatment of arrhythmias and heart failure, and a double dose could cause toxicity, most notably in patients with renal failure. According to a press release from Digitek's manufacturer, Actavis, digitalis toxicity "can cause nausea, vomiting, dizziness, low blood pressure, cardiac instability, and bradycardia," and even death. The FDA is alerting doctors and the public to the recall via its MedWatch program. The...

In another expansion of its prescription drug program that has helped to increase its pharmacy sales, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it's adding a 90-day supply of its prescription drugs for $10, increasing additional medications for women, and unveiling $4 over-the-counter medicines. Wal-Mart and its Sam's Club pharmacies will fill prescriptions for as many as 350 generic drugs costing $10 for a 90-day supply, an expansion from the existing 30-day supplies that cost $4. Wal-Mart also is adding $9 women's generic prescription drugs for up to a 30-day supply that are used to treat osteoporosis, breast cancer, menopause and hormone deficiency,...

lbert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery inspired — and arguably corrupted — millions in the 1960s hippie generation, has died. He was 102. Hofmann died Tuesday at his home in Burg im Leimental, said Doris Stuker, a municipal clerk in the village near Basel where Hofmann moved following his retirement in 1971. For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention. "I produced the substance as a medicine. ... It's not my fault if people abused it," he once said. The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938...

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD and thereby gave the psychedelic generation the pharmaceutical vehicle to turn on, tune in and drop out, has died. He was 102.

Albert Hofmann, who died on Tuesday aged 102, synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 and became the first person in the world to experience a full-blown acid trip. The day, April 19 1943, became known among aficionados as “Bicycle Day” as it was while cycling home from his laboratory that he experienced the most intense symptoms. Hofmann was working as a research chemist in the laboratory of the Sandoz Company (now Novartis) in Basel, Switzerland, where he was involved in studying the medicinal properties of plants. This eventually led to the study of the alkaloid compounds of ergot, a...

Drug giant Merck has been caught red-handed in a scheme to deceive the FDA and the public over the integrity of its scientific studies, say top medical authorities. According to reports that were (amazingly!) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and detailed in the Washington Post, Merck waged a "campaign of deception" to disguise its in-house study authors as independent scientists working for universities. This scheme made the studies appear independent and unbiased, allowing them to carry more apparent credibility to FDA officials, doctors and other scientists. This fraud was conducted to boost the apparent scientific credibility...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials warned Baxter International Inc's supplier of the blood thinner heparin for failing to ensure that its manufacturing process can remove impurities, according to a letter released on Monday.

A drug that targets the cell surface receptors that play an important role in many types of cancer can bring about significant tumour regression in breast cancer after only six weeks of use, a scientist told the 6th European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-6) today. Dr. Angel Rodriguez, from the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA, said that the work demonstrated for the first time that the tyrosine kinase inhibitor lapatinib could decrease tumour-causing breast cancer stem cells in the primary breast cancers of women receiving neoadjuvant treatment (treatment given before the primary surgery for...

Health insurance companies are rapidly adopting a new pricing system for very expensive drugs, asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions for medications that may save their lives or slow the progress of serious diseases. With the new pricing system, insurers abandoned the traditional arrangement that has patients pay a fixed amount, like $10, $20 or $30 for a prescription, no matter what the drug’s actual cost. Instead, they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs, usually 20 to 33 percent, which can amount to thousands of dollars a month....

(CHANGZHOU, China) -- On a dusty lane in east China, a small factory sitting amid strawberry and vegetable fields processes chemicals from pig guts into heparin, a commonly used blood thinner linked to 62 deaths and hundreds of allergic reactions in the U.S. and Germany. The mysterious problems with heparin from the factory and others like it ? China's deadliest product quality scandal since Chinese cough syrup killed 93 people in Central America a year ago ? dramatically illustrate the perils of shifting drug production offshore. With recalls of heparin products now in six countries, it is an issue that...

Wherever possible, Tina Casale switches to compact fluorescent light bulbs; she also recycles daily, rides in carpools or walks when she can, and, as a third-grade teacher, has made it a priority to ensure that global warming is a frequent topic in her science discussions. But in the eyes of some activists, Casale could be doing more to save the environment: Namely, tossing out her birth control pills. Birth control pills, like batteries and baby bottles, have become the latest item in American homes to become a focus of environmental and health concerns. As scientists debate the effects of synthetic...

