Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

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Biden Announces Major Open Initiatives At Cancer Moonshot Summit

Press Release | The White House | June 28, 2016

Today, the Cancer Moonshot is hosting a summit at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. as part of a national day of action that also includes more than 270 events in communities across the United States.  Vice President Joe Biden will join over 350 researchers, oncologists and other care providers, data and technology experts, patients, families, and patient advocates, among others, will come together at Howard University.  They will be joined by more than 6,000 individuals at events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam.  This is the first time a group this expansive and diverse will meet under a government charge is to double the rate of progress in our understanding, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care of cancer...

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Biden Gives a Peek at What’s to Come for Cancer Moonshot

Anna Edney | Bloomberg Politics | June 29, 2016

A corporate-government partnership to improve U.S. veterans’ access to personalized cancer treatments will highlight a nationwide series of gatherings and events Wednesday detailing of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” program. IBM Corp. will donate access to its “Watson” supercomputer -- best known for beating human champions on the television game show “Jeopardy!” -- to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The supercomputer will help provide facilitate oncology treatment for those who have served in the U.S. military, according to a statement from the White House...

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Big Pharma Plays Hide-The-Ball With Data

Ben Wolford | Newsweek | November 13, 2014

...[E]vidence released earlier this year by  Cochrane Collaboration, a London-based nonprofit, shows that a significant amount of negative data from [Tamiflu's] clinical trials were hidden from the public. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew about it, but the medical community did not; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which doesn’t have the same access to unpublished data as regulators, had recommended the drug without being able to see the full picture...

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Big Pharma's Last Refuge

Bill Frezza | Bio IT World | September 27, 2011

In the previous issue of Bio•IT World (July/August 2011), my fellow columnist Ernie Bush posed the question, what are the limits to collaboration among pharmaceutical companies? This same question was faced by the telecommunications industry in 1913, albeit during an era of ascendancy and not senescence. This led to a solution that lasted 70 years. Could history repeat itself? Read More »

Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies

Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens | Mother Jones | November 1, 2012

How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill? Read More »

Bipartisan Policy Center's Health Innovation Initiative: Health IT Industry Officials Lying To Regulators With Impunity?

InformaticsMD | Health Care Renewal | February 14, 2013

A statement that health IT has a "lower risk profile" compared to other regulated healthcare sectors such as devices or drugs, in order to seek continued and extraordinary regulatory accommodations, is remarkable.  It is either reckless regarding something that the statement's makers should know, or should have made it their business to know - or a deliberate prevarication with forethought.

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Bloomberg Health Care Summit on "Connecting Healthcare Policy with Next Century Innovation"

Earlier this week, the Bloomberg Government Health Care Summit appropriately named "Mind the Gap: Connecting Healthcare Policy with Next Century Innovation", was held in Washington, D.C. It was convened to discuss perspectives of healthcare innovators, medical professionals, and government officials who are helping to redesign U.S. healthcare during a time of innovation. About 150 healthcare industry representatives were in attendance. One of our Open Health News (OHN) correspondents was there. Read More »

Bracing For A Battle, Vermont Passes GMO Labeling Bill

Eliza Barclay and Jeremy Bernfeld | The Salt | April 24, 2014

The Green Mountain State is poised to become the first to require food companies to label products containing genetically modified ingredients. Read More »

Breaking the Seal on Drug Research

Katie Thomas | New York Times | June 29, 2013

Together with a band of far-flung researchers and activists, [Dr. Peter Doshi] is trying to unearth data from clinical trials — complex studies that last for years and often involve thousands of patients across many countries — and make it public. Read More »

Breeding Bacteria On Factory Farms

Mark Bittman | New York Times | July 9, 2013

The story of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in farm animals is not a simple one. But here’s the pitch version: Yet another study has reinforced the idea that keeping animals in confinement and feeding them antibiotics prophylactically breeds varieties of bacteria that cause disease in humans, disease that may not readily be treated by antibiotics... Read More »

Can Doctors Teach The Body To Cure Cancer?

Jacoba Urist | The Atlantic | July 28, 2014

Increasingly, doctors are using their patients' own immune systems as valuable weapons against the disease...

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Can The Feds Make Health IT Systems Talk To Each Other?

Kenneth Corbin | CIO | February 7, 2014

Government officials are reluctant to issue mandates on standards and interoperability for health IT devices and applications -- but advocates say that's exactly what healthcare needs to promote innovation and improve patient care. Read More »

Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What's More Dangerous?

Michael Meurer | Truthout | September 15, 2013

[An important revelation] is the exposure of a nearly lunatic disproportion in threat assessment and spending by the US government. This disproportion has been spawned by a fear-based politics of terror that mandates unlimited money and media attention for even the most tendentious terrorism threats, while lethal domestic risks such as contaminated food from our industrialized agribusiness system are all but ignored Read More »

CDC Official Protests Federal Medical Response Cuts

Diane Barnes | Nextgov.com | April 29, 2014

More than half a decade of reductions to spending on state and local public-health agencies has already been "extremely damaging" to capabilities across the country for responding to unconventional attacks and other disasters, Dr. Ali Khan, director of the Public Health Preparedness and Response Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Global Security Newswire in an interview. 

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CDC Threat Report: Yes, Agricultural Antibiotics Play A Role In Drug Resistance

Maryn McKenna | Wired | September 17, 2013

The grave assessment on the advance of drug resistance, released Monday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contained some important observations about the relationship between antibiotic use in agriculture and resistant infections in humans. [...] Read More »