Odds and ends
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Odds and ends
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Written by Andrew Schmid
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 14:55 |
California’s 17KGET.com news site covered an interesting story this week about how a Bakersfield family blames their mother’s death on addiction to painkillers that she repeatedly re-ordered online without a prescription.
On Friday, police told Jerry Clearwater that his wife had died after losing control of her car and hitting a tree.
“I still can't believe that she's gone,'' he told reporters. ''I’ll never see my wife again.”
Although the corner's office said it could take eight to 10 weeks to determine if 44-year-old Laura Clearwater had drugs in her system at the time of the accident, Jerry Clearwater “blames the crash and his wife's death on her addiction to the prescription drugs she bought online.”
Clearwater said a doctor originally prescribed a muscle relaxer for a back injury his wife had suffered while skiing.
Six months later, with an expired prescription and apparently addicted, his wife “started ordering the muscle relaxer Soma from an online pharmacy called myrxbill.com,” Clearwater said.
She never saw a doctor and every week more pills arrived at the family’s doorstep
The president of LegitScript.com, a website recognized by the National Association, told 17KGET.com that he knows myrxbill.com and other sites tied to it are not legitimate online pharmacies.
''Ninety-nine percent of Internet pharmacies are not legitimate,'' John Horton said. “And a lot of Web sites, just like the one that it appears sold drugs to this woman, are nothing more than Internet drug pushers.”
Click here to see the LegitScript.com blog post on this story.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 April 2009 13:36 |
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Odds and ends
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Written by Marine Olivesi
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Wednesday, 11 March 2009 12:25 |
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The Associated Press reported yesterday that pharmaceutical giant Merck is buying Schering-Plough Corp. The merger will form the world’s second-largest prescription-drug maker, worth $47 billion in combined revenue in 2008. This comes six weeks after the largest drugmaker, Pfizer Inc., announced itself that it’s in the midst of acquiring Wyeth.
On NPR Morning edition today, Sean Nicholson from Cornell University said the move is an attempt to help big pharma regain firepower as they face multiple challenges, such as the imminent end of patent protection for the blockbuster drugs of the 1990s, a dearth of major new drugs coming out and the decrease of prescriptions in the US for the second consecutive quarter, a first "in recent memory,” Nicholson said.
That expensive drug sales drop in times of economic crisis make sense. What is unclear, however, is how much the online pharma business contributes to this trend. Arguably, buying drugs is not like buying a dress or an ipod. It is an not an expendable expense for cash-strapped customers... to a point. So, do people really by less drugs, or do they use more underground ways to get them?
If the latter is true, big mergers won't necessarily make big pharma better off. |
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Odds and ends
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Written by Catalina Lobo-Guerrero
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Thursday, 05 March 2009 23:18 |
Wide disparities in enforcement and regulations have encouraged the worldwide proliferation of rogue online pharmacies.
In the late 1990s, the International Narcotics Control Board, the independent and quasi-judicial body that oversees the implementation of international drug control treaties, expressed concern about the spread of illegal online pharmacies across the globe.
But it wasn´t until 2004 that the Board decided to investigate how countries around the world were cracking down on online pharma. They designed a survey in 2005 and requested governments to describe the operations of rogue online pharmacies in their countries and to list the rules and regulations they had in place to rein them in.
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Last Updated on Friday, 20 March 2009 13:20 |
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Read more... [Finally, UN tells members to work together to crack down on illegal online pharma]
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Odds and ends
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Written by Vytenis Didziulis
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Tuesday, 03 March 2009 09:29 |
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One of the unintended victims of rogue online pharmacies are senior citizens who depend on low-cost drugs from overseas.
Advocates for the elderly, many of whom are living off their obliterated retirement savings, are up in arms over a new proposal being pushed through Congress that would limit the number of countries from where Americans can buy prescription drugs to one: Canada.
The Dorgan-Snowe bill allows direct purchases from Canadian pharmacies but limits wholesale and retail purchases of prescribed medicines from other Tier One countries, including Australia and New Zealand, even if their pharmaceutical industries meet U.S. standards.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 05 March 2009 08:38 |
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Read more... [Seniors up in arms over limits on pharma imports]
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Odds and ends
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Written by Ana Azpurua
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Saturday, 28 February 2009 14:46 |
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You ordered medicine online, it was delivered to your home, but there seems to be something wrong. You suspect it's fake -- the markings on the pill look strange, the packaging is shoddy. And rather than put your health and life at risk, you decide not to take the medicine.
What do you do now?
Well, you can report the scam and hope that others will not be similarly victimized. But who do you contact?
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Last Updated on Monday, 02 March 2009 16:43 |
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Read more... [You bought a fake pill, now what?]
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