Herb Kohl, the chairman of the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging, asked the federal agency that runs Medicare some tough questions about the billions of dollars it may have to spend if lots of Medicare patients with a serious eye disease use Genentech’s Lucentis instead of the company’s Avastin.Kohl’s letter, sent yesterday, cites a story [...]
What do the ACLU, Gun Owners of America, the Free Congress Foundation and Microsoft have in common? A hankering for patient privacy, it seems.With some 40 other groups, they sent congressmen a letter yesterday urging them to “establish basic privacy protections” for health records, and soon. (Or see the press release.) They complain that no [...]
Another case of international travel and virulent tuberculosis reminds the Health Blog just how tough it is for authorities to nab infectious travelers who don’t want to be caught.CDC officials learned in April that a businessman from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico made frequent trips to the U.S. and took along his multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. The man had [...]
At least Boston Scientific has done a decent job of managing expectations. The beleaguered device maker said this morning that it lost $272 million last quarter, and the market responded by driving shares up more than 4% in early trading. The company’s been trying to re-tool itself to deal with heavy debt and sagging sales, [...]
James Watson, the Nobel laureate who co-discovered the structure of DNA, made racially charged comments to London’s Sunday Times and was suspended last night from his administrative duties at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.The story’s been unfolding in the U.K. for a few days but is just making its way to this country. Watson (pictured, in [...]
We at the Health Blog are always on the hunt for good art to spice up our posts. So we’ve got to hand it to the crafty and anonymous blogger Pharma Giles, who has been mocking Pfizer’s Exubera for months in a series called “101 Uses of an Exubera Bong.” His latest installment, to mark [...]
The decline of anemia drugs rolls on. Insurance giant Aetna has followed Medicare’s lead and tightened its reimbursement policies for the drugs, the Los Angeles Times reports this morning.It’s common for private insurers to model their policies on Medicare, and Bear Stearns biotech analyst Mark Schoenebaum tells the paper that “Aetna is likely to be [...]
Everybody’s rating everybody else in health care these days — patients rating doctors, doctors rating insurers — and yesterday California officials did their own rating, publishing their annual report card on the state’s biggest HMOs.None of the HMOs scored great, none was awful. A few ranked “good” and the rest ranked “fair.” The ratings, online [...]
The Health Blog took a field trip to Wyeth HQ Thursday for a chat with CEO-apparent Bernard Poussot and the incumbent, Robert Essner, who’ll step aside in Jan. A big topic of conversation was the trouble the company’s been having getting new drugs approved by FDA. What gives? The response focused mostly on changes at [...]
Impotence remedies Viagra, Cialis and Levitra have been associated with a sudden loss of hearing in some patients, the FDA said today. Whoa! Wasn’t it worrying enough when the agency warned two years ago that drugs have been associated with sudden loss of vision in some patients?Somebody at FDA caught wind of a case report [...]
