Mercury in Vaccines: Anti-vax group defends comparing immunisation withThimerosam additive to rape

In a press release issued recently, one that almost no mainstreain Australia m media sources have bothered to report, it was announced that Dr. Brian Hooker had finally received documents from the CDC through a Freedom of Information Act that revealed the CDC had access to data linking Thimerosal in vaccines to autism, non-organic sleep disorders, and speech disorders.

Two members of Congress helped Dr. Hooker draft his letter to the CDC, after having spent nearly 10 years submitting over 100 Freedom of Information Acts to no avail.

This information is very damaging to the CDC, which has stated for years that there are no studies linking the mercury of Thimerosal in vaccines to autism.  

In another recent testimony given by the CDC in the November 2012 Congressional Hearing on Autism, they claimed there are no studies linking Thimerosal to autism. Thimerosam however is still used today in the flu shot that is administered to pregnant women and infants.

An Anti-vaccination group in Australia has defended an advert which appears to compare immunising children with being raped. The Australian Vaccination Skeptics Network posted an image of a woman with a man threateningly holding his hand over her mouth on its Facebook page earlier today.  

This information, so far, has been completely blacked out of the mainstream media.

EU-Digest

USA: What happened to the Hippocratic Oath? Can Pharmaceutical And Medical Industry Still Be Trusted ?

Hippocratic Oath has been shoved under the mat?

I-Lawsuit noted recently “Medical professionals like doctors and pharmacists prescribe to the Hippocratic Oath before starting their practice.

The oath is believed to have been written by ancient Greek Philsopher Hippocrates and dates back to 5th Century BC.  When translated notable parts include to, “keep patients from harm and injustice”, and to practice medicine in both “purity and holiness”.

But are they keeping that Oath?

Undoubtedly there are more doctors who care about the quality of patient care over personal profit, but what about the professionals who are willing to take bribes to endorse a product?

In-between doctors and pharmaceutical companies are the little-known championers of the pharmaceutical industry- the drug reps.

According to Glassdoor the average Pharma sales rep made more than $80,000 last year while the average biotech rep pulled in $152,000 dollars a year- 6 times more than the average American citizen.

Pharma representatives rarely have any formal education in science with the majority holding a BA in the liberal arts or business.

A former rep for Eli Lily revealed that he was the only member of his team with a background in science, and that the majority of his coworkers were “former cheerleaders and ex-models”.

Base salaries begin at $60,000 for new reps and $150,000 for a seasoned biotech representative- but perks don’t stop there. Johnson & Johnson’s reps celebrated on internet forumswhen they were given a chance to partake in a new fleet of Audi A3’s, with a MSRP of over $27,000.

With commission ranging from 10-15%, a company car, free gas and bank account the job is undeniably sexy,  but pharma reps aren’t the only ones who are benefitting from Big Pharma’s generosity.

Doctors who endorse their products routinely receive gifts as well. Medical giant Medtronic shocked the media when it was discovered they had bribed a team of 13 doctors  $210 million over the course of 15 years to post favorable studies of the off-label use of their INFUSE bone graft.

Many patients who received the bone grafts became paralyzed or died from complications stemming from the uncontrollable bone growth.

Consequently large drug companies have grown "wealthy beyond imagination" through blockbuster drugs that depended on government-funded research—and by committing fraud.

Elisabeth Warren, a Democratic Senator recently noted that over the past 10 years, some of the US's wealthiest drug companies—those that capitalize on government research to generate billions of dollars in revenues through the sale of blockbuster drugs—have found another way to boost profits".

Warren said, in a prepared text of her speech at an event sponsored by the health care advocacy group Families USA. "They've been caught defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, withholding critical safety information about their drugs, marketing their drugs for uses that aren't approved, and giving doctors kickbacks for writing prescriptions for their drugs."

Democrats have largely laid off the pharmaceutical industry since the legislative debate over the Affordable Care Act, when drugmakers agreed to support the bill as long as it didn't include certain policies. And Warren—whose home state is home to several large drug companies—praised the industry's scientific advances.

But, said Warren, drug companies paid roughly $13 billion in settlements with the federal government
between 2007 and 2012. "That doesn't happen without serious wrongdoing."

