by Alison Bass | Jul 25, 2012 | Uncategorized
For those of you haven’t heard, I’ve accepted a tenure-track teaching position in the School of Journalism at West Virginia University and am moving to Morgantown — see WVU’s announcement here. With all the packing and unpacking the move...
by Alison Bass | Jul 3, 2012 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, drug marketing, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct, suicide rates, whistleblowing
I was glad to see that the New York Times’ reporters covering GlaxoSmithKline’s $3 billion settlement tipped their hat to former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. After all, it was his crew and specifically a pioneering attorney by the name of Rose...
by Alison Bass | Jun 29, 2012 | prostitution, public health, sex trafficking
A coalition of folks opposed to sex trafficking paraded last week in front of the Village Voice headquarters in Cooper Square, urging the shutdown of its classified website Backpage on the grounds that its online ads foster the trafficking of under-age prostitutes....
by Alison Bass | Jun 15, 2012 | Uncategorized
Just as Canada has provided us with a model for affordable health care, our neighbors to the north may also be leading the way on another key issue: reducing the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitting diseases. A few months ago, a federal appeals court in...
by Alison Bass | Jun 7, 2012 | biotech industry, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
Senator Charles Grassley is upping the ante on the controversy surrounding the Vertex pharmaceutical executives who cashed in on overstated clinical trial data — see my blog from last week. According to The Boston Globe, which broke the Vertex story, Grassley...
by Alison Bass | May 30, 2012 | biotech industry, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
Senior executives at Vertex Pharmaceuticals made millions of dollars each by selling company stock in the days after the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical reported promising clinical trial data on an experimental drug for cystic fibrosis. And then weeks after they cashed...
by Alison Bass | May 16, 2012 | clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, FDA, medical devices, pharmaceutical industry, public health
Congress is moving quickly to pass a bill that would authorize higher industry fees for the FDA in exchange for speeding up the approval of some drugs and medical devices and eliminating restrictions on financial conflicts of interest among the agency’s advisory...
by Alison Bass | May 8, 2012 | antidepressants, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, media coverage, National Institutes of Health, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
Two weeks ago, I headlined my blog with this question: Is the FDA violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? Four days later, the national Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a 233-page report concluding that FDA’s current approach to drug oversight “is...
by Alison Bass | Apr 27, 2012 | antidepressants, biotech industry, clinical trials, continuing medical education, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, medical devices, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct, suicide rates, Uncategorized
Is the Food and Drug Administration violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? That was the question that Donald Light, co-author of The Risk for Prescription Drugs and a long-time medical sociologist, posed at a talk yesterday at Brandeis University. The...
by Alison Bass | Apr 12, 2012 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct
I’ve been reading Dr. David Healy’s new book, Pharmageddon, and while some of it may seem like old news, I was struck by his fresh analysis of how the pharmaceutical industry has turned the original purpose of clinical trials inside out. As Healy, a noted...
