FDA cracks down on drugmakers, drugmakers crank up the prices

In an age of skyrocketing medical costs, it is in the Federal government's best interest to ensure our medicines are as safe and precisely targeted as possible. Enter the FDA, charged with regulating and monitoring drug safety. Unfortunately, their recent efforts to lock down drugs has resulted in 50x increases in drug prices for patients who can ill afford the cost, by creating pseudo-monopolies. Thus, increasing medical costs for everyone, including the Federal government.

Beware the well-intentioned bureaucrat!

Until January, colchicine was sold by many companies and cost as little as 10 cents a pill. Now it's available only under the trade name Colcrys, sold by a Philadelphia company called URL Pharma—for five dollars per pill.* The colchicine story, and a few others like it, have provoked ire among some patients and doctors about an otherwise praiseworthy effort by the FDA to get rid of old, untested, potentially harmful drugs.

Take the case of 17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone caproate (17OHP), a synthetic hormone designed to prevent preterm births in pregnant women...The drug's retail price jumped from $15 to $1,440 per treatment, a shock to obstetricians and their patients, as well as to those who write checks at insurance companies and Medicaid. The tens of thousands of women who receive the treatment each year typically require 20 injections during the course of their pregnancies.

To be fair, though, it appears that the FDA is not entirely deaf to these complaints, and is taking some action.

A Milestone in the Nuclear Age - A Cure for Radiation Sickness

If you have done any reading on the Manhattan Project, then you have read countless stories about the horror experience by the scientists there as they began to understand the phenomenon of radiation sickness. The atom bomb was originally engineered to simply be a VERY LARGE conventional explosive, but the radioactive fallout from the bombs caused unexpected side-effects. Days or weeks after the bomb, survivors began seeing hair falling out, teeth and fingernails rotting away, sores and burns appearing spontaneously, etc. Some believe more died from radiation poisoning after Hiroshima than were killed directly by the explosion. Scenes from these events have become emblematic of the nuclear age, and movies such as THE DAY AFTER have burned images like this into the collective consciousness.

But now, faced with a future nuclear Iran, scientists in Israel have developed a cure for radiation sickness!!! Using a protein found in human gut bacteria, they found a medication that could be ingested anywhere from 24 hours before exposure to 72 hours after. Animals treated with the medication showed an almost 100% survival rate, and in many cases showed no evidence of radiation sickness at all.

This is a game changer. Here is hoping that in the Age of Terrorism government will be loading up stockpiles ASAP.