After 1978 Bayer (a German Company) and other pharmaceutical companies produced Factor VIII and IX.
The product was designed for hemophiliacs, people who suffer from a genetic disorder whose blood can not clot to stave bleeding. As a result, even a minor cut could cause them to bleed out and lose dangerous levels of blood. Factor VII is harvested from the blood plasma of non-hemophiliacs, but to purportedly to cut costs Bayer harvested blood from pools of “high risk” individuals.

This included:  prison populations, intravenous drug users and blood from clinics with a large amount of homosexual donors. Federal law also forbids the use of blood from an individual with a history  of viral hepatitis- but Bayer and other companies failed to enact strict prerequisites for blood farming. As a result, thousands of hemophiliacs died from the HIV- tainted blood plasma.

Senator Warren said, "it seems that the biggest drug companies are increasingly playing by a different set of rules than everyone else," Warren said. "The government has kicked thousands of small and medium-sized physician practices out of the Medicare program for fraud, but not one of these major drug companies has ever been kicked out. The government convicts hundreds of people of health care fraud every year, but not one of these major drug company cases has even gone to trial."

Warren in a bill proposed to the Senate wants pharmaceutical companies to fund more of the basic research conducted by the National Institutes of Health. Many blockbuster drugs do stem, at least in part, from NIH research.

Under Warren's proposal, "the biggest and most successful drug companies" would have to contribute to the NIH's budget whenever they settle criminal accusations with the federal government. In addition to the fines that companies already pay, they would have to contribute 1 percent of their annual profits to the NIH for five years.

"It's like a swear jar: Whenever a huge drug company that is generating enormous profits as a result of federal research investments gets caught breaking the law—and wants off the hook—it has to put some money in the jar to help fund the next generation of medical research," Warren said.

If such a policy had been in place over the past five years, NIH would have seen a budget bump of about $6 billion—or 20 percent—per year, she said.

In the meantime, however, in the US, the boundaries between the drug companies, FDA, and doctors have became increasingly blurred. FDA officials sometimes move to jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, which means they may not want to burn their bridges with industry.

The same FDA officials who approve the drugs are responsible for monitoring them after they are on the market, which gives them an obvious disincentive to say that the drugs they earlier certified as safe were now unsafe.

Finally, the FDA gets input from outside advisory panels made up of doctors who are experts in their fields. Most of these doctors receive payments as consultants, research grants and support for travel to conferences from drug companies.

In some cases, the doctors are working as paid consultants to the same companies whose drugs are coming up for approval by their advisory committees.

The US is the only country in the world where you can turn on the TV and have an announcer tell you to go ‘ask your doctor’ for a drug.

Doctors often will give medications to patients even if they don’t think they need it. For example, one study showed that 54% of the time doctors will prescribe a specific brand and type of medication if patients ask for it.

Drugs on the average cost twice as much in the US than in Canada or Europe . US  Dr's also prescribe more drugs to their "patients" than any other nation in the world

The argument drug manufacturers make for the high cost of their products is that the money supports research and development of new life-saving medicine. And they also say that expensive advertising is needed not to sell drugs, but to educate doctors and patients. Indeed, a whopping 80% of their budgets is used for marketing and advertising, certainly not education.

 Some things definitely are broken and need fixing in the US Pharmaceutical and Medical Industry.

A Special EU-Digest Report

US Health Care - a warning for European medical free marketeers: "the free market in American medicine is a myth"

Those who work in the health care industry and those who argue over health care policy seem inured to the shock. When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high? 

What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million- or million-dollar tab for people living in America? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

In hundreds of small and midsize cities across the country — from Stamford, Conn., to Marlton, N.J., to Oklahoma City — the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals into the towns’ most profitable businesses and largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensated executives. And in our largest cities, the system offers lavish paychecks even to midlevel hospital managers, like the 14 administrators at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who are paid over $500,000 a year, including six who make over $1 million.

Taken as a whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn out dominate the nation’s economy and put demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere else on earth. In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.

According to one of a series of exhaustive studies done by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, we spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia. We may be shocked at the $60 billion price tag for cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy. We spent almost that much last week on health care. We spend more every year on artificial knees and hips than what Hollywood collects at the box office. We spend two or three times that much on durable medical devices like canes and wheelchairs, in part because a heavily lobbied Congress forces Medicare to pay 25% to 75% more for this equipment than it would cost at Walmart.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 10 of the 20 occupations that will grow the fastest in the U.S. by 2020 are related to health care. America’s largest city may be commonly thought of as the world’s financial-services capital, but of New York’s 18 largest private employers, eight are hospitals and four are banks.

