David Ward, civil justice coordinator for Keystone Progress, recently wrote an opinion piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he defends the civil court system.
Ward’s piece is a response to a report by the American Tort Reform Association, “Judicial Hellholes,” which criticizes an alleged bias in favor of plaintiffs in Philadelphia’s courts.
According to Ward, the Keystone Progress ‘Taking Back Our Courts’ project found that the Philadelphia civil courts are “a ...
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The FDA ordered Bayer, maker of the Yasmin line of birth control pills, to create TV commercials specifically for the purpose of correcting misinformation included in previous ads.
According to Rick’s Blog, Bayer executives used the occasion to produce a spoof ad intended to be shown only in-house, ridiculing birth control pill users as irresponsible and promiscuous.
The blog provides some background on the situation, noting that more than 6,800 lawsuits have ...
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Lopez McHugh has learned that transvaginal mesh devices, which are causing women extreme pain due to mesh erosion, extrusion, and failure, was approved by the FDA because they were similar another device on the market that has been recalled due to problems.
Yet this approval process is not limited to transvaginal mesh devices. A number of consumer advocacy groups have criticized the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 510(k) approval process, ...
continue reading...An item on the blog Pharmalot examines an e-mail suggesting that drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb plans to get physicians to lobby state Medicaid programs on the company’s behalf.
According to Pharmalot, the e-mail was sent to the district business manager team with the goal of getting Medicaid programs in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland to place the Onglyza diabetes drug on the state formularies.
Although the blog doesn’t say that the company was doing anything illegal, it does point out that the region business ...
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In a piece in Canadian magazine Common Ground, University of Victoria drug policy researcher Alan Cassels questions whether pregnant women in Canada are getting adequate warnings about drugs they’re taking during pregnancy.
Cassels particularly takes issue with a Toronto-based program called Motherisk, touted as a source of “accurate and reliable information” for mothers-to-be about the potential risks of prescription drugs.
But Cassels writes that the program is sponsored by a drug company, ...
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During Johnson & Johnson’s annual meeting, outgoing CEO Bill Weldon and successor Alex Gorsky both tried to reassure shareholders that the company is getting its act together, the Washington Post reports.
According to the Washington Post, shareholders were “upset over the health giant’s battered image amid unprecedented product recalls and ethical lapses.”
Weldon told them that the company started growing again last year after two years of sales declines, with revenue climbing ...
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