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Two people have been arrested after police stopped a car in Devon and found drugs inside with an estimated street value of £6,000. Officers stopped the vehicle on the M5 on Friday afternoon and discovered cannabis and an amount of powder – believed to be controlled drugs. More suspected drugs were found when they searched an address in east Devon. A man from east Devon and a woman from Bristol, both 45, were arrested and bailed until 6 November. Via: bbc.co.uk A drugs company under scrutiny for increasing the price the NHS pays for lifesaving pills by 1,000 per cent in two years has dramatically cut its charges after a Mail on Sunday investigation. The firm slashed the price of its hydrocortisone tablets, used to treat kidney patients, by £7.40 – saving the NHS almost £500,000 on its monthly drugs bill. The company’s boss had claimed the NHS ‘doesn’t care what it costs’ when he was asked to explain the price increases passed on to the taxpayer. The price cut came as the Department of Health admitted it does not police the cost of everyday medicines supplied to the NHS. The Mail on Sunday investigation revealed how some pharmaceutical companies were imposing huge price increases while earning massive profits. Drugs firm Auden McKenzie was charging £44.40 for a packet of its 10mg hydrocortisone tablets, but on Monday – the day after our investigation was published – the company wrote to wholesalers cutting the price to £37 with immediate effect. The firm had increased the price of the tablets for the NHS from £5 in 2008 to a peak of £48 earlier this year – making it about £2.4 million a month. Company boss Amit Patel, 35, whose personal wealth is said to exceed £40 million, claimed the price rises were needed to pay for his firm’s new multi-million-pound factory production line. He refused to say where the factory was or give any further details and said the price of the drugs would ‘creep back down’ because the firm had recouped much of its outlay. In a previous interview with The Mail on Sunday, he said: ‘Joe Public doesn’t know what it takes to . . . revive these old drugs. Quite rightly . . . the Government views medicine as public safety, so they don’t care what it costs.’ He added: ‘To be honest, they don’t care what it costs. You either meet their criteria or you don’t market the product.’ Last week, he issued a statement denying that he had claimed the ‘NHS doesn’t care what drugs cost’ and saying he ‘strenuously denies ever discussing the production costs of the drug’. Questions to Auden McKenzie’s media advisers asking for the reasons for the reduction in the price of the tablets went unanswered yesterday. Between 2007 and 2008, the firm’s turnover rose from £5.3 million to £10.6 million and its profits trebled to £6.2 million. Details of its more recent accounts – which coincide with the increased price of hydrocortisone – are not available and are listed as overdue by Companies House. Via: dailymail.co.uk London, July 26 (ANI): A new report is set to reveal that thousands of Britons are being denied access to drugs crucial in cancer treatments. The UK’s breast cancer patients have 50 percent less chance of the drug Herceptin than elsewhere in Europe. The report, commissioned by the Department of Health will put pressure on the Government to speed up plans for a 200 million pounds cancer fund that would allow patients to get access to new drugs not currently approved for NHS use. “It is high time we had a review of access to new drugs. However, I doubt that the 200million pound cancer fund would make us as good as the best countries in the report. We would need around £billion to achieve that,” The Daily Express quoted leading cancer specialist Karol Sikora from Cancer Partners UK, as saying. “Patients in the UK have poorer access to Alzheimer’s drugs, Multiple Sclerosis drugs and Rheumatoid Arthritis drugs too. It all needs to be looked at,” he added. Allegedly, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence or NICE has blocked a number of medicines, on grounds of cost, that can extend the lives of those battling more unusual forms of cancer. NICE has restricted access to the bowel cancer drug Avastin, and Nexavar, the only treatment offering any chance of survival for patients with advanced liver cancer. NICE agrees the drugs can alleviate symptoms but says the NHS cannot afford them. The outcry against negative decisions has led to a review by NICE into a controversial decision to block one new bone marrow drug called Azacitidine. One of the groups suffering most are 400 liver cancer patients denied Nexavar to shrink their tumours and give them the chance of potentially life-saving surgery. Ian Beaumont, of Bowel Cancer UK, said that for some patients even a few months delay “means the difference between life and death.” (ANI) Via: newstrackindia.com In college, I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical. I thought it would be satisfying enough to be a researcher, until I got into graduate school and saw that I wanted to be the one giving the agents and seeing the response. I didn’t even know what pharmacology was until my third year of college. My chemistry professor saw that I was interested in physiology and biochemistry. It struck a chord with me to merge those two disciplines and apply it to the human disease condition. So I decided I wanted to become a clinical pharmacologist, which is essentially a drug development expert. The Navy put me through medical school, and upon graduating, I worked as a primary-care doctor for two years on a ship with 600 other men. I also began my research work in the Navy. It was during the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Heat stress was a problem for the troops in the desert. I studied to see if there was a way to decrease the body temperature of the soldiers if they got overheated. We found some medicines that would be safe and effective. Eventually, I became intrigued by the Food and Drug Administration and its power to make decisions on medicines. It’s one thing to be writing the book, but the FDA gets to be the book critic, so to speak. I spent six years there working in infectious disease or oncology review. The neat thing about being a clinical pharmacologist is that it’s a broad specialty that lets you be involved with different types of products. I was on the receiving end of two applications that ended up being approved by the FDA. One treated the infectious disease hepatitis C, and the other treated colon cancer. That was my proudest work — to be on the team that approves a new product that allows people to live longer. I left the FDA and went into industry, working at various companies in vaccines and products for infectious disease and oncology. I was positioned at the very end of development and application for FDA approval. Via: washingtonpost.com Utah voters have reacted enthusiastically to Sen. Orrin Hatch’s legislation to drug test the unemployed and those receiving other forms of government cash assistance, the Utah Republican told the Huffington Post after introducing his measure last week. The goal, he said, is to get users into treatment. He said he has gotten little feedback from his colleagues, however. Sens. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) all told HuffPost they don’t have an opinion yet on Hatch’s measure and will have to study the language. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), meanwhile, has an opinion. “I think it’s a punitive attitude. Who’s going to pay for the test? What’s the point of the test? You know, why do you want to drug test people who have lost their job?” she wondered. Hatch said the test would be paid for with money saved by not paying benefits. “Any monies left over would go to help the states with the drug testing and so forth, and if there’s any surplus it goes to pay off the deficit,” he said. The idea of drug testing those on public assistance is not a new one, though policymakers have generally dismissed it as ineffectual. Harold Pollack, the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, has studied the issue closely. He notes that the 1996 welfare reform already grants states broad discretion to drug test recipients, though Hatch’s measure would expand that to the unemployed. “Absent specific indications, my own research and work conducted by others suggests that population drug screening is unwise. The likely consequence is to stretch states’ already overburdened screening, assessment, and referral systems with large numbers of casual marijuana users,” he said. “In part, this pattern reflects a technological quirk: Urine tests more readily detect marijuana than they can detect other intoxicating substances. In part this pattern reflects the basic epidemiology of illicit drug use.” A project in Michigan demonstrated that reality. “A decade ago, Michigan implemented mandatory testing in three welfare offices. Out of 258 new and continuing applicants tested, 21 tested positive for illicit substances. All but three of these women tested positive for marijuana only. In light of such experiences, few states have chosen to pursue similar efforts,” said Pollack. Medical marijuana, meanwhile, is legal at the state level for nearly half the American population. Drug testing could punish patients who are legally following state law and their doctors’ recommendations. Via: huffingtonpost.com |
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