and it is what labor and justice should be fighting on the Democratic side.
RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU KNOW THIS IS BAD PUBLIC POLICY? IT LITERALLY KILLS PEOPLE. I want to revisit health care policy and look at what deregulation and dismantling the public sector oversight and accountability of health care is looking like. Clinton was the culprit in starting the move of public universities as corporate research facilities. Patenting products using taxpayer money takes the public university from public interest and holding power accountable to creating data that supports that university-patented product. THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL/NEO-CON FOR YOU-----ANYTHING FOR PROFIT!
The Clintons have a major shareholder stake and spent their time in office pushing Monsanto all over the world.......industrialized patented food. Below you see one of the products that resulted-----for Monsanto it was EQUAL sugar substitute. There is no problem creating new food products----the problem is that none of these biotech food products goes through the clinical trial research that finds how these new products not only effect people, but in the case of food----the food chain.
The point I take from the article below is that we are finding over and over that much of the obesity and diabetes in society today is created by these products released with little to no research. This is important because the same neo-liberals who worked to dismantle regulations and oversight of health research are the ones passing Affordable Care Act which seeks to move the working and middle-class out of full health coverage and into preventative health only. They scorn those low-income people who are obese and suffering from diabetes as careless! Actually all Americans are victims of these biotech advancements and our health will show it!
ALL OF MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS CREATING THESE POLICIES.
Just as Clinton ended Welfare as he pushed NAFTA and global markets knowing millions of Americans would be impoverished and unemployed-----creating the deepest poverty in US history---we are having a health crisis in America at the same time Obama and today's neo-liberals are working to end access to the health care for those Americans subjected to food that should have never passed FDA approval. Note that this professor was a Perdue University academic.......the ability to get money and do research that proves corporate accountability in harm is drying up and Trans Pacific Trade Pact allows corporations to sue for these kinds of studies as hurting profits. So, the intent is to harass and eliminate any attempts to hold corporations accountable at universities across the US.
These are Republican policies of small government with free markets so don't vote Republican to rebuild public protections!
The Center for Public Integrity
Meet Susan Swithers, a Purdue University professor who conducts studies about the health effects of artificial sweeteners.
As The Center for Public Integrity reporter Chris Young writes today, trade groups representing diet- and low-calorie food companies will go to great lengths — and often use questionable public relations tactics — to protect its interests by blasting the work of academics such as Swithers.
Read our investigation here:
Critic of artificial sweeteners pilloried by industry-backed scientists
Critic of artificial sweeteners pilloried by industry-backed scienConflicts abound among industry's defenders, even on national TV
Susan Swithers is no stranger to food industry criticism.
In fact, the Purdue University professor anticipates a swift public relations blitz from trade groups representing diet- and low-calorie food companies every time she publishes a study about the health effects of artificial sweeteners.
“They reflexively put out a press release that spins it as, ‘Here’s what’s wrong with the study,’” says Swithers, a professor of behavioral neuroscience who has been researching artificial sweeteners for the past decade. “I’m sure I’m on somebody’s Google Alert at this point.”
Still, even Swithers was surprised by the way in which the diet food industry attacked a paper she published last summer that raised health concerns about popular sugar substitutes used in snack foods and diet drinks. In her widely publicized work, published as an opinion article in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, Swithers reviewed recent studies on artificial sweeteners and concluded that people who frequently consume sugar substitutes “may … be at increased risk of excessive weight gain, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.”
Seizing on the “opinion” tag, the food and beverage industry responded quickly. The American Beverage Association, for example, dismissed the paper’s findings, arguing that it was “not a scientific study.”
But perhaps the strongest, most wide-ranging attacks came from the Calorie Control Council, a lesser-known industry group with an innocuous-sounding name, a long history and a penchant for stealthy public relations tactics. The organization, which is run by an account executive with a global management and public relations firm, represents the low- and reduced-calorie food and beverage industry. But it functions more like an industry front group than a trade association.
In criticizing Swithers, the Council relied on industry-funded scientists, bloggers and dietitians — it even wrote a letter to the professor’s university demanding that the school stop promoting “biased science.”
“The intimidation tactics, going to somebody’s employer, it just seems to go beyond the realm of what’s reasonable,” says Swithers, who disputes the “opinion” critiques by noting that her paper was peer-reviewed and based on her assessment of recent scientific studies conducted about artificial sweeteners. “But I guess that’s par for the course in their world.”
