High doses of the popular antidepressant Celexa (known as Cipramil in South Africa) can cause potentially fatal abnormal heart rhythms and should no longer be prescribed to patients, the US Food and Drug Administration has said.
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (Reuters) – The U.S. National Institutes of Health revised on Tuesday its 16-year-old conflict of interest rules for medical researchers, lowering the amount of money that constitutes a financial conflict and expanding the required disclosures….Concern about the integrity of research in the United States has grown since 2008, when Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley criticized prominent Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman and others for failing to fully disclose payments from drug companies.
People love how Facebook lets them comment on and share other people’s posts. But the idea of sharing on social media has got drug companies scared. When Facebook told drugmakers that they had to start allowing comments on their Facebook pages, some of those pages started disappearing.
“Take On Depression” suddenly disappeared. “ADHD Moms” vanished, too. So did “Epilepsy Advocate.” In the past, drug companies had been reluctant to create Facebook pages without a guarantee that they’d be closed to public comments — a unique accommodation on Facebook’s part. But that accommodation ended last week.
Congressman Ron Paul has re-introduced H.R. 2769, known as The Parental Consent Act of 2011 – A bill which prohibits federal funds from being used to establish or implement any universal or mandatory mental health, psychiatric, or socioemotional screening program.
A pharmaceutical company’s use of Twitter to promote medicines discredited the industry, a regulatory body has ruled. The Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) said that Bayer Healthcare had violated the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry Code of Conduct (ABPI Code). The Code sets rules on what companies can say when informing the public about prescription-only medicines.
Bayer was in breach of the parts of the Code which prohibits the advertising of prescription-only medicines to the public, the PMCPA said. The company also breached a rule that prohibits companies releasing information about prescription-only medicines that would encourage the public to ask their doctor for the product. Bayer also failed to maintain high standards and brought discredit upon, and reduced the confidence in, the pharmaceutical industry – two other rules written into the Code.
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