Drug companies enjoy a very privileged position among the industrial sectors.  They are granted extraordinarily high levels of privacy and protection, non-drug competitors are not allowed to bring alternatives to market, especially in the area of cancer care, their relationship with doctors is protected by the Advertising Standards Authority ...

Governments are good at wasting our money.  After all, that’s their job. But the enormous amount of money that is being spent on avian flu vaccines for key public workers has to be up there as one of the most wasteful around. The UK government last week committed a further £155m of public money on a new vaccine that ...

The Chinese have given us many things over the years.  There's wall building, the recipe for chop suey, and those neat jackets without collars. Now they're teaching us how to treat our drug regulators.  The Chinese authorities have decided to execute Zheng Xiaoyu, the head of their food and drug agency, after he accepted ...

It would be nice to think that he balances and deliberates before making his choice - but there are more dubious pressures at play.  All has been revealed by a drug company salesman who has just retired, and perhaps has a pang of conscience. He writes: "It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is.  For some ...

America's senators have missed an enormous opportunity to give their citizens genuine protection against a pharmaceutical industry that is all too rarely brought to account.  Instead they voted overwhelmingly in favour of moves that draw the industry and the drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, even closer together. The ...

For such a haven of faceless bureaucrats, NICE has suddenly become the hate figure of the UK.  NICE - or the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - is the gatekeeper of the National Health Service, and it is the ultimate arbiter of the drugs that are prescribed by doctors. Sometimes drugs are turned down on grounds of cost, ...

Most agree that the American health model is in meltdown.  Driven by insurance money, surgeons perform too many unnecessary operations while doctors dispense too many unnecessary drugs.  Not only does this aggressively interventionist approach keep medical costs high, it also means others wait longer to get on the medical ...