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows. To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe. But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences...

A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare—one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate politicians, bearing the post-bubble ire of their newly destitute citizenry, to enact legislation that would prevent subsequent occurrences... Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of...

Prescribing anti-depressants to the vast majority of patients is futile, as the drugs have little or no impact at all, according to researchers. Almost 50 clinical trials were reviewed by psychologists from the University of Hull who found that new-generation anti-depressants worked no better than a placebo – a dummy pill – for mildly depressed patients. Even the trials that suggested some clinical benefit for the most severely depressed patients did not produce convincing evidence. Professor Irving Kirsch from the university’s pyschology department said: “The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking anti-depressants is not very great.

Sen. Barack Obama, who has refused donations from federal lobbyists and paints his Democratic presidential rival as a Washington insider for accepting their contributions, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from partners at dozens of firms that lobbied Congress in 2007. The partners — who often share in a law firm's overall profits — gave at least $214,000 to the Obama campaign from October through December, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records and lobbying-disclosure reports with the Senate. Partners at the Chicago-based law firm of Kirkland Ellis LLP, which has a lobbying arm in Washington, gave Mr....

At a time when Chinese products from toys to food face increased scrutiny over safety, a top U.S. regulatory official now says that the Chinese government does not inspect production plants that make drugs solely for export to the U.S. and other markets.

WASHINGTON - U.S. health officials evaluated the wrong factory when assessing the safety of a Chinese-made drug ingredient that may be a source of problems with a blood thinner, the Food and Drug Administration said Monday. ADVERTISEMENT Baxter International's heparin has been linked to four deaths and hundreds of reports of allergic reactions. An investigation will take FDA inspectors to China this week. The Chinese manufacturer was not inspected because it was confused with another company in the agency's database with a similar name, said Joseph Famulare, deputy director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research's compliance department. The...

A Chinese facility that hasn't been inspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made the active ingredient in much of the widely used Baxter International Inc. blood-thinner that is under investigation after reports of hundreds of allergic reactions and four deaths among the drug's users, the agency said yesterday. The disclosure is likely to add to broad concerns about the safety and quality of products imported from China and elsewhere in the developing world. A tide of tainted goods ranging from pet food to children's toys has prompted recalls and increased scrutiny of Chinese-made wares around the world. Although...

WASHINGTON —  A House investigation is casting a wider net into whether artificial-heart pioneer Robert Jarvik improperly endorsed a cholesterol-reducing medication in a number of advertisements. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich., and committee member Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., sent a letter Tuesday to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach demanding to see records housed in the FDA's Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications office regarding recent advertisements for the cholesterol-decreasing drug Lipitor. Dingell and Stupak asked for all records relating to print, radio, TV or Internet advertisements for Lipitor featuring Jarvik, setting a Feb. 5 deadline. The...

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found. In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal...

Numerous unpublished studies submitted to the Food and Drug Administration by pharmaceutical companies have found that many popular antidepressants have little or no effect on patients, according to a new review of the previously hidden findings. A total of 74 studies involving a dozen anti-depressants and 12,564 patients were registered with the FDA from 1987 through 2004. The FDA deemed 38 of the studies to be positive. All but one of those studies was published, the researchers said. The other 36 were found to have negative or questionable results by the FDA. Most of those studies -- 22 out of...

Today the Supreme Court will consider a petition to hear a case raising profound issues regarding the right of individuals to make their own health-care decisions. The case is Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. von Eschenbach. The suit claims that FDA violates the due process rights of terminally-ill patients, who have exhausted all approved options and are unable to enter a clinical trial, by prohibiting access to promising investigational drugs. Consider the plight of such patients. They search for clinical trials of new drugs that might extend their lives. Nearly all are ineligible. Of the few...

A third pharmaceutical giant said Sunday it is being investigated by Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) over alleged breaches of the United Nations oil-for-food programme in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Eli Lilly and Company Limited said it had been asked to hand over documents to the SFO, a day after British peer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca announced they had received similar requests.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Along a seemingly endless row of identical gray warehouses, a lone guard stands watch over a shuttered storage area with a peeling green and yellow sign: Euro Gulf Trading. Three months ago, when the authorities announced that they had seized a large cache of counterfeit drugs from Euro Gulf’s warehouse deep inside a sprawling free trade zone here, they gave no hint of the raid’s global significance. But an examination of the case reveals its link to a complex supply chain of fake drugs that ran from China through Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates,...

