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Cash-strapped Sri Lanka announced a 40 per cent price hike for dozens of commonly used medicines on Saturday (Apr 30) as the island nation labours through its worst economic crisis in decades. Months of lengthy blackouts and acute shortages of food, fuel and pharmaceuticals have sparked widespread protests calling for the government's resignation. Antibiotics, non-prescription painkillers and medications for heart conditions and diabetes will all be subject to the price rise, Health Minister Channa Jayasumana said. It is the second time in six weeks that pharmaceutical prices have been raised. In mid-March, a 30 per cent increase was imposed.

The latest version of Democrats’ $4 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation bill includes a provision to empower the government to set Medicare drug prices.Government price-setting of prescription drugs is zombie legislation that just won’t die. After briefly being excised due to opposition from moderate legislators, the latest version of congressional Democrats’ $4 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation bill includes a provision to allow the government to set Medicare drug prices. “Democrats announced they have sealed a deal [on] pharmaceutical drug costs for seniors,” announced the Associated Press last week. The consequences of prescription drug price-setting in terms of reduced access...

In another recall over cancer-causing impurity levels, Lupin Pharmaceutical has recalled several batches of its Irbesartan tablets and Irbesartan and Hydrochlorothiazide tablets because N-nitrosoirbesartan – a substance that causes cancer - was found in levels above allowable specification limits. The drugmaker received four reports of illness from Irbesartan and zero reports from the Irbesartan and Hydrochlorothiazide medication from the dates of Oct. 8, 2018 to Sept. 20, 2021. However, Lupin said that it has received no reports of illness that appear related to the recall issue but is recalling the medication “out of an abundance of caution.” The company is...

Folks - I want to buy some "prep" food for my son & his soon-to-be-bride. I want to make sure they have some stored food & the easiest way (unlike how I've done it) is to just buy some stored food from Patriot Food Supply or such. I'm curious if any Freepers have purchased & what they consider the best options, where you have purchased from or what advice you might have. Appreciate the advice!

My Jewish father was an old country lawyer who believed deeply in fairness and justice for all living people, so I was curious what he thought about the Nazis. It was spring of 1977, and the American Nazi Party had announced their intention to hold a July 4th rally in the town of Skokie, a predominantly Jewish community in Illinois. Not surprisingly, the town of Skokie had sought an injunction to ban the rally, and the Nazis had, ironically, sought the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to fight the injunction. The subject at the family dinner table...

Mark Currie of Virginia had three checks snagged in postal delays in three months. In New Jersey, Lois Fitton says she was forced to pay interest on a credit card balance because the bill never arrived. Jim Rice says two insurance companies canceled policies for his property management business in Oklahoma after the payments got lost in the mail. As the service crisis at the U.S. Postal Service drags into its eighth month, complaints are reaching a fever pitch. Consumers are inundating members of Congress with stories of late bills — and the late fees they’ve absorbed as a result....

President Joe Biden’s United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Thursday stopped executive orders from his predecessor designed to significantly lower prescription drug prices for Americans, including insulin and epinephrine. The new administration will apparently re-evaluate the executive action from President Donald Trump toward the end of March. It remains unclear if it will be reinstated. “The HHS Thursday froze the former Trump administration’s December drug policy that requires community health centers to pass on all their insulin and epinephrine discount savings to patients,” Bloomberg Law reported Thursday. “Centers that don’t pass on the savings wouldn’t qualify...

A Minnesota medical team has played a key role in possibly getting another COVID vaccine on the market within weeks. Allina Health is running the state’s only clinical trial site for the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. WCCO checked in on the progress and found a husband and wife team committed to protecting the population from COVID-19 once and for all. Beverly Christie has a history of working with research as a nurse clinician. “I thought it was really important to jump in and be vaccinated or step up to be part of the trial in this crazy time,” Christie said....

Here's the reason you've been hearing more about ivermectin lately: the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).The group -- led by three physicians with a knack for making headlines -- posted its own review and meta-analysis of the global ivermectin literature on its website.In early December, these doctors held a press conference, and one testified at a Senate hearing on early treatments for COVID-19.They maintain that ivermectin has a special combination of anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties that make it useful preventively and for treating early and late-stage illness.Too good to be true? Not in the mind of FLCCC co-leader...

Though the researchers didn’t say how Ivermectin was able to destroy Covid-19, they believe it inhibits Covid-19 replication. Australian scientists have found that an antiviral drug called ‘Ivermectin’ was able to kill coronavirus grown in cell cultures in less than 48 hours. Ivermectin is a medication used to treat many types of parasite infestations. This study comes as researchers and scientists are scouring drugs that can be repurposed or used to treat the novel coronavirus. The study, published in the journal - Antiviral Research, stated that Ivermectin was able to kill the virus in less than two days. The study...

