pharma companies

After years of underfunding, this is now a great time for the vaccine business. Three new vaccines hit the market during 2006 alone, the most known for a single year, and costly new vaccines are likely to find acceptance this year. Vaccines released during 2006 include HPV, which has been linked to the development of cervical cancer, and rotavirus, which kills 600,000 children around the world. And the trend is likely to continue, experts say. Technology breakthroughs, boosted by higher …

Press Release: Disease Management and Patient Adherence: 41% of Program Budgets are Outsourced

> In 2005, cancer patients spent roughly $2.3 billion in traveling to, waiting for and getting care in the first year of diagnosis--a number which only climbs as the disease progresses. Article

> Pediatric physician group Nemours has dumped its contract with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, leaving thousands of BCBS of Florida enrollees with higher bills for …

The long arm of the drug companies snags yet another researcher. Pearson "Trey" Sunderland III, who was chief of the Geriatric Psychiatry Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, is accused of failing to disclose that he accepted $285,000 in consulting and other fees from Pfizer between 1997 and 2004. Sunderland was paid $25,000 a year for consulting with Pfizer and a $2,500 fee for each one-day meeting he attended with Pfizer executives. Sunderland, whose department was working …

The federal Centers for Disease Control is drawing fire for its decision to focus a $3 million immunization study on teenagers rather than children. Officials had planned to gather data on whether children in 22 large metros with historically low immunization rates had been getting all of the immunizations recommended by pediatricians. Instead, they have decided to focus on teens, who are being targeted by pharma companies for a number of new vaccines. Vaccines targeting adolescents …

> Back in the saddle again! HealthSouth begins trading on the NYSE once more. Article

> The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is distributing new clinical preventative guidelines. …

Jumping on a trend that seems to be gathering momentum, the UC Davis Health System may be the next medical center to strictly limit how much pharma company swag doctors are allowed to accept. Interestingly, the initiative is being driven by Garen Wintemute, an emergency doctor and UC Davis professor, rather than a bioethics think tank or executive board looking to polish its reputation. The effort is also endorsed by many UC Davis medical students.

While the restrictions are only …

> The state of California has passed legislation allowing it to funnel Medi-Cal spending to pharma companies that provide drug discounts. It also passed a law requiring insurance companies to cover HPV testing as part of cervical cancer screening. Article and article

> Michigan has …

In a perfect world the policy made sense, but in the real world, this is another policy that some bio-ethicist who has nothing better to do dreamt up in his office.

The AMA was wrong years ago on this. For example, pharmaceutical companies can no longer support Continuing Medical Education (CME) dinner meetings if a spouse is to attend. The net result is that I do not attend these functions. I do not want these events to be another evening away from my family besides night calls. So the turnout for these functions have dropped dramatically. The flip side is that I do not have the slightest clue what products the pharmaceutical companies make, so there is the big hole in the "undue influence” argument.

The Society of Critical Care dropped pharmaceutical industry support for providing lunch at their annual meeting in order to avoid any possibility of being improperly influenced. The net result is the exhibit hall is like a ghost town during lunch hours whereas in the years before this policy was adopted the hall was usually full. I am equally helpless in telling you who was paying for lunch boxes in the prior years. This type of overly-cautious policy is detrimental to everyone. Pharma companies are not willing to pay high fees to rent exhibit hall space if no physician is around to talk to them. And we as physicians are missing the chance to be exposed to some genuinely new products at these meeting.

It is looking to be a good year for oncology, as new targeted therapies and drug cocktails make their debut on their market and healthcare providers increasingly come to view the specialty as a profit center. Expect the annual meeting of the American Association of Society Clinical Oncology this week in Atlanta to generate a steady stream of stories about new potentially "revolutionary" approaches and noteworthy study findings. The New York Times spotlights the increased …