The White House is looking to slash what Medicare pays for drugs to roughly match the cost in European countries. US residents pay more for meds than any other high-income country; some drugs cost 4 times more than in other countries, tweeted health secretary Alex Azar.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis’s ability to develop resistance to antibiotics has long been a threat to global health. Matthew Wipperman, PhD, MSc, a research scientist in the Immunology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues recently published a…
A sweeping new opioid bill passed the US Senate Monday, which would target illicit fentanyl trafficking and expand telemedicine prescriptions for buprenorphine and methadone, currently limited by in-person prescription rules. It would also give the DEA more power to slash…
Nigeria accounts for over 60% of West Africa’s medications. In 2015, about 17% of all generic drugs were fakes, accounting for over 100,000 deaths a year across sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite the magnitude of America’s addiction problem, addiction training is thin on the ground in US med schools. A decade of efforts mean the nascent field of addiction medicine is gaining some ground, but there are just 52 addiction medicine fellowships to go around. That…
Faced with the daunting prospect that over 500,000 in the US could die from an opioid overdose in the next decade, Baltimore City health commissioner Leana Wen draws hope from her city’s strategy.
For the last 4 years, a generic blood pressure drug containing a potentially carcinogenic substance—an inadvertent chemical byproduct—has been circulating the market.
A new spate of research has scientists hopeful that safer, non-addictive pain relievers are on the horizon, in the form of “novel opioids” or opioid alternatives, writes Robert F. Service. Driven by super-potent synthetic opioids, overdoses killed a record 72,000 people in…
Back-to-school shopping for EpiPens is a slog this year. A global shortage of the life-saving devices has parents, drug makers and regulators scrambling for solutions as demand spikes before school starts. The FDA declared the shortage in May; last week the agency extended…
In the urgent search for multipronged, coordinated solutions to the opioid epidemic ravaging the U.S., blockchain might be just the powerful weapon we need.
