Pfizer Races to Reinvent Itself
By KATIE THOMAS
For years, drug companies have known that their days of plenty were numbered, that the moment would arrive when the best-selling drugs that had driven two decades’ worth of profits would lose their patent protection and succumb to competition from generic alternatives. Without new blockbusters to replace them, profits would tumble.
For Pfizer, that day has arrived. Pfizer profited from hits like Lipitor and Viagra, and swallowed up smaller companies from the 1990s onward.
But it has no immediate successor to Lipitor, the best-selling drug in history, which lost patent protection last fall. The problem was punctuated on Tuesday when the company said that profit declined 19 percent last quarter, largely because of declines in Lipitor sales.
Pfizer — once the Big in Big Pharma — is making a radical shift, one being watched closely by the rest of the industry. It is getting smaller.
Last week the company announced it was selling its infant nutrition business to Nestlé for $11.85 billion, and it is expected to divest its profitable animal health business by next year. At the same time, the company is slashing as much as 30 percent of its research budget as part of a plan to focus on only the most promising areas, like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
A Bad Case of PIISD: Private Insurance Induced Stress Disorder
A psychiatrist diagnoses victims of health insurance
In July 2009, Carol A. Paris, a psychiatrist and an advocate for a single-payer national health care system, found herself on a speakers panel with Donna Smith of Aurora, Colo.
Smith and her husband, Larry, had been featured in the 2007 Michael Moore movie "Sicko." After Larry Smith was diagnosed with chronic coronary disease and Donna Smith contracted uterine cancer, they couldn't keep up with the costs of health insurance. They were forced to sell their home in South Dakota and move into the basement of a daughter's home in Colorado. Moore took them to Cuba for treatment.
"I heard her talk," Paris said, "and I thought, 'That's an amazing story.' I see patients every day being pushed around by the health insurance industry and that story just pissed me off."
The more she thought about it, the more she realized that people dealing with health insurers exhibit some of the same symptoms as patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
U.S. Lags in Global Measure of Premature Births
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Fifteen million babies are born prematurely each year, and the United States fared badly in the first country-by-country global comparison of premature births, which was released Wednesday by the World Health Organization and other agencies.
Although American hospitals excel at saving premature infants, the United States is similar to developing countries in the percentage of mothers who give birth before their children are due, the study’s chief author noted. It does worse than any Western European country and considerably worse than Japan or the Scandinavian countries.
That stems from the unique American combination of many pregnant teenagers and many women older than 35 who are giving birth, sometimes to twins or triplets implanted after in vitro fertilization, the authors said. Twins and triplets are often deliberately delivered early by Caesarean section to avoid the unpredictable risks of vaginally delivering multiple full-term babies.
Also, many American women of childbearing age have other risk factors for premature birth, like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure or smoking habits. And the many women who lack health insurance often do not see doctors early in their pregnancies, when problems like high blood pressure or genital infections can be headed off.
Experts do not know all the elements that can set off early labor.
Number of US babies born suffering from drug withdrawals triples
Posted April 30, 2012, at 4:15 p.m.
CHICAGO — Less than a month old, Savannah Dannelley scrunches her tiny face into a scowl as a nurse gently squirts a dose of methadone into her mouth.
The infant is going through drug withdrawal and is being treated with the same narcotic prescribed for her mother to fight addiction to powerful prescription painkillers.
Disturbing new research says the number of U.S. babies born with signs of opiate drug withdrawal has tripled in a decade because of a surge in pregnant women’s use of legal and illegal narcotics, including Vicodin, OxyContin and heroin, researchers say. It is the first national study of the problem.
The number of newborns with withdrawal symptoms increased from a little more than 1 per 1,000 babies sent home from the hospital in 2000 to more than 3 per 1,000 in 2009, the study found. More than 13,000 U.S. infants were affected in 2009, the researchers estimated.
The newborns include babies such as Savannah, whose mother stopped abusing painkillers and switched to prescription methadone early in pregnancy, and those whose mothers still are abusing legal or illegal drugs.
Weaning infants from these drugs can take weeks or months and often requires a lengthy stay in intensive care units. Hospital charges for treating these newborns soared from $190 million to $720 million between 2000 and 2009, the study found.
The study was released online Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Hundreds in line for free dental care this week in Machias
Posted May 01, 2012, at 4:56 p.m.
MACHIAS, Maine — On Monday school kids were arriving by the busload.
On Tuesday both children and adults were lined up at 8:30 a.m. in front of the Lee Pellon Event Center on Main Street in Machias, where all this week volunteers from the New York University College of Dentistry are joining dentists from throughout Maine in providing free dental care to any Washington County resident who walks through the doors.
By the last day of the clinic on Saturday, it’s expected more than 750 people will have received care, ranging from simple dental examinations and X-rays to extractions, crowns and root canals. The program has been staged here every six months for the past two years, with this week being the fourth and, from appearances Tuesday, most popular free clinic.
“In rural Washington County, dental care is an economic issue,” said Dr. Timothy Oh, a dentist who heads up the Ellsworth-based Caring Hands of Maine Dental Center. “Paying for dental care gets pushed down the priority ladder while families are trying to find ways to pay other bills.
“In rural areas, you’ll also find a culture that doesn’t value taking care of teeth, which makes programs like this an educational challenge,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons this program focuses so heavily on kids. We’re trying to break that cycle.”
Oh said many of the dental issues being addressed at the free clinic this week are related to diets filled with soda, sweets and junk food. The region’s issues with substance abuse have also created pockets of populations with severe dental problems.
“We see that, among people involved in methamphetamine use, teeth deteriorate at an exceedingly rapid rate,” Oh said. “Another contributor to poor dental hygiene is tobacco use. People who smoke are four times more likely to lose teeth. We’re dealing with a whole scenario of problems, and the answer is not drilling teeth or pulling teeth but working to create a value system that promotes dental health. We’re hoping that this week we can get people who have terrible problems with their teeth to realize the importance of having a healthy mouth.”
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