New atrial fibrillation drugs possess significant advantages over warfarin for reducing the risk of embolic events such as a stroke or peripheral embolism. Patients with AFib have an especially high risk of blood clots that can lead to stroke. Warfarin (Coumadin) has been the gold standard for stroke prevention in patients with AFib for the past 50 years. But to be effective, warfarin requires careful monitoring. Within the last several years, the FDA has approved several new anticoagulants as alternatives to warfarin: dabigatran (Pradaxa), a direct thrombin inhibitor; rivaroxaban (Xarelto), a factor Xa inhibitor; and apixaban (Eliquis), also a factor...

A high-dose vitamin K supplement reduced calcium precipitates associated with hardening of the arteries by 37 percent in rats, scientists from The Netherlands have reported. If the results can be reproduced in humans, high-dose vitamin K could have potential clinical implications for reducing arterial calcification, which is an important independent risk factor for the development of cardiovascular disease (CVD). “High vitamin K intake not only prevents calcification, but even regresses arterial calcifications,” lead researcher Leon Schurgers said. There are two main forms of vitamin K: phylloquinone, also known as phytonadione, (vitamin K1) which is found in green leafy vegetables such...

People taking blood-thinning medications have been told in the past to limit their vitamin K intake. Some researchers now say that may not be the best advice. Patients taking blood-thinning drugs such as warfarin are told by doctors to reduce their intake of vitamin K because it’s believed too much of this vitamin can decrease the drug’s effectiveness. This is due to the belief that the vitamin interacts with the body’s clotting process and can interfere with the drug’s blood-thinning properties. But what if this advice is wrong? According to a new clinical trial, people taking these drugs should actually...

Not sure what FRs policy is about remarks on products but I thought this was kinda important. With all the memory pills this and that the wife said lets start taking Prevagen. I looked into the pricing and for two people thats an additional $100 a month. But I ordered some anyway. What,,, have to wait a year or two for effects?????? But before ordering some more I did some searching and of course ran across many, many items that say they do the same thing. Most advertised on TV. Finally, just to save a few bucks I looked into...

Medication for high blood pressure could improve Covid-19 survival rates and reduce the severity of infection - according to new research from the University of East Anglia. Researchers studied 28,000 patients taking antihypertensives - a class of drugs that are used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure). They found that the risk of severe Covid-19 illness and death was reduced for patients with high blood pressure who were taking Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme inhibitors (ACEi) or Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARB). Lead researcher Dr Vassilios Vassiliou, from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: "We know that patients with cardiovascular diseases are at particular risk...

Censorship by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter is in full throttle in deleting information about the successful treatment of COVID-19, as described Monday by physicians who spoke in D.C. at a press conference. There have been more than 14 million views of a video in which physicians explain how effective hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has been for their COVID patients, but Big Tech is censoring it. Liberal, anti-Trump tech monopolies are on the rampage with their modern equivalent of book-burning. Twitter suspended the account of the president’s son, Don Jr., because he dared to tweet out information favorable to HCQ, and Twitter deleted...

There were more side effects in the group of 75 people who took hydroxychloroquine, but they were mostly mild, the most common being diarrhea. The researchers, led by Wei Tang of Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, wrote that the medicine’s anti-inflammatory effects probably helped alleviate patients’ symptoms.

Dr. Larry Brilliant has been on the frontlines in the fight against disease for decades. The epidemiologist helped eradicate smallpox, and he's also been involved in the battle against polio and blindness. In a 2006 TED Talk, Brilliant described what the pandemic would look like — and he says the coronavirus pandemic has the potential to infect more people than he predicted. “I think it has the potential for infecting more than a billion people,” he says. “I'm optimistic that for this particular virus, which has a relatively low death rate compared to smallpox and others, that the death rate...

If there’s a silver lining to the novel coronavirus, it’s that our dependence on China for medication and medical devices has been brought to the fore (at least to those paying attention). Our dependence on China for these vital supplies is insane for all the obvious reasons, none-the-least of which is how quickly we could be brought to our knees. We must act now to break this dependence and start manufacturing medication here at home. India, which manufactures most of the world’s generic drugs, is already taking steps to reduce their reliance on ingredients from China (here). This point...

The vast majority of key ingredients for drugs that many Americans rely on are manufactured abroad, mostly in China. Antibiotics, which turn life-threatening infections into minor nuisances, are considered the single biggest advance in modern medicine. A leading Chinese economist gave voice to the worst fears of U.S. policymakers in March, in a speech to an annual national congress.