Employing all those people in the cause of curing the sick is, of course, not anything to be ashamed of. But the drag on our overall economy that comes with taxpayers, employers and consumers spending so much more than is spent in any other country for the same product is unsustainable. Health care is eating away at our economy and our treasury.

The health care industry seems to have the will and the means to keep it that way. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.

When you crunch data compiled by McKinsey and other researchers, the big picture looks like this: We’re likely to spend $2.8 trillion this year on health care. That $2.8 trillion is likely to be $750 billion, or 27%, more than we would spend if we spent the same per capita as other developed countries, even after adjusting for the relatively high per capita income in the U.S. vs. those other countries. Of the total $2.8 trillion that will be spent on health care, about $800 billion will be paid by the federal government through the Medicare insurance program for the disabled and those 65 and older and the Medicaid program, which provides care for the poor.

That $800 billion, which keeps rising far faster than inflation and the gross domestic product, is what’s driving the federal deficit. The other $2 trillion will be paid mostly by private health-insurance companies and individuals who have no insurance or who will pay some portion of the bills covered by their insurance. This is what’s increasingly burdening businesses that pay for their employees’ health insurance and forcing individuals to pay so much in out-of-pocket expenses.

Note EU-Digest: this in depth report by Time Magazine should be read by every politician in Europe calling for a free market based health-care system. As the American model of healthcare has proven it does not provide affordable healthcare.

Read more: Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.co

Croatia: Dozens arrested in Croatia anti-corruption sweep

Croatian police have detained managers of a local pharmaceutical company, its 27 employees and dozens of doctors suspected of corruption.

Health Minister Rajko Ostojic said Monday that as many as 350 doctors were under investigation as part of a major anti-corruption sweep in the health system.

Croatia is under pressure to fight corruption ahead of becoming the 28th European Union member state in 2013.

Police said the management of Farmal company and its employees are suspected of bribing doctors to prescribe the medicines they produced.

Read more: Dozens arrested in Croatia anti-corruption sweep - News - Boston.com

Medical and Pharmaceutical Industry: Prevention provides great savings in cost of health care

Prevention and public health services benefit the consumer and the government.

Not only do these preventive services help individuals by providing immunizations and health screenings, they keep entire communities healthy by preventing disease and help us respond to disasters.

These services also help the economy by preventing illness and helping to reduce out-of-control health care spending.

Investment in prevention saves lives and money. In the US seventy-five percent of that nation’s health care spending each year is on treatment of chronic disease such as obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

For every euro 0.78 ( US $1 dollar) invested in chronic disease prevention, we stand to save euro 4.34 (US $5.60) in health spending, reports Trust for America’s Health.

EU-Digest

Cancer costs European economy 124 billion euros a year

Two studies conducted by researchers presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology's 2012 Congress estimate how much resources cancer - which is detectable by blood tests - costs the continent in terms of healthcare and lost productivity. They concluded that the overall annual cost of cancer in Europe is 124 billion euros.

"Cancer poses a considerable economic burden not only to healthcare systems but to other areas of the economy, including productivity losses through early mortality and time-off-work, and relatives who have to forego work/leisure to care for cancer patients," said Ramon Luengo-Fernandes of the University of Oxford.

The price tag indirectly linked to positive blood tests for cancer in Germany is higher than all other European nations, the study shows. Meanwhile, Lithuania spent less than 25 percent of what Germany did, the lowest amount out of all nations surveyed on cancer healthcare costs and canceled productivity.

Cancer drains about as much funding from the United States as it does from Europe, according to the National Cancer Institute. Based on its findings in 2010, residents in the U.S. either spent or lost an estimated total of almost $250 billion.

Note EU-Digest: Cancer treatment and care are obviously a "milk cow" for the pharmaceutical industry and some medical experts are voicing their concern if progress in the research towards finding a cure against cancer is not deliberately slowed down, or why not all important breakthroughs are made public ? 

Read more: Cancer costs European economy 124 billion euros a year