According to the New York Times, Johnson & Johnson has pledged to remove a number of potentially harmful chemicals, including formaldehyde, from its line of consumer products by the end of 2015.
Although the company had already pledged to remove certain chemicals from its baby products by 2013, the new announcement extends the program to its adult products. Johnson & Johnson is the first major consumer products company to make such ...
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A drug developed as a cancer treatment proved to be an effective form of birth control for male mice, according to a Bloomberg report.
Scientists don’t intend to test that particular compound, called JQ1, in humans. But they hope their findings may eventually point the way toward male birth control.
The report quotes James Bradner, the senior author on the study and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, as saying: “These ...
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Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay about $600,000 to resolve three cases in the first settlements of lawsuits related to the company’s all-metal hip implants, Bloomberg reports.
The report, which cites unnamed sources, says officials with Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy unit recently agreed to settle Nevada residents’ suits over the devices, which were recalled in 2010.
The hip implants in question ...
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According to a report by ProPublica, medical devices have no unique code that would allow the government to track problems.
Although many manufacturers imprint a serial number on their devices, there’s no standardized system that would enable the government to easily monitor them. And critics say this gap in FDA oversight has contributed to numerous high-profile cases of medical devices malfunctioning in recent years – injuring and even killing patients.
For example, ...
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The U.S. Food and Drug administration has ordered St. Jude Medical to do additional studies on patients implanted with medical device components that are blamed in as many as 20 deaths.
According to the New York Times, the FDA has also recommended that patients who received the Riata defibrillator lead — a wire that connects a defibrillator to a patient’s heart — get X-rays or other imaging to check for problems.
The ...
continue reading...A joint report by MedPage Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel takes a look at a bone growth agent called Infuse, made by Medtronic, which has caused a number of health problems in patients who received it.
According to the report: “The story of how the product … went from revolutionary advance to public health alert is a cautionary tale that is equal parts the art of medicine and the art of the deal.”
The report describes the Infuse product as ...
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