EpiPen’s Notorious Marketing Model
It’s a great business model: Start (or find) a life-threatening trend, develop (or acquire) a product absolutely necessary to counteract that trend, then gradually raise the cost until you find the highest price the market will bear. No wonder Mylan, the company that owns the EpiPen, is being compared—and unfavorably yet—to Turing Pharmaceuticals and its former chief executive Marti Shkreli, the man…
There’s Measles and Zika. Then There is Autism.
When you look at all the drama behind the 189 reported cases of measles1 in the United States last year and the recent daily reporting on the Zika virus, it is reasonable to question the priorities of our country’s public health officials and media. No one died from measles in the U.S. and…
Leaky Vaccines: More Than a Farmer’s Nightmare?
Here’s the quote, as provided to The Washington Post: “To me, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use imperfect vaccines,” says Andrew Read, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Entomology and Eberly Professor in Biotechnology at Penn State University, “Let’s say we become certain that a malarial vaccine is going to drive the evolution of more dangerous malarial…
Consumer Reports Looks at Arsenic in Food
Over the last several years, various studies from Consumer Reports have shown “worrisome” levels of arsenic in many mainstay foods commonly fed to children, including—of all things—fruit juices and organic baby cereal. Consumer Reports researchers first tested the arsenic levels in apple juice after Dr. Mehmet Oz alerted his viewers that arsenic levels in 10 of 36…
Doctors Going to Work Sick, Putting Patients at Risk
In case you didn’t know, patients may not be the only sick people in the room when they go visit the doctor’s office. A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics designed to understand how often and why physicians and advanced practice clinicians work while sick found that 94% of respondents believed that working while sick puts…
Sugar Nation: Is Sugar the New Alcohol?
It is a common misconception to associate cirrhosis of the liver with alcohol abuse, but the truth is that more and more people who either don’t drink alcohol at all, or drink very little, are being diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which can range in severity from simple excess fat in the liver to cirrhosis or end-stage liver disease. The disorder has…