ATLANTA (AP) — Merck & Co. is recalling about a million doses of a childhood vaccine, after testing showed a sterilization problem in a Pennsylvania factory.

If laws banning the use of force are relaxed when an intruder crawls in your window and you’re home, shouldn’t stringent F.D.A. regulations bend when you’re backed into a dark corner by a terminal illness? That was the gist of an argument made by the U.C.L.A. law professor Eugene Volokh in the May issue of The Harvard Law Review. Citing the concept of “medical self-defense,” Volokh contended that a dying American should have the right to buy any drug that has passed the F.D.A.’s preliminary safety tests. Currently, the F.D.A. insists that most terminally ill patients await, like everyone else,...

(BEIJING)--The medicine cabinet in the average U.S. home is filling with drugs made in China, and some experts say that could be a prescription for trouble. China’s booming pharmaceutical industry has doubled exports to the United States in the past five years, undercutting competitors and making American consumers reliant on the safety of Chinese factories and captive to any disruptions in Sino-U.S. commerce. It might seem like merely a trade issue. But industry experts in Europe and the United States say that national security concerns are edging into the debate. Consider this scenario: If a major anthrax attack were to...

BEIJING — The medicine cabinet in the average U.S. home is filling with drugs made in China , and some experts say that could be a prescription for trouble. China's booming pharmaceutical industry has doubled exports to the United States in the past five years, undercutting competitors and making American consumers reliant on the safety of Chinese factories and captive to any disruptions in Sino-U.S. commerce. It might seem like merely a trade issue. But industry experts in Europe and the United States say national-security concerns are edging into the debate. Consider this scenario: If a major anthrax attack were...

The cancer death rate for children in the United States has declined sharply -- down 20 percent from 1990 to 2004 -- thanks to better treatment of leukemia and other cancers, health officials said on Thursday. Cancer stands as the leading disease-related cause of death for U.S. children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report. Better treatments are improving survival rates, the CDC said. The cancer death rate for U.S. children was 34.2 per million for children up to age 19 in 1990, but fell to 27.3 per million in 2004, the CDC said. This death...

The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield Oxford University Press, 287 pp., $29.95 Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50 Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression by David Healy New York University Press, 351 pp., $18.95 (paper) 1. During the summer of 2002, The Oprah Winfrey Show was graced by a visit from Ricky Williams, the Heisman Trophy holder and running back extraordinaire of the Miami Dolphins. Williams was there to...

<p>HONG KONG -(Dow Jones)- Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. (PFE) said Friday it is looking to outsource as much as 30% of its manufacturing, much of it to Asia.</p> <p>Pfizer, based in New York City, now outsources about 15% of its manufacturing capabilities. The company aims to double that figure, as part of cost-cutting measures, it said at an investor presentation in Hong Kong, which was broadcast over the Internet.</p>

It is shaping up to be the biggest shift yet to a generic drug, potentially saving the nation $2 billion a year or more in prescription costs. And scientists and doctors say that for most of the 16 million people in America who take drugs to reduce cholesterol, the low-priced alternative will work as well as the name-brand medicine — Lipitor, which is made by Pfizer and is the nation’s most widely prescribed drug. While Lipitor itself is not available as a generic, a very similar drug made by Merck, Zocor, lost its patent protection last year. The generic version...

A Virginia court granted GlaxoSmithKline PLC's request for a preliminary injunction blocking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from implementing new rules that the pharmaceutical giant says will cause it "and other innovative companies like it" irreparable harm. "It's a good day for innovators in this country because the new rules would have stifled innovation," GlaxoSmithKline's lawyer, John Desmarais, said.The proposed rules, which were scheduled to go into effect Thursday, reduced the number of times a patent applicant could contest or amend rejected or pending patent claims. Previously, applicants could file an unlimited number of amendments or challenges, known in...

Edwards: 2-Year Ban on New Drug Ads Oct 28 10:55 AM US/Eastern By HOLLY RAMER Associated Press Writer View larger image CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says prescription drug companies should have to wait two years to begin advertising their new products to consumers. Edwards on Sunday was outlining a plan to regulate what he views as a proliferation of misleading drug ads. In the decade since the government relaxed rules on advertising directly to consumers, spending on prescription drug ads has nearly quadrupled to more than $4 billion a year, he said in prepared remarks....

