Healthcare Waste Archives - Page 8 of 25

Lawsuit: Big Pharma funded terrorism in Iraq with payments to corrupt health ministry

October 19, 2017

In the first years following the defeat of Saddam Hussein, there were few dark corners of battle-scarred Iraq less hospitable to Americans than the country’s ministry of health.

The walls of the ministry, headquartered in a dilapidated high-rise in eastern Baghdad, were covered with hundreds of photos of scowling Shiite clerics. Banners proclaimed “Death to America and Israel” and “we must destroy the occupiers.” Death squads commandeered the ministry’s ambulances for missions to hunt Sunnis. Assault rifles were stacked in offices. The morgues were used for torture. Everywhere flapped the flag of the Jaysh al-Mahdim, also known as the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia controlled by the radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

‘Drug Dealers in Lab Coats’

October 18, 2017

For decades, America has waged an ineffective war on drug pushers and drug lords, from Bronx street corners to Medellin, Colombia, regarding them as among the most contemptible specimens of humanity.

One reason our efforts have failed is we ignored the biggest drug pushers of all: American pharmaceutical companies.

Health Canada gives ‘kiss of death’ to planned policy for rare-disease drugs

October 17, 2017

OTTAWA — Health Canada has quietly deleted from its website all references to a planned framework for rare-disease drugs that dates back to 2012 and was intended to improve the availability of such drugs in Canada.

Canada is one of the only developed countries without a regulatory framework for rare-disease drugs, also known as orphan drugs.

Durhane Wong-Rieger, president and CEO of the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders, said the decision “certainly seems to be the kiss of death” for the orphan drug framework.

Canada is long overdue for a national registry of drug company payments to doctors

October 17, 2017

Ontario recently took a historic step as the first province in Canada to introduce legislation that would shine a light on interactions between drug companies and prescribers. The use of the term “historic” here is not hyperbole, since the extent of payments by the pharmaceutical industry to individual physicians in Canada has never been known.

Other countries, such as the United States and France, have been making such information public for a few years now. But Ontario’s bill would provide a wider scope of transparency by including payments to prescribers of all sorts — not just doctors — into the mix, and even including payments from medical device companies.

University Health Network investigating errors in patients’ records

October 12, 2017

A clinical team will investigate whether the care of any patient at Ontario’s largest hospital network was impacted by errors reported in its electronic medical records, says a spokeswoman.

Gillian Howard said that while the University Health Network is conducting a review of five million electronic health records gathered over the past five years, a clinical team will also review the files of patients directly impacted by the privacy breach to ensure their care was not compromised.

Here’s how the VA helped Big Pharma get veterans hooked on opioids — then made the problem worse

October 12, 2017

he Veterans Administration overprescribed opiates and psychiatric medication for more than a decade, and then swung back dangerously in the other direction about five years ago.

Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma played a key role in spreading opiate use among veterans by giving $200,000 to essentially turn the VA into its propaganda arm, according to an investigative report by Newsweek.

Secret corporate documents obtained by the magazine show how the pharmaceutical company helped develop VA-Department of Defense guidelines that claimed opiates rarely cause addiction, and promoted the phony campaign, “Pain: The 5th Vital Sign.”

“Opioid Avenger”: Mike Moore Takes Aim at Big Pharma

October 9, 2017

Former Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore, who famously led a campaign to punish tobacco companies for lying about the dangers of smoking, has set his sights on the pharmaceutical industry, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Moore, a University of Mississippi alumnus who served as the state’s attorney general from 1998 to 2004, was the first state AG to file a lawsuit against Big Tobacco and won the largest corporate settlement in history—$246 billion for 50 states, with the money earmarked to fund smoking cessation and prevention programs.

The Lies About ADHD Medication That Big Pharma Funds

October 5, 2017

Drug companies give financial support, sometimes without public knowledge, to individuals and groups that are key players in the research, diagnosis, and treatment of ADHD. The parent advocacy group Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD), for example, which was instrumental in helping get ADD (as it was then called) designated as a handicapping condition under federal disability laws in the 1990s, was secretly taking money from pharmaceutical companies for years before disclosing its financial connections after a 1995 PBS broadcast revealed its underhanded dealings with drug companies.[i] It now regularly reports the amount it receives each year from Big Pharma.

States Prep Lawsuit That Could Devastate Big Pharma

October 5, 2017

The same lawyer that took on big tobacco and landed the largest corporate settlement in the history of the U.S. is gearing up for his next victim: the opioid industry.

Mike Moore, the former attorney general of Mississippi, began asking states last summer to sue pharmaceutical companies for what he argued was a calculated misrepresentation of the benefits and addictions risks of using opioids. Moore wants to get roughly 25 states behind his cause, and build such a strong case against the pharmaceutical industry that it is forced to cower to the states’ demands.

Pfizer loses battle to keep Medicaid rebate data hidden from Texas lawmakers

October 5, 2017

Pfizer (PFE) lost a round in the larger fight over pharmaceutical pricing when a federal judge ruled that Texas lawmakers should be able to obtain state Medicaid rebate data about its medicines.

The drug maker last year filed a lawsuit against the Texas Health and Human Services Commission for releasing the data to a pair of state lawmakers, who sought the information in order to assess drug costs for the state Medicaid program. But Pfizer argued that releasing the data would violate federal and state laws that protect its confidential information.