Is Pharma Business Model Unsustainable? - NewsGrabs Sunday, 15 March 2009
Why big pharma mergers magnify failures
The fact that so many companies are now merging reflects the failure of each company to discover and develop its own replacement pipeline. To maintain growth, a pharmaceutical company must either produce enough new products to replace those that have gone off-patent or acquire rights to distribute drugs created by others. This is clearly not happening on a large enough scale. A small number of patented drugs, each with annual sales of $1 to $5 billion, accounts for most of the profits of the large pharmaceutical companies, and these profits are vanishing as the patents expire. Meanwhile, the number of new drugs approved for sale annually has steadily decreased over the past 15 years.Today, programs that are thought to have an annual sales potential of less than $1 billion are usually stopped in their tracks. Some companies have abandoned their work in entire areas of medicine, such as antibiotics, because they believe the markets are too small to make a difference to their total sales.
This article provides an interesting look at Pharma's business model.The product of pharma is money, rather than healthy people. Not even new drugs as such are a product, only new drugs that have blockbuster (more than $1 billion annual sales) potential. The model is creaking at the seams and pharma has become a dog-eat-dog game as evidenced by takeovers and mergers.
Pharma's business model appears to be unsustainable. It seems we should re-invent healthcare with human health in mind, rather than the maximization of pharma's profits.
One in seven US teens is vitamin D deficient
"These are alarming findings. We need to do a better job of educating the public on the importance of vitamin D, and the best ways to get it. To meet minimum nutritional requirements teens would need to consume at least four glasses of fortified milk daily or its dietary equivalent. Other foods rich in vitamin D include salmon, tuna, eggs and fortified cereals. A vitamin supplement containing 400 IU of vitamin D is another alternative..."... and what about getting a few minutes in the sun each day? Makes lots of vitamin D when its rays hit the skin!A reader notes that intoxication with lead can also cause vitamin D deficiency: "Lead accumulates in bones and inhibits formation of heme and hemoglobin in erythroid precursor cells. Before this happens, however, lower levels of lead can cause other problems. These are: impaired vitamin D metabolism, decreased nerve conduction rates, and developmental problems for children including: loss of IQ, hearing impairment, delayed growth, and behavior disorders."
Heavy Metal Toxicity and Parkinson's Disease
Hanne Koplev is a veterinarian who lives in Denmark. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease but, unlike many others, she did not give up hope when told that Parkinson's was incurable and destined to get progressively worse...
Mass. doctor accused of faking pain pill data
The hospital said a routine review in May found that some of Reuben's research was not approved by an internal hospital review board. Further investigation found 21 papers published in anesthesiology journals between 1996 and 2008 in which Reuben made up some or all data.The hospital asked the journals to retract the studies, some of which reported favorable results from painkillers including Pfizer Inc.'s Bextra, Celebrex and Lyrica and Merck & Co. Inc.'s Vioxx. His studies also claimed Wyeth's antidepressant Effexor could be used as a painkiller.
US: State of Massachusetts bans drug firm gifts to doctors
State officials gave final approval yesterday to regulations banning pharmaceutical and medical device companies from providing gifts to physicians, limiting when companies can pay for doctors' meals, and requiring companies to publicly disclose payments to doctors over $50 for certain types of consulting and speaking engagements.The regulations will take effect July 1, and the first public reporting by companies will be due by July 1, 2010. The information will be posted on the Public Health Department website and will be searchable by company and by healthcare provider.
JAMA Editor In Chief "Upset" At Researcher For Pushing Conflict Disclosure
Catherine DeAngelis, editor-in-chief of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association and some researchers who failed to report conflicts of interest to the journal on a Lexapro study, have been found calling one other researcher, who brought the unreported conflict to the journal's attention, by phone to chew him out. What's ironic is that DeAngelis has made much hay out of her efforts to eliminate conflicts of interest from medical studies and yet there she was picking up the phone to call Jonathan Leo, an associate professor of neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, and give him hell when she should have been thanking him for identifying an unreported conflict of interest that got past reviewers and editors at JAMA.
Prostate tests overdiagnose cancer
Most men over 50 have had a blood test that measures prostate specific antigen, or PSA, mostly for routine screening.There begins the list of problems: Most men who undergo a biopsy for an abnormal PSA test don't turn out to have prostate cancer; high PSAs often signal a benign enlarged prostate. Of those who do have cancer, there's no proof yet that early detection saves lives - as most prostate tumors grow so slowly that had they not been screened, those men would have died of something else without the anxiety.
PSA tests for prostate cancer are notoriously unreliable - just like HIV tests.
