drugs

When I was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency’s national advisory committee recommended in 1977 that we eliminate an agricultural practice that threatened human health. Routinely feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy livestock, our scientific advisory committee warned, was breeding drug-resistant bacteria that could infect people. Read More »

What's been called the first clinical study protocol developed using crowdsourcing methods received the FDA's imprimatur earlier this month. The agency approved Transparency Life Sciences' IND for a clinical trial designed to test a generic blood-pressure medication, ACE inhibitor lisinopril, in patients with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis. Read More »

U.S. consumers and taxpayers usually pay more - often much more - than people in other developed nations for brand-name drugs, according to a series of papers published Monday in the journal  Health Affairs. Read More »

The active drug in Tylenol, acetaminophen, is one of the best medications we have for helping people in pain. It's also one the most commonly overdosed substances in the world and puts about 60,000 Americans in the hospital every year. Several hundred people in the U.S. will die in 2013 from liver failure after acetaminophen overdose. Read More »

Countries sometimes do things differently from other countries or gain reputations for doing certain things well or poorly. But within a country, within the same federal government, does it make sense to do things differently among departments or programs that are providing essentially the same service? Read More »

The recent news that thousands of seniors with cancer are being denied treatment with expensive chemotherapy drugs as a result of sequestration-mandated budget cuts raises the question of whether other patients are being equally harmed, but less visibly. Read More »