Indeed, tracking the Calorie Control Council’s efforts to discredit Swithers’ paper on artificial sweeteners provides a lesson in how the food and beverage industry will go to great lengths — and often use questionable tactics — to protect its interests. With a brand new artificial sweetener about to hit the market, and with the science still unclear about the safety of sugar substitutes, industry’s efforts to discredit science unfavorable to their interests are unlikely to end anytime soon.
“This isn’t personal,” Swithers acknowledges. “This is about somebody’s bottom line."
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I'm highlighting today common products that are now connected to one major disease vector----diabetes. Children are now getting early-stage diabetes and it is less about family genetics and pre-disposition and more about the dismantling of public protections in our Federal agencies for food and drugs. Over and again you will see that women are being hit the hardest in this failure to adequately test because when shortcuts are allowed to maximize profits it is women and children that are dropped in clinical testing.
Lipitor is a great product....we would not want to lose the benefits it provides. The point is that all of these side effects may have been mitigated by simple reformulation. That is what clinical trial data forces product designers to do. Is ten years of clinical trials and reformulation worth creating a product people can trust? IN A FIRST WORLD DEMOCRACY THAT IS A GREAT BIG YES.
NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS SAY-----TAKE YOUR CHANCES---WE'RE IN IT FOR THE PROFIT!
Lipitor Lawsuits Claim Drug Causes Diabetes, Seek Damages for Suffering
The attorneys at Morgan & Morgan are actively filing lawsuits on behalf of women who were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes after using Lipitor. Several studies have linked Lipitor and other cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to an increased risk of diabetes, particularly in middle-aged and older women. Our attorneys believe that the maker of Lipitor, Pfizer, Inc., failed to properly warn consumers of this risk and is therefore legally responsible for the medical bills, pain and suffering and lost wages of women who developed diabetes as a result of taking Lipitor.
If you or a loved one was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes after using Lipitor, you may be able to sue the drug’s manufacturer and recover compensation for your injuries. If you have questions about your legal rights or would like more information on filing a lawsuit, complete our free case review form today. The attorneys at Morgan & Morgan are offering this online consultation with no cost and no obligation.
Why Are Lawsuits Being Filed?
Typically, lawsuits involving pharmaceuticals allege that a drug is unreasonably dangerous and/or that the manufacturer failed to provide adequate warnings for side effects associated with the drug. Women filing lawsuits against Pfizer allege:
- Patients and doctors were not adequately warned about the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes with use of Lipitor
- Pfizer promoted Lipitor as safe and effective, despite knowing that it could elevate blood sugar levels and/or cause Type 2 diabetes
- Lipitor’s label never carried a warning that it could cause changes in blood sugar levels and/or Type 2 diabetes until the FDA requested a label change in February 2012
- Even after the label change, Lipitor’s label still does not adequately warn patients about the risk of Type 2 diabetes
- Patients who developed diabetes due to Lipitor use now have to undergo regular testing of their blood glucose levels, adhere to a strict diets and take medication for the remainder of their lives and are at an increased risk for kidney disease, blindness, heart disease and other complications of diabetes
Is This a Class Action?
This is not a class action lawsuit. Our attorneys are helping women who have used Lipitor and developed Type 2 diabetes file individual lawsuits to recover compensation for their specific injuries.
To help conserve judicial resources and ensure a consistent and efficient resolution to the growing litigation, a multidistrict litigation (MDL) has been formed to handle these lawsuits. This means that all federally-filed lawsuits, as well as any future cases filed in federal courts, will be transferred to the U.S. District Court District of South Carolina to be overseen by the Honorable Judge Richard M. Gergel. Judge Gergel will manage the lawsuits and oversee the pretrial and discovery process, which includes taking witness testimony and reviewing relevant documents. While one judge is overseeing the litigation, each plaintiff will retain his or her own lawsuit, attorney and right to an individual award.
How is Lipitor Causing Diabetes?
Several studies have uncovered a link between Lipitor and Type 2 diabetes, a life-long condition that causes a patient to develop high blood sugar levels. To understand the potential link between Lipitor and Type 2 diabetes, it is important to understand the science behind the disease.
