For more than a decade, members of a little-known group called the Pain Care Forum have blanketed Washington with messages touting prescription painkillers’ vital role in the lives of millions of Americans, creating an echo chamber that has quietly derailed efforts to curb U.S. consumption of the drugs, which accounts for two-thirds of the world’s usage.
The makers of prescription painkillers have adopted a 50-state strategy that includes hundreds of lobbyists and millions in campaign contributions to help kill or weaken measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids, the drugs at the heart of a crisis that has cost 165,000 Americans their lives and pushed countless more to crippling addiction.
When Washington state made one of the first major moves to place limits on opioid painkiller prescriptions, pharmaceutical companies fought back — using the Pain Care Forum, a national network of drug companies and opioid-friendly nonprofits, many of them funded by drugmakers.
As hundreds of Johnson Junior High School students remained home Thursday, inspection crews combed “every classroom, every hallway, every closet” to determine the extent of mercury contamination at the west valley campus.
Josiah Cooper-Pope, born 15 weeks premature, did fine in the neonatal intensive care unit for the first 10 days of his life.
The Food and Drug Administration wants all U.S. blood centers to start screening for Zika, a major expansion intended to protect the nation’s blood supply from the mosquito-borne virus.
The White House on Wednesday sidestepped commenting directly on the large price increase for EpiPens, while Clinton called the price jump ‘outrageous.’
Lawmakers are demanding more information on why the price for lifesaving EpiPens has skyrocketed. A two-dose package cost less than $60 nine years ago. The cost is now closer to $400.
A University of Nevada, Reno, expert who played a key role in investigating a 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti that was later blamed on U.N. peacekeeping troops says the international organization needs to do more to ensure that it doesn’t contribute to the spread of infectious diseases.
The U.S. government has shifted $34 million in funding to the National Institutes of Health and $47 million to the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to work on Zika vaccines.
