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A nationwide drug shortage that's dogging the food and drug administration is hitting home with first responders. For emergency medical technicians, shortages can mean the difference between life and death. Nationwide, anti-seizure drugs including intravenous Valium, Versed, and Ativan are among the dozens of drugs - including cancer treatments - that are in short supply.

We have found the following stocks had unusual volume spikes on Thursday, June 28, 2012. Tenet Healthcare Corp. (NYSE:THC) had a 86.9% volume spike trading 40,717,900 shares. THC’s 30-day average volume is 5,335,410. Shares closed at $5.25 +6.71%. Tenet Healthcare Corporation is an investor-owned health care services company whose subsidiaries and affiliates mainly operate acute care hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, diagnostic imaging centers and related health care facilities. Health Management Associates (NYSE:HMA) had a 86.1% volume spike trading 24,950,900 shares. HMA’s 30-day average volume is 3,461,860. Shares closed at $7.49 +11.79%. Health Management Associates, Inc and its subsidiariesprovide health care...

Several people have become interested in a quite controversial topic called "AGENDA 21." They have requested being on a ping list for this topic. While I do not have time to do a thorough treatment of this subject, nor am I in any way an expert, I am willing at least for a time,to ping people as I run across articles which might pertain to this concern. It might be good to start with an examination of just what it is or might be. To kick this discussion and exploration off,I did a Google search (just for fun) on "Agenda...

(CNN) - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will not release more Freddie Mac-related documents, according to campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond. Though the contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination said Wednesday that his campaign would "do what they can" to release more information about payments he received as a consultant from the government-backed mortgage group, Hammond backtracked later in the evening. When asked via email whether the campaign would release more Freddie Mac-related documents or if a fact sheet it released in the afternoon was the last word on the issue, Hammond responded to CNN, "last word."

Newt Gingrich spent the last decade being paid by big business to convince conservatives to support big-government policies that would profit his clients. Gingrich's consulting firm racked up $1.6 million in fees from the government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac, we learned this week from Bloomberg News. Gingrich's job was to help Freddie Mac win over conservatives to this market-distorting, bubble-fueling, housing-subsidy entity, which is now officially owned by the federal government. We also know that Growth Energy, an ethanol lobby, paid $312,500 to the Gingrich Group in 2009, according to the group's tax filing. Growth Energy lobbies to preserve many ethanol...

(Cannot quite due to copyright restrictions) Read here: http://www.a azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/11/10/20111110scorpion-drug-cost.html#ixzz1dje2uG1i

Chinese and Indian drug makers have taken over much of the global trade in medicines and now manufacture more than 80 percent of the active ingredients in drugs sold worldwide. But they had never been able to copy the complex and expensive biotech medicines increasingly used to treat cancer, diabetes and other diseases in rich nations like the United States — until now. These generic drug companies say they are on the verge of selling cheaper copies of such huge sellers as Herceptin for breast cancer, Avastin for colon cancer, Rituxan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Enbrel for rheumatoid arthritis. Their...

  Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler has unexpectedly announced his resignation. NLPC recently filed a shareholder proposal with Pfizer critical of the company's deal with the White House to support ObamaCare. We foresaw Kindler's retirement in the resolution's supporting statement: If ObamaCare fails to control health care costs, as several studies now suggest, the government will seek savings through price controls. Shareholders ultimately will lose. Perhaps Kindler plans to retire before Pfizer is required to sell its products for less than the cost of production. We were more prescient than we realized.Kindler, who is only 55, cited the "extremely demanding"...

The Ohio medical board concluded [1] that pain physician William D. Leak had performed “unnecessary” nerve tests on 20 patients and subjected some to “an excessive number of invasive procedures,” including injections of agents that destroy nerve tissue. Yet the finding, posted on the board’s public website, didn’t prevent Eli Lilly and Co. from using him as a promotional speaker and adviser. The company has paid him $85,450 since 2009. In 2001, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered [2] Pennsylvania doctor James I. McMillen to stop “false or misleading” promotions of the painkiller Celebrex, saying he minimized risks and...

It's almost a done deal. We are about to see herbal preparations disappear, and the ability of herbalists to prescribe them will also be lost. Big Pharma has almost reached the finish line of its decades-long battle to wipe out all competition. As of 1 April 2011—less than eight months from now—virtually all medicinal herbs will become illegal in the European Union. The approach in the United States is a bit different, but it's having the same devastating effect. The people have become nothing more than sinks for whatever swill Big Pharma and Agribusiness choose to send our way, and...

Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks of Psychosis Drugs for Young OPELOUSAS, La. — At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums. Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3. He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the...

A psychotic friend of my sister's stated recently that Pharmaceutical Comapnies are "creating and spreading new artificial viruses and diseases... in an effort to increase their profits!" I asked her what kind of evidence she had to support this, and I've been so far met with silence (she's busy Googling & researching this). As she re-adjusts her "tin-foil hat", I wanted to ask my FR friends what they think about this issue and how you would respond to such a blatantly false statement?

From Tim Carney’s article in the Washington Examiner, Dems tap drug maker millions for PhRMA-friendly bill: Of all the single-industry lobbies in Washington, the largest is the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America. PhRMA spent $26.2 million on lobbying last year — that’s nearly three times as much as the insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans, which spent $8.9 million. If you include individual companies’ lobbying, pharmaceuticals blow away the competition, beating all other industries by 50 percent, according to data at the Center for Responsive Politics. Given this Big Pharma clout, it’s unsurprising that the bill Obama’s whipping for...

... Mr. Tauzin, 66, will retreat, to contemplate the apparent collapse of the grandest in a career of fearless deals — a pact to trade the drug industry’s political support for favorable terms under President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. Mr. Tauzin is leaving his $2 million-a-year job as the top lobbyist for the drug industry amid complaints from drug makers that he bargained away their profits too cheaply, spent too much in his $150 million advertising campaign to sell the overhaul and miscalculated in his assessment that the passage of the legislation was all but inevitable. Other drug industry...

I was just watching Fox News and they had an ad telling how great ObamaCare is and the 2 donkey VA Senators are so wonderful for supporting it. I noticed the ad was sponsored by Pharma which as most freepers know made a deal with Zero paying for these ads. I hope is this passes, which I think it will given my pessimistic nature, some donkey politician comes back in a few years and slaps price controls, etc on the drug industry. They have a price for selling their souls. I can't but help think of the infamous quote by...

Facing last-minute liberal resistance in Congress, the drug industry is bracing for an increase in its share of the cost of the proposed health care overhaul beyond the $80 billion over 10 years that it had negotiated with the White House, industry lobbyists say. ... Now, after narrowly beating back some Senate proposals to extract far more and facing similar demands from House leaders, the drug makers acknowledge that they may have to renegotiate, several drug lobbyists said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the overhaul legislation is not yet final. ... Lobbyists for the health insurance industry, meanwhile,...

The health care debate began for real in June when ABC devoted an entire hour to Obamacare in a special edition of ABC's Prime time hosted anchor Charlie Gibson and (now incoming anchor) Diane Sawyer. Called "Questions for the President: Prescription for America" the special aired on June 24, 2009, from the East Room of the White House. Basically Obama was given solo airtime to pitch his health care agenda both in prime time and later that evening on Nightline. To make matters worse, Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) a group that opposes Obamacare tried to air commercials giving the...

Guess who just discovered the Jim Geraghty Axiom? Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reports that Barack Obama reversed his get-tough-with-Big-Pharma routine when it came to actually, er, getting tough with Big Pharma. How did Obama’s allies on Capitol Hill feel about it? “Awkward”: On the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to take on the drug industry by allowing Americans to import cheaper prescription medicine. “We’ll tell the pharmaceutical companies ‘thanks, but no, thanks’ for the overpriced drugs — drugs that cost twice as much here as they do in Europe and Canada,” he said back then. On Tuesday, the...

A deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry is holding up a bipartisan amendment to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, according to a member of the Senate Democratic leadership. The Senate has been debating the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), since Tuesday but has not held a vote, which is contributing to a stall in the floor action on healthcare reform. Dorgan’s measure, which would permit bulk exports of medicines from countries such as Canada, enjoys broad and bipartisan support and likely has the backing of more than 60 senators, which would...

This summer, just when the health-care debate grew sour, Big Pharma struck a sweet deal. Or so they thought. By agreeing to pony up $80 billion to support Obamacare, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, assumed that they dodged a bullet. Ladle the Democrats some cash now, they reckoned, and maybe they could avoid some big bills later.