In the body, food is broken down into sugar (glucose), which travels through the bloodstream. In a normal patient, the pancreas will release insulin in response to a meal to reduce blood sugar levels and allow glucose to enter the body’s cells, providing them with the energy needed to function. Patients with Type 2 diabetes, however, cannot produce enough insulin or cannot use the insulin well enough. As a result, glucose cannot enter the body’s cells and instead builds up in the blood, causing a spike in blood sugar levels. High levels of sugar in the blood can result in a number of serious health problems, including organ damage and heart attack.
Researchers suspect that Lipitor can inhibit the function of the pancreatic cells responsible for storing and releasing insulin, and may also decrease the body’s sensitivity to the hormone.
Studies on Lipitor
Highlight Diabetes Risk for Women, Statin Users
Patients on a high-dose Lipitor regimen may have an increased risk of developing diabetes A number of studies have linked use of Lipitor and cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins to diabetes. In 2013, researchers in Canada found that patients taking Lipitor had a 22 percent increased risk of developing diabetes compared to those taking Pravachol, another drug used to lower cholesterol. Two years earlier, a study based on data from three large clinical trials also suggested that patients on a high-dose Lipitor regimen may have an increased risk of developing diabetes, especially if they have other risk factors for the disease. The trial included nearly 4,000 adults who did not have diabetes, but had a history of stroke. It is believed that women, including those with a healthy body mass index (BMI), are at the highest risk of developing diabetes from statin use.
FDA Warning Highlights Increased Diabetes Risk
In February 2012, the FDA released a statement on Lipitor and statins. The agency warned that patients taking these drugs may have an increased risk of developing high blood sugar levels and type 2 diabetes, and announced that changes will be made to the drugs’ labeling to reflect this concern. According to an FDA spokesperson, prescribing doctors should assess patients’ blood sugar levels after they have started treatment with Lipitor or another statin.
The FDA warning also commented on the potential risk for liver injury, memory loss and muscle damage; however, the current litigation surrounding Lipitor pertains only to the manufacturer’s alleged failure to warn about the type 2 diabetes risk.
At Morgan & Morgan, our attorneys have been assigned leadership roles in some of the largest defective drug litigations across the country and have recovered millions on behalf of injured patients. We believe that the maker of Lipitor put profits before patient safety and are committed to helping patients recover the compensation they deserve. For more information on how we may be able to help, do not hesitate to contact us today. There is no cost or obligation.
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Below you see the kind of advocate for eliminating the FDA and public protections because of the costs and limits to profit. Remember, public universities are the ones that do these clinical trials and taxpayer money funds them. Ten year clinical trials are expensive but the product rarely harmed the public. If this is too costly for private industry they should not be in the PHARMA business. What Clinton, Bush, and Obama are doing with universities as research corporations is placing what this article below suggests on steroids. Universities like Johns Hopkins has a BioTech building attached just to rifle these biotech products through with patents ------with absolutely no value to humanity for the most part. Most of these 'innovations' are simply are reshuffling of compound configuration and this rifling is what is causing class action lawsuits to soar. The solution say neo-liberals and neo-cons-----take away the ability of the public to sue for health damages.
Neo-liberals and neo-cons say----TAKE YOUR CHANCES-----IF YOU ARE INJURED YOU ARE A LOSER/VICTIM.
BASIC RESEARCH ON THE CHEMISTRY OF THESE 'INNOVATIONS' IS WHAT PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES DO. ONCE WE KNOW THE SCIENCE THEN WE GO TO MARKET AND 'INNOVATE'.
The excuse of harming people by delaying new product is bogus. So few people are in need of these new products and exceptions are made for those needing these products as a last resort.
Paying for Permissionless Innovation
- by Adam Gurri
- August 4, 2014
Here at The Ümlaut we’re big fans of permissionless innovation—the concept and Adam Thierer’s excellent book. The biggest, most consequential enemy of permissionless innovation in the US is undoubtedly the FDA. Its long, expensive approval process delays access to life-saving drugs and other innovations for years, dramatically increases the price of such things once they reach the market, and skews the investment incentives for the health industry. Many economists would like to see the FDA radically reformed, some would like to abolish it entirely. In the spirit of the sort of political compromises that Milton Friedman was famous for proposing, I’d like to suggest an intermediate solution: a permissionless premium. Here’s how it would work: there would be some specified amount (either an absolute amount per unit or a percentage of the revenue) that patients would have to pay in order to get a given drug or access to a medical device before it was FDA approved. The patient should be made well aware that the risks are at this point unknown (not that they’re thoroughly understood just after FDA approval anyway). The revenue would bolster the FDA’s budget, thus in theory helping to investigate the risks associated with the drug and drugs like it in the future.
