The FDA says it has a vision to tackle its mountainous backlog of generic drug applications–but donÂ’t expect an easy fix.In announcing a plan today, FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach said officials hoped to streamline the approval process and bring cheaper generic drugs to market faster. The plan (most of which was actually rolled out [...]

  “There’s all this hubub about what Google and Microsoft are doing,” Aetna CEO Ronald Williams (pictured) said this afternoon on a visit to Health Blog HQ. “We’re perplexed by the fact that their vaporware gets all this attention and we get very little.”He was talking about Aetna’s rollout of its own personal health record — [...]

  Spending lots of time outdoors raises your risk of contracting the West Nile virus, whether you’re walking in the woods because you like nature — or sleeping outside in the city because you’re homeless. That’s the finding of epidemiologists at the University of Texas Health Science Center, whose research appears in the current issue of [...]

  Novartis’s pain pill Prexige — once seen as a possible blockbuster — looks like it’s on its way out. The company said today that it’s pulling Prexige from the Canadian market at the request of regulators there, who are worried about risks of liver damage associated with the drug.The FDA rejected Prexige last month, and [...]

  Microsoft finally beat Google at something. The company just released a “software and services platform” that will allow people to store their health information online. It’s the sort of project Google’s been making noises about for a while–but Microsoft delivered first. Here’s a screen shot Microsoft’s press people send us of what the ubernerds of [...]

  Pfizer just named Martin Mackay, a smooth-talking Scot and denizen of Pfizer’s research HQ, as the company’s R&D chief. Mackay’s a consummate insider, who’s been at the drug maker for more than a decade. In that regard, he’s an odd choice. The Pfizer board made clear it wanted new blood when it put former McDonald’s [...]

  Big Pharma companies continue to pop up on lists of the best places to work, despite steady layoffs and growing reputations as creativity-stiflers.While blockbuster drugs may be hard to come by, Big Pharma is pretty adept at offering the kind of groovy postmillenial vibe the young and ambitious look for in the office. In her [...]

  Now that President Bush has vetoed the bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, what will congressional Democrats do? First, they’ll try to override the veto. If that doesn’t work, and odds are against an override in the House, the Los Angeles Times reports that Democrats may pass the bill again, forcing the [...]

  Patients given bare-metal stents were more likely to die within three years than patients given drug-coated stents, a New England Journal of Medicine study found. The results from the latest analysis comparing old-style and new-model stents could give a boost to Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson which have seen sales of drug-coated stents fall [...]

  A 37-year-old man is wearing an iPod and jogging in Vancouver during a thunderstorm. He’s struck by lightning. He doesn’t know it, but doctors — apparently as iPod obsessed as everybody else, only in a geekier way — will be arguing about his case for months in the New England Journal of Medicine.The latest missives [...]