Portside

Growing resistance to antibiotics now allows long-treatable diseases to once again become killers. Yet, pharmaceutical companies are sacking their antibiotic researchers. Even with the looming threat of drug resistant “superbugs,” there are now less than 1,500 researchers who know how to develop antibiotics. It’s a problem rooted in the market-driven nature of the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma makes more money by making expensive drugs and selling a lot of them.

Hundreds of thousands of kids are dying every year because pharmaceutical companies are making record profits off a life-saving vaccine.

Many Americans do not to know that thalidomide was never approved for use in the US, and that was almost entirely due to the vigilance and, yes, outright stubbornness of one brave woman, who could sniff out spin and misinformation in a drug company application and would not be swayed by unrelenting pressure.

On Thursday more than 100 prominent oncologists came out in support of a patient-driven initiative to lower the high price of cancer drugs, charging at least 20 percent of their patients can’t follow their cancer treatment because they can’t afford the drugs. In their article in Mayo Clinic Proceedings the physicians also called upon the federal government to, among other things, allow Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices.

Medicalizing normal human behavior or common symptoms, and renaming subsets or combinations of symptoms, are common strategies to sell drugs.

According to those intimately involved in the response to the West African Ebola outbreak, NewLink Genetics owns the rights to a piece of the puzzle needed to quickly test and deploy one of two likely Ebola vaccines and they are holding up the entire process because they are not entirely sure they are going to get rich on it. Others suggest it is incompetence. NewLink seems to be claiming it is just a lot of paperwork.

Crackdown in Israel; Two, three, many Fergusons; Rightbloggers go apeshit; Ebola and Big Pharma; Aunt Jemima's vengeance; Co-op state of mind

India's Intellectual Property Appellate Board allows license for generic cancer drug at fraction of cost of Bayer's.