Seroquel user wants judge to unseal papers for FDA
A patient who claims the psychiatric drug Seroquel gave him diabetes has asked a judge to unseal maker AstraZeneca's confidential documents about its side effects before U.S. regulators decide whether to approve a version of the drug for millions of new patients.The documents in question include internal company analyses of safety data on Seroquel that the lawyers believe FDA staff and advisers have never seen.
"We think it's important that they have the benefit of what we have learned," Ellen Relkin, one of Baker's lawyers, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Wednesday. "What we believe the FDA does not have are internal memos where they analyze the studies (and state) their real opinions or concerns about the data."
Relkin said plaintiffs lawyers believe the drug causes Type 2 diabetes through two mechanisms: stimulating appetite and significant weight gain, and by raising levels of blood sugar and cholesterol.
AIDS Drugs Make Patients Older, Faster
T-cells from the immune systems of HIV-positives had characteristics of advanced aging by 25 years - in other words, these people were older than their calendar age. All of the ‘positive’ trial participants are on a multiple-drug “cocktail” of FDA Black Box label drugs, meaning any of the drugs that they’re taking can and have caused death, or permanent injury, including organ damage and failure.* “HIV-infected subjects (median 56 years) with good immune reconstitution and viral suppression had immune changes comparable to older (median 88 years) HIV-negative subjects.”
The researchers don’t count this as a factor - they simply don’t consider drug toxicity in people given the AIDS diagnosis.
Video: Liam Scheff on AIDS Drug Experiments in NYC Orphans
Liam Scheff talks about his long investigation into orphans used in NIH drug trials in New York City. Subtitles in Spanish.
Flu Vaccine Causes HIV Positivity
A case–control study of 101 blood donors who had been vaccinated against influenza and 191 matched controls showed that recent inoculation with any brand of influenza vaccine was significantly associated with a false positive screening assay for HIV antibodies. Guidelines of both Johns Hopkins and the New York State Department of Health list influenza vaccination as a known cause of indeterminate results on Western blotting for HIV antibodies.Given the escalating international awareness of various influenza strains, it is very important to remind patients and clinicians that influenza vaccination may cause cross-reactivity with HIV antibody assays.
UK Government Hands Drug Industry Control of Childhood Vaccination
UK press reports today show UK’s New Labour Government appears to have placed control of UK vaccination programmes from 1 April 2009 for all effects and purposes into the hands of the drug industry and introduced what is potentially a compulsory vaccination law without Parliamentary debate under The Health Protection (Vaccination) Regulations 2009.
'No proof' of bee killer theory
For five years, increasing numbers of unexplained bee deaths have been reported worldwide, with US commercial beekeepers suffering the most. The term Colony Collapse Disorder was coined to describe the illness. But many experts now believe that the term is misleading and there is no single, new ailment killing the bees.This interesting BBC article on Colony Collapse Disorder shows scientists are still in the dark as to the cause. My comment, sent to the BBC (I hope they publish it):I agree that the loss of large numbers of bees is with all probability a multifactoral event.
Claude Bernard once said with regard to human illness that "the microbe is nothing, the terrain is all". Pasteur, on his deathbed, expressed his agreement, but medicine had already gone the route of emphasising the single factor, the microbe.
We now see the same in Colony Collapse Disorder. "The terrain is all, the single cause - be it mite or poison - is nothing"...
What weakens the bees' defenses sufficiently for them to succumb? A multitude of factors, one of which is conspicuously absent from most serious discussion: Electromagnetic interference by our communication technologies, which have grown explosively in the same time frame as CCD got to be a serious problem.
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The only thing that remains constant in this universe is change. Health supreme's newsgrabs are no exception - I am starting to publish more often but less regularly.Instead of every Sunday as I have been doing for some time now, I may now be posting more unpredictably ... whenever I feel I have a sufficient number of stories and news. So subscribe by RSS or by email or check back more often to see the latest post...
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More information out there...
There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.
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Dr Mercola's health blog, Mike Adams' Natural News and the One Click Group in the UK have good health information. The Dr Rath Foundation is also putting out a weekly collection of health related news. Here is the link to their Newsletter Archive.
The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group and the healthfreedom ning group are places to discuss and exchange information on what is happening in the world of natural health.
For the influence of electromagnetic waves from radio, mobile phones and other radio emitting devices, check out the emr-updates group on Yahoo. Genetic modification and issues around agriculture and foods are reported on the Organic Consumers Association site.
A few sites to keep up to date with the other side of world affairs, the stuff you won't necessarily find on your tv or in the papers:
http://therealnews.com/
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.commondreams.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.truthout.org/The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Sunday March 15 2009
updated on Wednesday August 15 2012URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2009/03/15/is_pharma_business_model_unsustainable_newsgrabs_sunday_15_march_2009.htm