Drug prices in Australia are three times higher than in New Zealand. A key reason is the lack of transparency about taxpayer subsidies for Big Pharma and the companies’ own finances.
In an era when opinion often trumps evidence in public health issues, it’s time to support and invest in evidence-based medicine to protect the public from dangerous, poorly informed beliefs.
The state of Ohio filed a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers. Will their legal arguments hold up in court – and what will it mean for other cities and states going after big pharma?
Drug companies funded more than 116,000 educational events for doctors over four years. Now you can find out exactly which companies footed the bills and how much they paid.
More of us are labelled as sick with the constantly changing diagnostic cut-offs for diseases. Now an international expert panel has drafted a list of things to consider before setting new thresholds.
Intuitively, it might seem desirable to speed up access to medicines. But this means more drugs will be approved that may subsequently prove unsafe or ineffective.
Children’s cancer is a rare disease, which means the market is small and pharmaceutical companies have few incentives to develop drugs for these cancers.
The maker of the EpiPen has raised the price of two injectable treatments to about US$600, six times the price nine years ago. Why do drug companies do this? Because they can. The FDA ends up helping.
An important new study in the United States has found doctors who receive just one cheap meal from a drug company tend to prescribe a lot more of that company’s products.
The lack of transparency and accountability found in the hedge fund world is increasingly finding a home in the pharmaceutical sector, where more people care.
This project offers the tantalising possibility that plants containing drugs, such as agents to treat HIV, could be farmed on a small scale at low cost by communities that need them most.
Clinton, who named drug companies among her enemies in this week’s debate, is pushing populist-inspired policies that could hamper the flow of new medicines.
Before the last round of negotiations, only a handful of issues remained in the way of concluding the TPP. A potential deal-breaker for Australia was intellectual property protections for biologics.
Professor of Bioethics & Medicine, Sydney Health Ethics, Haematologist/BMT Physician, Royal North Shore Hospital and Director, Praxis Australia, University of Sydney