Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

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DNAnexus to Deliver precisionFDA

Press Release | DNAnexus | August 5, 2015

DNAnexus, the leader in cloud-based genome informatics and data management, today announced that the company was awarded a research and development contract by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Health Informatics to build precisionFDA, an open source platform for community sharing of genomic information. precisionFDA is a new approach for evaluating bioinformatics workflows, and is an integral part of the agency’s work in understanding diagnostic tests that incorporate next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. FDA’s role under the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative is to review the current regulatory landscape and develop a streamlined approach to evaluating NGS-based diagnostics.

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Do Gaps in Health IT Security Laws Stunt Technology Innovation?

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | August 10, 2016

A new ONC report details the implications of health IT security laws on health IT innovation and development. Gaps in privacy and security law may be hindering the development and expansion of health IT and EHR use across the industry, a recent report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology suggests...

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Do We Need To Know What’s In Junk Food?

Staff Writer | New York Times | February 5, 2010

In the continuing effort to fight obesity in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration is reviewing its nutrition labeling guidelines. The agency is re-evaluating serving sizes and considering the placement of calorie and nutrition labels on the front of food packages, from cereals to soups to candy. Read More »

Doctors And Hospitals Got At Least $3.5 Billion From Industry In Just Five Months

Julia Belluz | Vox | September 30, 2014

...Lawsuits in recent years revealed that doctors' relationships with industry can alter their prescribing practices and decision-making for the worse, and pharmaceutical companies have paid out billions of dollars in fines for fraudulent marketing practices...

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Doctors Given Meals by Drug Makers Prescribed More of Their Pills

Ed Silverman | STAT | June 20, 2016

Doctors who were fed meals costing even less than $20 later prescribed certain brand-name pills more often than rival medicines, according to a new analysis published on Monday of a federal database. And in most cases, costlier meals were associated with still higher prescribing rates for Medicare Part D drugs made by the same companies that provided the food. The findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, are likely to intensify an ongoing debate over the extent to which ties between drug makers and doctors unduly influence medical practice and the nation’s health care costs...

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Doctors' Dubious Excuses For Taking Pharmaceutical Companies' Money

Roy M. Poses | Health Care Renewal | March 19, 2013

Pro Publica has updated their database of payments by pharmaceutical payments to physicians and organizations.  It now has data from 15 companies totaling more than $2 billion from 2009 to 2012. To accompany Pro Publica's report, a number of news outlets wrote about payments given to local or regional doctors... Read More »

Document Dive: What's Inside The Sugar Industry's Filing Cabinets?

Maya Dusenberg | Mother Jones | October 31, 2012

Internal papers reveal a strategy to safeguard sugar from "opportunists," "pseudoscientists," and "enemies." Read More »

Documentary Explores Use Of Antibiotics In Food Animals

Lydia Zuraw | Food Safety News | October 15, 2014

On Tuesday night, PBS aired FRONTLINE’s two-part documentary exploring the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance. The first half of “The Trouble with Antibiotics” focused on the science and politics behind the widespread use of antibiotics in food animals, presenting the history of the practice and attempts to link human illnesses back to animal antibiotics...

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Dr. Eric Topol Joins The Wide Open Road Of mHealth As AT&T As Chief Medical Advisor

Ryan Sartor | Health Tech Zone | February 6, 2014

Last fall Verizon announced FDA approval for their Converged Health Management System, a remote patient monitoring platform to connect doctors with patient vitals using HIPPA level security. Now AT&T is upping the ante, announcing the appointment of Eric Topol, MD as Chief Medical Advisor, in charge of design, development and delivery of the company’s healthcare IT solutions. Read More »

Drug Bust: Generic Drug Prices On the Rise

Jeremy A. Greene | Slate | November 20, 2014

For 30 years, generic medications helped make health care cheaper. Why is their cost surging?...

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Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have

Jonathon Cohn | The Huffington Post | March 31, 2016

One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake”...

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e-Health Project In Malaysia To Monitor Medical Drug Preservation With Waspmote

Alberto Bielsa | Libelium | January 20, 2012

Medical drugs are very expensive, in special vaccines and others that need to be stored at a specific temperature. Therefore, real-time monitoring is vital to control whether the cold chain has been broken or not. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are capable of getting temperature, humidity or luminosity measurements and transmit the data to a remote server periodically. In this way, real-time conditions can be monitored in order to know when a problem in a freezer or a refrigerator happens, avoiding critical situations and saving a huge amount of money.

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Elizabeth Warren Questions FDA Rules for Limiting Antibiotics on Farms

Venessa Wong | Bloomberg Businessweek | March 14, 2014

New voluntary rules to limit the use of antibiotics in agriculture aren’t enough to satisfy Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). [...] Read More »

Farm Antibiotics: Still Headed In The Wrong Direction

Maryn McKenna | Phenomena | December 14, 2015

New federal data released at the end of last week indicates that sales of antibiotics for use in food animals in the United States are still rising, despite public pressure to change the practice and condemnation by medicine that farm misuse and overuse is contributing to antibiotic resistance that threatens human health. That’s not good. It’s especially not good because the numbers just released cover the year 2014—the first year in a voluntary three-year period, set by the Food and Drug Administration, during which use of farm antibiotics is supposed to be reduced. If agriculture and the veterinary pharma industry didn’t manage reductions in Year 1, they have a hard task ahead of them to create significant change in Years 2 and 3...

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Farm-Drug Companies Agree To Antibiotics Ban. More Of The Same, Or Fresh Start?

Maryn McKenna | Wired | March 28, 2014

Big news in the realm of agricultural antibiotics: For the first time in almost 37 years of trying, the US Food and Drug Administration has achieved some control over the meat-industry practice of routinely giving antibiotics to livestock. The drawback: The control comes in the form of a voluntary commitment by veterinary drug manufacturers [...]. Read More »