Author: Peter

(Mario DeSanctis) director of the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center has been fired, becoming the second top official ousted amid reports of over-medication practices at the facility…. reports of excessive opioid prescriptions being written there… patients at Tomah facility were more likely than patients at other VA hospitals to receive high doses of pain killers.

Hospitals across the country are under growing pressure to reduce preventable medical mistakes, the errors that can cause real harm and even death to patients…Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs a massive system of hospitals and clinics that cared for 5.8 million veterans last year, is doing less, not more, to identify what went wrong to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

U.S. appeals court has cleared the way for Novartis AG to launch the first biosimilar drug in the United States as it declined on Wednesday to stop the sale of the company's copycat version of Amgen Inc's blockbuster cancer drug Neupogen (filgrastim)…. Novartis (Sandoz) could begin to market its biosimilar drug, to be sold under the name Zarxio…. a version of Neupogen, have been available in Europe since 2006...

Kardashian's #CorrectiveAd came during MTV's Video Music Awards...Kim Kardashian West took to social media…to belatedly acknowledge the side effects of a controversial morning-sickness drug she endorses (Diclegis)… Aug. 7 warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to drugmaker Duchesnay saying that Kardashian's original paid endorsement omitted important safety information.

To date, nearly 143.8 million people have had their protected health information compromised in a HIPAA breach. Here's a list of the 10 biggest in the U.S.

DEA officials today announced a nationwide series of enforcement actions targeting every level of the global underground trade of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs,…manufactured and trafficked from underground labs in China…Operation Cyber Juice …resulted in the arrest of over 90 individuals, the seizure of 16 underground steroid labs, approximately 134,000 steroid dosage units, 636 kilograms of raw steroid powder, 8,200 liters of raw steroid injectable liquid, and over $2 million in U.S. currency and assets.

Data-driven fight begins with goal to cut overuse of antibiotics…Fifty hospital and health system members of Premier…are testing, defining and scaling new strategies in a nationwide effort to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria…goal is to reduce antibiotic overuse by 20 percent and implement the Centers for Disease Control's core elements of its antibiotic stewardship program by July 2016.

CVS Health Corp said..its decision to stop selling tobacco products last year led to a 1 percent decrease in cigarette sales...The September 2014 decision hurt sales, with general merchandise revenue at CVS pharmacies open at least a year falling 7.8 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier,.., CVS said it benefited in others ways…nicotine patch purchases rose 4 percent…visits to its retail clinics for smoking cessation counseling nearly doubled.

August was a horrible month for biotech stocks. The breadth of the selling during the month was impressive. Among all U.S.-listed biotech stocks regardless of market cap, only 68 companies managed to end August with higher stock prices, while 267 biotech stocks lost ground,… If you want to be an optimist, note the IBB ETF is still outperforming the broader market for the year.

US FDA has found no systemic issues affecting the safety or efficacy of generics clinically tested at GVK BioSciences, but says it supports Europe’s ban of around 700 products…Last week, a European ban took effect on…medicines that were approved based …on what regulators called flawed clinical studies… US Food and Drug Administration isn’t taking any action on products sold here that included data from GVK’s studies in their applications,…