Moreover, this would allow pharmaceutical companies to start getting revenue before FDA approval, lowering the burden of their overhead. As things currently stand, they spend billions on drug development and by the time the FDA process is complete they have a very short window before their patent expires. As Alex Tabarrok documents well, the result is that pharma companies have almost no incentive to develop drugs that treat diseases that are anything other that very broadly experienced. The pharma dream in this scenario is not to find an effective treatment for rare but aggressive cancers, but to find the next Lipitor.
However, if they could develop experimental new drugs for rare diseases that could be bring in revenue immediately, that might just change the cost-benefit analysis sufficiently to see some real progress on that front. The premium will act as a Pigovian tax rather than an outright ban on the consumption of such still largely untested drugs, and will help fund both pharmaceutical companies and the FDA’s efforts to increase our stock of medical knowledge. It seems, from a number of perspectives, to be a win-win.
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The hype for the ACA was having insurance would create better health results. As we know, requiring people to buy insurance and then having people unable to afford co-pays and deductibles to access that care are two different things. Neo-liberals never expected access to health care----they are pushing everyone to preventative health. Counseling on better eating habits and blood tests will control diabetes. Except, that is not true. The environmental exposures as we saw in the articles above will not be mitigated by preventative care. The huge numbers of people aging into these policies already having diabetes will not be helped because most people can only afford Bronze and/or Medicaid coverage.
The US was already at the bottom in the developed world for health outcomes.....the ACA will take the US to third world status.....
'A widely cited experiment in Oregon offered an early look at what happens when people suddenly get Medicaid coverage. Researchers found that physical health, like obesity and the prevalence of diabetes, did not change much'.
Affordable Care Act to provide preventive health care coverage to millions with diabetes
- July 22, 2010
With expanded access to preventive services, individuals may obtain the information they need to make health care decisions that are right for them.
Plan LevelInsurance
Company Pays
Bronze 60% of health care costs
You Pay
40% of health care costs
Silver Company pays
70% of health care costs
You pay
30% of health care costs
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Access to preventative health care will do nothing with widespread health disease and infection vectors brought from deregulation and global markets. We are already back to the age of The Jungle-----US food is as contaminated as before US advanced to the first world society. Now we are being assaulted by biotech industry food and health care products that create pre-conditions. All of the promotion of access to insurance is simply hype.
We must remove corporate structures from our public universities and rebuild our public health system being dismantled with deregulation and neo-liberalism. We must demand Expanded and Improved Medicare for All to allow all citizens access to basic medical procedures and treatments.
WE PAID TAXES FOR DECADES TO HAVE THE COVERAGE WE NEED ------THESE TAXES ARE PAYROLL TAXES INTO MEDICARE TRUSTS AND INCOME TAXES THAT FUND NIH AND NCA RESEARCH. YOU PAID FOR YOUR ACCESS TO QUALITY CARE. CORPORATE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION EMPTIED GOVERNMENT COFFERS.
NYT Covers Food Safety Deregulation the US Beef Export Crisis
- Bad Cow Disease
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times, June 13, 2008
Straight to the Source
That little ditty famously summarized the message of "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's 1906 exposé of conditions in America's meat-packing industry. Sinclair's muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act - and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.
Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines - tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister's decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.
How did America find itself back in The Jungle?
It started with ideology. Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed - not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era - as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism.
Thus, when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a restoration of the way America was "up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that."
The late Milton Friedman agreed, calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. It was unnecessary, he argued: private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits. (Friedman, unlike almost every other conservative I can think of, viewed lawyers as the guardians of free-market capitalism.)
Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety ineffective.
They did this in part by simply denying these agencies enough resources to do the job. For example, the work of the F.D.A. has become vastly more complex over time thanks to the combination of scientific advances and globalization. Yet the agency has a substantially smaller work force now than it did in 1994, the year Republicans took over Congress.
Perhaps even more important, however, was the systematic appointment of foxes to guard henhouses.
Thus, when mad cow disease was detected in the U.S. in 2003, the Department of Agriculture was headed by Ann M. Veneman, a former food-industry lobbyist...