The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is entering a partnership with the Chinese government to fight HIV infection among China’s urban drug users, prostitutes and gay men. The venture, backed by $50 million in grants from the foundation, is the result of years of personal diplomacy by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (pictured) to surmount bureaucratic [...]

  After Merck determined that its experimental HIV vaccine not only failed but may have backfired by increasing the risk of infection with the deadly virus, the company and its partners on the project have decided to tell everyone who took part in the clinical test whether they received the vaccine or a placebo.The decision came [...]

  Another health insurer has agreed to modify its doctor-ranking programs under pressure from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. But Aetna, the third-largest U.S. health insurer, is the first to take the changes nationwide, Cuomo’s office said.Insurers have been rolling out plans to rate some doctors as better than others, with some consumer groups saying [...]

  Nothing says you’re sorry quite like $135 million. That’s how much Pfizer is forking over to Nektar Therapeutics, its jilted partner in the inhaled-insulin business, the companies said today.Just last month, Nektar CEO Howard Robin said he was the last to know that Pfizer was going to pull the plug. “We first learned this morning [...]

  If you’re a horse worried about catching the West Nile virus (pictured), you’ve got a couple vaccines to choose from. If you’re a person, you’re out of luck. But the search for a human vaccine got a boost today, when Sanofi-Aventis said it will pay $10 million, and promised up to $70 million more, to [...]

  Allowing people to sell a kidney could prompt the poor and the desperate to enter a dangerous bargain. To many, the idea just feels creepy. For now, it’s also illegal and widely opposed by the medical establishment.But Arthur Matas, a University of Minnesota doc and former president of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, is [...]

  Those ubiquitous antibacterial soaps, gels and wipes may lead to more harm than good. The chemicals may spur the growth of hardy bacteria that resist not only antibacterial cleaners but also antibiotics.A medical resident lays out the case against antibacterial cleaning products in this morning’s Washington Post. The article suggests that washing thoroughly with old-school [...]

  Amgen’s spending millions to lobby against Medicare rules restricting the use of anemia drugs such as Amgen’s Aranesp for cancer patients. The campaign is a long shot, the WSJ reports. Congress has repealed only one of 41,000 such rules in the past decade, according to a Congressional Research Service report.But that hasn’t stopped the company [...]

  “I know that people don’t believe us and our motives,” Genentech president of product development Susan Desmond-Hellmann told an audience of angry eye doctors at an ophthalmology conference this weekend. “We don’t expect to make friends with this decision.” (A recording of her talk and the following Q&A session is available here.)She was there to [...]

  We Americans are becoming more accident prone, and it’s a development that threatens our lives. That’s the unhappy conclusion from a federal analysis of “unintentional-injury deaths,” better known to average Joes as accidental deaths.The overall rate of accidental deaths rose 7%, to 37.7 per 100,000 in 2004, from 35.3 in 1999, says the analysis published [...]