Personalized genomic medicine – at a Walgreens near you! From an article in the Washington Post: Beginning Friday, shoppers in search of toothpaste, deodorant and laxatives at more than 6,000 drugstores across the nation will be able to pick up something new: a test to scan their genes for a propensity for Alzheimer’s disease, breast [...]

A lead story in the news this week has been the latest in a series of propaganda pieces on tanning beds: they are bad for you. The story now goes that tanning salons are bad because they attract people with addictive behavioral patterns. Some dermatology study was produced that will become another piece of ammunition [...]

Despite the maddening nature of this paragraph from an article in the Wall Street Journal Pharmaceutical Daily, hardly no one who reads the story will notice it: A measure to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and some other countries fell short in the Senate Tuesday night, but lawmakers were working on [...]

From today’s Wall Street Journal: The Food and Drug Administration is taking aim at caffeinated alcoholic drinks, saying it will pull them off the market unless manufacturers can prove the beverages are safe to drink. On Friday, the FDA sent letters to nearly 30 companies, giving them 30 days to provide evidence that their drinks [...]

In a previous blog, I mentioned a couple of points about Merck’s Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix, with both companies competing for guinea pigs to increase their customer base for HPV vaccines. First, GlaxoSmithKline had applied to the FDA for approval to sell its HPV vaccine, Cervarix, in the United States. Second, Merck had applied to [...]