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Public hospitals in Uganda have been hit by shortages of essential medicines and supplies needed for emergency care…The shortages are affecting the East African country’s main Mulago Hospital, which handles serious cases referred to it from other facilities, Uganda Medical Association said...UMA President Ekwaro Obuku...said government hospitals were experiencing serious shortages of basic medicines for emergency care such as vaccines and other drugs, syringes, gloves, catheters, gauze and others...Vivian Nakaliika Serwanjja, health ministry spokeswoman, said shortages had been caused by financial disruption at the government agency responsible for procurement of medical supplies...the scarcities are not widespread,” she said, adding only a few hospitals were affected and supplies had started being delivered...

Sanofi and Novartis said...they planned to increase stockpiles of medicines in Britain in preparation for potential disruption if the UK crashes out of the European Union without a deal...the European Medicines Agency...warned of bigger than expected staff losses and cuts in some activities as a result of having to move from London to Amsterdam due to Brexit...Supplies of thousands of medicines are at risk of disruption if Britain leaves the EU without a deal, forcing manufacturers to prepare duplicate product testing and licensing arrangements to ensure their drugs stay on the market...The European Medicines Agency...expressed “serious concerns” over the availability of some 108 medicines that are manufactured exclusively in the UK.

China’s cabinet investigation group has found that vaccine maker Changsheng Bio-technology broke the law in manufacturing rabies vaccines...The investigation group said the company had systematically falsified production and testing records to avoid regulatory scrutiny...“The company used expired materials to produce some rabies vaccine and falsified the production date,”...“To cover up violations, the company systematically fabricated production and testing records.”...China has launched sweeping spot checks on vaccine makers around the country after Changsheng was found to have falsified data and sold ineffective vaccines for children...President Xi Jinping has ordered all relevant departments to investigate the scandal, which has triggered public outrage in what is the latest case of tainted medical products...

The Nevada Supreme Court has agreed to quickly take up the question of whether a drug company can block the use of its product in an inmate's execution...Prison officials won expedited review Friday, just minutes after filing documents saying the state faces the expiration of one of three drugs it wants to use...State Attorney General Adam Laxalt's office says it needs a high court ruling by Oct. 19...That would put twice-convicted killer Scott Raymond Dozier's twice-postponed lethal injection on track for mid-November...Dozier says he wants to die, but judges have for different reasons blocked the never-tried combination of drugs the state drew up after struggling to find lethal injection supplies...Pharmaceutical firm Alvogen says Nevada improperly obtained its sedative midazolam to use in Dozier's execution.

Multidrug-resistant “superbugs” that can cause dangerous infections in hospitals are becoming increasingly resistant to alcohol-based hand sanitizers and disinfectants designed to hold them at bay...In a study of what the researchers described as a “new wave of superbugs”, the team also found specific genetic changes over 20 years in vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, or VRE - and were able to track and show its growing resistance...efforts to tackle the rise of hospital superbugs such as VRE and MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, institutions worldwide have adopted stringent hygiene steps - often involving hand rubs and washes that contain alcohol...health authorities should try higher-alcohol concentrate products and renew efforts to ensure hospitals are deep cleaned and patients found to be carrying VRE infections are isolated...

Nevada Medicaid will decide next month whether to impose additional requirements for patients to undergo therapy on an ongoing basis, a move the state says will increase accountability and ensure people are getting the care they actually need...mental health providers across the state are decrying as yet another barrier to access to mental health care for a vulnerable population...The Division of Health Care Financing and Policy...to decide whether to require psychologists, therapists and other mental health professionals to provide written documentation demonstrating medical necessity and receive prior approval to continue providing talk therapy or neurotherapy…State officials describe the policy as an effort to be both fiscally and socially responsible, ensuring that providers are only getting paid for services that are actually necessary and that patients are receiving the right treatment for their condition...opponents...argue that it will damage an already-thin safety net for patients by imposing additional administrative burdens on providers…

Drug companies are making record profits and at the same time raising the prices of life-saving prescription drugs...Additionally, drug companies have no legal obligation to justify or explain the massive spikes in drug prices...the FAIR Drug Pricing Act, a bill that takes the first step in addressing skyrocketing prescription drug prices by requiring basic transparency for pharmaceutical companies that drastically spike the price of a drug...whose initials stand for “Fair Accountability and Innovative Research," would require drug companies to give notice and justification for raising the price of a drug more than 10 percent at one time or more than 25 percent over three years...For each price increase drug companies would have to tell the public what they spent on manufacturing, research and development costs for the qualifying drug, net profits attributable to the qualifying drug, and marketing and advertising spending on the qualifying drug...

Food and Drug Administration’s...warning letter for BioDiagnostic International featured an odd note about halfway down the CGMP violations: “You use kitchen cooking pots and household power tools to manufacture your drug product used for biopsy procedures.”...The surprising detail – part of one of four CGMP violations cited – comes as an FDA investigator further found an employee food prep station within its Brea, CA-based drug manufacturing area “with no separation between open manufacturing equipment, cooking utensils, and personal-use items.”...Parts of the facility to manufacture product...were also “open to the outdoors,” which FDA said increases “the likelihood of your drug products becoming contaminated.”...

Pfizer protested the use of its drugs in lethal injection procedures last year, asking states to return the drugs for a refund. But not all of them have, and with an execution planned for Aug. 14 in Nebraska, a state senator is urging Pfizer to sue to halt use of its drugs..."Time is of the essence," Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers said in a letter...to Robert Jones, J.D., Pfizer vice president of U.S. government relations...A Pfizer representative said the company's "records do not show any sales of any restricted products to the Nebraska Department of Corrections. We are again asking the Nebraska DOC to return any Pfizer restricted product.”...Pfizer's position is that its drugs are to "enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve." The company "strongly objects" to the use of its drugs as lethal injections...As Chambers noted in his correspondence, Alvogen recently blocked the use of its drugs in a Nevada execution through the courts.

A Chinese vaccine scandal has laid bare a new challenge Beijing faces in its long-running battle for information control: blogs and online articles by independent writers capable of unleashing a storm of public fury...The outrage over safety lapses by Changsheng Bio-technology Co Ltd in some of its vaccines for children came six days after the issue was flagged in regulatory filings, triggered instead by a July 21 article posted on the popular WeChat messaging platform...Titled “Vaccine King” and posted to a WeChat account managed by former journalists, it critiqued business practices by Changsheng’s chairwoman and was read tens of thousands of times before being deleted the next day...The enormous impact of the so-called “zi meiti”, or “self-media” article marks a threat to efforts by China’s ruling Communist Party to tighten its grip over content online...The article touched a nerve in a country already scarred by a long history of drug and food scandals. A day later Chinese social media was ablaze...For China, keeping a tight grip on the flow of information is seen as key to maintaining social stability in the world’s most populous nation...