On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India,...
Category: generic drugs
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India," according to a story by Katie Thomas in The New York Times.
Thomas reported that Ranbaxy "acknowledged that it failed to conduct proper safety and quality tests of several drugs manufactured at the Indian plants, including generic versions of many common medicines, like gabapentin, which treats epilepsy and nerve pain, and the antibiotic ciprofloxacin."
That's disturbing, but it sounds like the kind of thing that can be corrected with proper oversight.
But I didn'...
Over at Scientific American, Laura Newman has a post recapping three recent papers in the BMJ that conclude that insulin...
Over at Scientific American, Laura Newman has a post recapping three recent papers in the BMJ that conclude that insulin analogues--genetically engineered insulin replacements--show no compelling advantages over human insulin but cost two to four times as much.
We've heard this kind of story before, but it's worth remembering that despite outsiders' attempts to uncover and discourage such things, the pharmaceutical industry continues, in at least some circumstances, to value marketing over research. And that is precisely where reporters should go to make the distinction and to clarify what's going on--which is what Newman does here.
-Paul Raeburn
I've expressed the opinion here that science journalists bring a unique set of...
I've expressed the opinion here that science journalists bring a unique set of qualifications to their work, and that other journalists--and other authorities and experts--often cannot do the job as well as a science writer. A good example of the problem appeared in The New York Times over the weekend.
The Times piece was written by Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist; bioethicist; former White House adviser; the brother of Chicago mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; the brother of Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel--and an all-around smart guy. In September, he will join the University of Pennsylvania with "...
It's an old story: A generic drug looks promising, but because anybody can make it, nobody wants to.
Drug companies, unlike many other businesses, often refuse to sell a product unless they have monopoly control. I guess we should be grateful they still sell us aspirin.
As I say, it's an old story....
It's an old story: A generic drug looks promising, but because anybody can make it, nobody wants to.
Drug companies, unlike many other businesses, often refuse to sell a product unless they have monopoly control. I guess we should be grateful they still sell us aspirin.
As I say, it's an old story. But Marie McCullough of the Philadelphia Inquirer has made this story fresh again with a nice piece on a generic multiple sclerosis drug that looks promising but is still years and millions of dollars away from approval.
She begins with that old standby, the anecdotal lede--but it's a good one. It's about a woman who has...
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