Launched by an Executive Order in April of 2002 under the guise of expanding the scope of 1990's Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has since received the official sanction of the U.S. Congress... This commission is the driving force behind a massive policy shift that will literally turn public schools into mental health screening centers...all parents of public school children are supposed to be receiving written notice of these new federally mandated mental health screening policies. Some will also get permission slips to sign that will allow school counselors or other non-medically-educated bureaucrats...

CHICAGO - Nearly two-thirds of academic leaders surveyed at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals have financial ties to industry, illustrating how pervasive these relationships have become, researchers say. Serving as paid consultants or accepting industry money for free meals and drinks were among the most common practices reported by the heads of academic departments. Drug companies and makers of medical devices often use these connections to influence doctors to use products that aren't necessarily in the patient's best interest, said Eric Campbell, the study's lead author. He is a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Since...

RENO, Nev. - A jury levied a $134.5 million judgment against pharmaceutical giant Wyeth in a lawsuit filed by three Nevada women who claimed the company's hormone replacement drugs caused their breast cancer. It was the largest award to date against the Madison, New Jersey-based company, which faces about 5,300 similar lawsuits across the country in state and federal courts. "These are very large numbers for compensatory damages," said Howard Erichson, a law professor at Seton Hall University. "It has to be troubling for Wyeth because dollar figures like these suggest the jury entirely accepted the plaintiff's version of the...

On June 19, 1987, Ben & Jerry’s introduced Cherry Garcia, in honor of the man who played lead guitar for the Grateful Dead. The Food and Drug Administration struck back three months later, when it approved the first of a new family of statin drugs that curb cholesterol production in the human liver. A synthetic statin licensed a decade later would become the most lucrative drug in history. At its peak, Lipitor was streaming $14 billion a year into Pfizer’s coffers. Let’s not blame the victim: we don’t choose Cherry Garcia; it chooses us. Lipitor is a lifesaver for 600,000...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — Safety experts for the Food and Drug Administration urged the agency on Friday to consider an outright ban on over-the-counter, multisymptom cough and cold medicines for children under 6. The recommendation, in a 356-page safety review, is the strongest signal yet that the agency may take strong action against the roughly 800 popular medicines marketed in the United States under names like Toddler’s Dimetapp, Triaminic Infant and Little Colds. The next step in the process is a meeting of outside experts on Oct. 18 and 19 to examine the medicines’ safety and offer recommendations to the...

The whitewashed “scientific” factory looks distinctly out of place on the edge of a peasant village where desperately poor farmers eke out a living selling ears of corn by the roadside. But the choice of a remote location in the Henan province of China had been deliberate. “Out here, nobody bothers us,” said its owner Gabriel Zhang. That is because Zhang, a 32-year-old devout Roman Catholic, is engaged in a modern Chinese business: the illegal counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals. Over the past month Zhang has been involved in negotiations with a UK wholesaler, offering to manufacture fake drugs for people with...

As overall health care costs continue to rise sharply, prescription drugs have emerged as a surprising exception. Annual inflation in drug costs is at the lowest rate in the three decades since the Labor Department began using its current method of tracking prescription prices. The rate over the last 12 months is 1 percent, according to the government’s latest data, released Wednesday. “The way the index is going, it looks like drug price increases are not going to be very painful this year,” said Daniel H. Ginsburg, a supervisory economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where he is involved...

TORONTO, September 20, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - As Canada, in large part due to aggressive behind the scenes lobbying, rolls out the not-comprehensively-tested Merck HPV vaccine for girls as young as nine, a look at developments on the vaccine south of the border should cause Canadians serious concern.  In the United States a similar lobby campaign by the same company launched the mass HPV vaccination of girls beginning in June last year.  In just little over a year, the HPV vaccine have been associated with at least five deaths, not to mention thousands of reports of adverse effects, hundreds deemed...

A promising experimental vaccine to prevent the AIDS virus has failed in a crucial experiment, with volunteers becoming infected with HIV anyway, leading the drug developer to halt the study.

A 78-year-old woman was found unconscious on the floor of her apartment by a neighbor who checked on her. The woman could not remember falling but told doctors that before going to bed she had abdominal pain and nausea and had produced a black stool, after which she had palpitations and felt lightheaded. Her medical history included high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure and osteoarthritis. She also had a cold with a productive cough. For each condition, she had been prescribed a different drug, and she was taking a few over-the-counter remedies on her own....