So Asia is awash with fake pills. No news there. Cops are seizing a fair few of them — 16 million in the last few months, worth US$ 6.6 million, according to Interpol. That’s a step forward. But that some of them seem to be antiretroviral drugs for HIV threatens two steps back.
The first step [...]
A new study suggests that people with HIV have a 70% greater chance of staying alive if they start taking antiretrovirals when their CD4 count is as high as 500. That’s good news for people who know they are infected early on and who have easy access to drugs. It’s also potentially good news for [...]
As competition to treat people for HIV has hotted up, pharmaceutical companies have started dumping on one another. Using innuendo and not-quite-stated factoids, they are beginning to imply that the rival camp has something to hide (something they’ve no doubt learned from political campaigns). Those other drugs are toxic, discolouring, inconvenient. Activist groups and [...]
Last week, Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche said it was giving up on HIV-related research. I expected some cynical “told you so” comments from industry analysts, but the reaction to the announcement was surprisingly muted. Even AIDS activists were mousy.
Activists have done a spectacular job in slapping down the price of antiretroviral drugs in the last [...]
Today, apparently, is “Rethinking AIDS Day”. Or so we’re told by a group of AIDS denialists who gather under the banner of RethinkingAIDS.com. They and their mates have a channel on Youtube, too, called HIVquestions. They’ve been inviting me to sign up since I posted a video explaining that in some countries, counterintuitively enough, more [...]
Big Pharma is famous for trying to seduce doctors into prescribing their products by giving them goodies and inviting them on junkets. Often, that amounts to naked bribery. But they also offer to pay independent scientists to participate in meetings, to give advice to board members, or to speak to said junkets. That’s more of [...]
India’s sprawling railway network will from next week allow HIV-infected people to travel half-price, the Economic Times reports. Since it’s India, there’s red tape to go with the red ribbons — the discount is only for second class travel to and from approved HIV treatment centres and people “have to produce (a) certificate in prescribed [...]
Now that over 40 million people are taking Prozac and similar medication to cheer themselves up, we learn that they may as well be taking sugar-pills. Waving the Freedom of Information act as a warrant to gain access to data drug companies haven’t wanted to publish, researchers looked again at whether people popping Prozac actually [...]
Public health scientists love to whinge that no-one listens to us. We wring our hands endlessly over what we can do to better communicate the results of research to policy makers and the public. And yet a new study suggests that some scientists can’t even report their own names and e-mail addresses correctly. And the [...]
