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MIAMI, FLORIDA – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney scheduled a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser at the home of Phil Frost, the executive of the company that makes the Morning After Pill, on Wednesday night. Plan B One-Step is produced by Teva Pharmaceuticals, Frost’s company.

The American Legacy Foundation released a policy statement on electronic cigarettes, in which it called for the removal of these products from the market. The statement was entitled "The FDA Should Take Electronic Cigarettes Off The Market Until It Is Satisfied That They Are Safe and Effective." According to the statement: "While we remain open to promising products that can help smokers quit smoking, a consideration of all of the available evidence combined with important unanswered questions strongly supports our call on the FDA to prohibit the marketing and sale of e-cigarettes unless and until the FDA is satisfied that...

The Virginia Supreme Court has issued a ruling in the case of Casey v. Merck & Co. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had asked the Virginia court to rule on two issues regarding Virginia law and a statute of limitations for class actions. A class action was filed ...

With Contraceptive Mandate, who's really in bed with "Big Pharma" now?

A contentious relationship between drug manufacturers and the Drug Enforcement Agency may cause a continuing shortage of the attention deficit medication Adderall, which the FDA just added to its official drug shortages list, the New York Times reported. As of 2007, about 9.5 percent, or 5.4 million, of school-aged children were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyper Disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adderall prescriptions went up 13.4 percent from 2009 to 2010, and more than 18 million prescriptions were written for the drug, Reuters reported. As demand for the drug grows, more and more patients have...

PHOENIX, Arizona, November 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Research at Arizona State University (ASU) has found that the synthetic progestin hormone medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA), used in the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera, is linked to memory loss. Psychology doctoral student Blair Braden and Heather Bimonte-Nelson, associate professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the Bimonte-Nelson Memory and Aging Lab at ASU, led the study. This study was an extension of earlier research carried out by Braden that implicated MPA used as a component of hormone therapy for menopause to possible detrimental cognitive effects in...

Fresh off its successes in the green-energy patch, the Obama team is turning its investment skills to the life sciences. Last Friday, President Obama announced his intention to increase the federal government’s involvement in the business of biotechnology. His plan is for a new federal center inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that would be focused on the development and commercialization of new drugs. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) would engage in early drug-development work, eventually handing off programs to private companies for completion. In return, the government would take a guaranteed royalty stream on drugs...

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...

good times good times. Meanwhile, Bachman has taken somewhere north of $140,000 from pharmaceutical companies. Those donors include Abbott Labs, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Bayer. Yet, not a dollar of all that pharma money, from such a wide range of the world’s largest drugmakers, came from Merck. Might Bachmann be going after Merck on behalf of that company’s competitors who also happen to be Bachmann donors? She’s claiming a vaccine manufactured by Merck (Gardisil) causes mental retardation. Meanwhile, she’s taking campaign donations from Merck’s top HPV vaccine (Cervarix) competitor, GlaxoSmithKline.Hey, that’s not at all suspicious.Weren’t we...

Locally the news has been covering the shortage of Cancer Drugs. Patients are haveing life saving surgeries and trestments prosponded or delayed due to this shortage. This situation led me to ask WHY? I have found that Doctors are fighting to get drugs for their patients. Nuclear Medicine (lukemia etc) is having shortages of Isotopes due to the destruction of the Nuclear Industry. Have we missed the complicity of the Obama Admin in this silent genocide. When Gov policies result in a class of people dying it is in fact genocide. Big Pharma held meetings with the Administration and by...

Yet another panel of scientists has found no evidence that a popular vaccine causes autism. But despite the scientists’ best efforts, their report is unlikely to have any impact on the frustrating debate about the safety of these crucial medicines. “The M.M.R. vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t,” Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, the chairwoman ... --snip-- The panel did conclude, however, that there are risks to getting the chickenpox vaccine that can arise years after vaccination. People who have had the vaccine can develop pneumonia, meningitis or hepatitis years later if the virus used...

