My maternal grandfather died in 1968 of what was almost certainly a fulminant Hepatitis B infection (causing rapid liver failure, occurring in just 1% of acute cases). He probably acquired it working part-time in a deli, slicing meat. In med school a few years later, I learned that butchers had increased risk. You get Hepatitis…

Let’s start with tetanus, the disease we think of when scratched with something rusty or dirty, and develop an abscess. This is a terrible illness, because tetanus bacteria produce a nerve toxin that takes months to recover from.   First, how much tetanus disease is there is the US?  Second, does it spread from person-to-person? There are…

Pharmaceutical companies conduct pre-clinical (without people) and clinical research (utilizing human subjects) to understand the effects of drugs they are developing. Until now, even though the research often involves human voluntary subjects who may not be compensated for their participation, the findings of the research have been considered proprietary, or owned by the research sponsor….

JAMA Intern Med. 2015 Apr 1;175(4):567-77. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.7774. Research Misconduct Identified by the US Food and Drug Administration: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of the Peer-Reviewed Literature. Seife C1. Author information Abstract IMPORTANCE: Every year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects several hundred clinical sites performing biomedical research on human participants and…

In that same panel on vaccines, another panelist alleged that vaccines are a low-margin product and a low profit industry.  It was said that many companies left the market. That was true once.  This is now.  There are few companies due to tremendous market consolidation in pharmaceutical companies overall. Prices of vaccines have gone crazy….

Yesterday I was in a televised panel discussion about vaccines, and I suggested that Merck might influence CDC by donating to CDC’s foundation and by having hired CDC’s former Director, Julie Gerberding, as President of Merck Vaccines.  After NJ’s Health Director Eddie Bresnitz mandated Merck’s HPV vaccine in NJ, he too was given a job…

Here is the Complaint, filed on April 2, 2015 alleging gross mishandling of the case on many levels, and concealment of evidence exonerating Bruce Ivins: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1714250-former-fbi-special-agent-in-charge-richard.html   Here is the story in the NY Times of April 8. Here is the story in Courthouse News. And here are some extraordinary excerpts from the complaint that validate things…

Lots of babies get measles in Africa and India, and it is a significant cause of death there.  A great deal of work has gone into developing measles vaccines that can be given to children at younger and younger ages, especially in Africa, for this reason.  But in the United States, endemic measles has been…

Marcia Angell (Harvard professor, writer and former NEJM editor) has penned another excellent book review for the NY Review of Books.  This time, she discusses Stephen Brill’s new book on Obamacare, “America’s Bitter Pill”.  Two excerpts follow: … Practically every serious economic analysis of the American health system has concluded that the most efficient way…