FORT WORTH, Texas - If your dog has heartworms it will be harder to get a cure. The only company producing the parasite-killing drug has run out and veterinarians don’t know when they’ll get more. Veterinarians across the country are in a quandary because Immiticide is the only FDA-approved drug available to treat dogs with heartworms. Drug company Merial said its supply is gone and it can’t produce any more because it can’t get the drug’s active ingredient in the United States. The FDA has been hesitant to allow overseas suppliers to fill American orders. Vets are working with what...

WASHINGTON (AP) — International business can be an ethical jungle, but it's rare to get details of bare-knuckle tactics on tape. According to a recording and sworn testimony provided to The Associated Press, a lawyer in Mexico for a leading U.S. drug manufacturer offered to pay an opposing expert in a lawsuit if he would leave the country on a key court date to undermine the case. *** Baxter said the lawyer was not authorized to make any offers, and it has severed all ties with him. The recording and its disclosure offer an unusual glimpse of fishy maneuvers in...

WASHINGTON, August 12, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The California legislature is now pushing through a bill to remove parental notification for children as young as 12 to receive the dangerous STD vaccine Gardasil. The American Life League reports that each treatment of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, has an average cost of over $360, a sum that would be footed by taxpayers. Gardasil, the most popular HPV vaccine, has been found to cause dangerous side effects and as many as twelve deaths in the United States alone. The state had attempted but failed in 2007 to mandate HPV vaccinations for all girls...

Bear with me, this isn’t a “sound bite” subject. The Human Papilloma Virus is an infection, and should not be a moral issue. In contrast, the vaccine against four strains of the virus, Gardasil, has become a political issue, even though the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now recommends it for all boys and girls. Governor Rick Perry has been criticized for his February, 2007 Executive Order that made the vaccine mandatory for girls before entering the 6th grade. Very little is said about the part of the EO that affirmed the right of and facilitated parents who wish...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Michael O'Neal is a pharmacist. He purchases drugs for Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He often deals with drug shortages, but this one is bad. O'Neal is concerned about the availability of electrolytes. They are critical to a babies in neonatal intensive care and seriously ill adults. Electrolytes are administered to a critically ill patient for nutritional support intravenously. They are given to patients who cannot get their nutrition any other way. O'Neal said he's concerned that as supplies shrink, measures will have to be taken. "We are dangerously close, we believe, when we will have to ration...

Vid at source.

The court split along conservative-liberal lines. "It is beyond dispute that the federal statutes and regulations that apply to brand-name drug manufacturers are meaningfully different than those that apply to generic drug manufacturers," said Justice Clarence Thomas. "Indeed it is the special, and different, regulation of generic drugs that allowed the generic drug market to expand, bringing drugs more quickly and cheaply to the public." In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor countered, "These divergent liability rules threaten to reduce consumer demand for generics... ... Thomas acknowledged that from the plaintiffs' perspective in the latest cases, "finding pre-emption here but not in...

Lipitor. Actos. Plavix. These are some of the most-prescribed medicines in the U.S., drugs that are so commonplace they are responsible for a huge chunk of the $300 billion spent on brand-name pharmaceuticals each year. That is about to change as patents on these pricey pills begin to expire, opening the door for generic competition. And that can translate to savings of up to 90 percent, analysts say, making these drugs affordable to more consumers. Americans will see cheaper copies of some of the biggest drug names starting this fall. Out-of-pocket costs of the generic form of Lipitor, a widely...

Even short-term use of some painkillers could be dangerous for people who've had a heart attack, according to research published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers analyzed the duration of prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) treatment and cardiovascular risk in a nationwide Danish cohort of patients with prior heart attack. They found the use of NSAIDs was associated with a 45 percent increased risk of death or recurrent heart attack within as little as one week of treatment, and a 55 percent increased risk if treatment extended to three months. The study was limited by its observational...