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Baby Formula Milk Companies ‘Exploit’ Parents’ Fears to Boost Sales, Analysis Alleges

ABC News reported:

Many baby formula milk companies allegedly exploit parents’ emotions and “manipulate” scientific data to boost sales, according to a major new analysis published in The Lancet.

The analysis, led by Professor Nigel Rollins of the World Health Organization, said urgent clampdowns are needed to address misleading claims made by the industry.

It comes on the heels of the formula crisis in the U.S. last year, which saw parents struggling to find formula due to global supply chain issues exacerbated by a large recall of Abbott baby formula after two infants died.

According to the analysis, formula milk companies use exploitative tactics to sell products such as preying on parents’ fears about their children’s health and development. For example, companies have said it’s important to introduce formula to help settle the behaviors of babies, such as disrupted sleep and persistent crying, implying that breast milk alone is not enough.

Be Warned: The Next Deadly Pandemic Is Not Inevitable, but All the Elements Are in Place

The Guardian reported:

If you wanted to kill as many people as possible, deniably and with no criminal consequences, what would you do? You’d do well to start with the bird flu. Bird flu are responsible for all the known flu pandemics: the great influenza that started more than a century ago, “Asian flu,” “Hong Kong flu” and “Russian flu,” which killed tens of millions between them. They also cause many of the annual outbreaks that slaughter hundreds of thousands of people.

Once you have found a suitable variant, two further components are required to weaponize it. The first is an amplifier. The best amplifier is a giant shed or factory in which thousands of birds are packed. These birds should be genetically homogenous so that your viral strain can travel freely between them. Intensive poultry farms would serve very well. Before long, a low-pathogenic strain should mutate in these circumstances into a highly pathogenic variety.

But it’s difficult for a flu virus to travel directly from birds to humans, so another component is required: a mixing vessel. This is a species that can simultaneously harbor the newly pathogenic bird virus and a flu variety already adapted to humans. Then the viruses, conveniently brought together, can exchange genetic material — a process known as “reassortment.”

Pigs are reasonable mixing vessels. They might have played this role in some previous outbreaks and pandemics. But there’s a much better candidate: mink. Mink readily harbor human and avian flu viruses. As predators, they can easily acquire avian flu from the meat they eat. The distribution of sialic acid receptors — a key determinant of infection — in their respiratory tracts is similar to that of humans. Human flu strains can pass between them through aerosol transmission.

Insulin Is Way Too Expensive. California Has a Solution: Make Its Own.

Vox reported:

There are few better emblems of the failures of the U.S. system of medical care than its inability to consistently provide insulin to Americans who need it. The drug was discovered 100 years ago, and it provides essential and ongoing treatment for millions of people living with diabetes, one of the most common chronic diseases in the country.

And yet one in six Americans with diabetes who use insulin say they ration their supply because of the cost. Some people end up spending nearly half of their disposable income on medicine they must take to stay alive.

Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the U.S., a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture and sell insulin themselves for a price that is roughly equivalent to the cost of production.

Their premise: Take away the private market’s profit motive and maybe states can deliver affordable insulin as a wholly public enterprise, run by civil workers, that does not need to make money. Because these states buy a lot of drugs too, through their Medicaid programs and the health plans for government workers, they would also reap the rewards if those drugs are cheaper.

For Baby’s Sake, Moms-to-Be Need the Whooping Cough Vaccine: CDC

U.S. News & World Report reported:

Pregnant women can help protect their newborns from whooping cough by getting a Tdap vaccine during the third trimester of pregnancy. Whooping cough, or pertussis, is highly contagious and can be serious for infants who are too young to be vaccinated. The CDC recommends babies get their first Tdap shot at 2 months of age.

The researchers had not looked at U.S. population-level trends in infant whooping cough cases since this maternal vaccination strategy began in 2011. The CDC recommends all women get Tdap vaccines between the 27th and 36th week of each pregnancy.

Tdap vaccination during pregnancy dropped off during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the CDC and its partners are working to increase rates.

Pfizer’s Susan Rienow: From COVID to Fighting the ‘Silent Pandemic’

The Guardian reported:

Pfizer’s president in the U.K., Susan Rienow hopes Pfizer can help move the system from one “prioritized on end-stage disease and significant ill health to a place where we’re actually preventing people from getting sick.”

To this end, she is attempting to tackle “the silent pandemic”: antimicrobial resistance. For years, scientists have bemoaned public apathy about bacteria and fungi that develop an ability to defeat drugs designed to kill them.

The World Health Organization estimated that 1.27 million people died due to this resistance in 2019, and this figure is expected to hit 10 million by 2050. “If you’re in a situation where you don’t have working antibiotics, you almost go back to sort of a medieval dark ages,” says Rienow.

The American executive, a Pfizer lifer with two decades at the company under her belt, has made the resistance threat a priority since taking charge last February.

Mpox Is Simmering South of the Border, Threatening a Resurgence

Politico reported:

For now, the situation here looks good. On the verge of spiraling out of control last summer, when cases exceeded 450 a day, mpox is now all but gone, with the CDC reporting an average of two new cases a day, as of Feb. 1.

But across the globe, cases started to rise again at the end of last month, according to the World Health Organization, which will decide on Thursday if the outbreak still constitutes an international emergency. The number of cases reported worldwide was slightly over 400, with most of the new ones in the Americas and Africa.

Of the 13 countries that saw an increase, Mexico reported the highest weekly hike, reaching 72 cases. The United States’ southern neighbor is now among the 10 countries in the world with the highest overall number of cases during the current outbreak. But unlike the other nine — which include the United States, Spain, and France — Mexico has not acquired any vaccines against mpox, nor seems to be planning to.

Top Mexican health officials have claimed the shot has not yet been proven safe and effective. Jorge Alcocer Varela, Mexico’s health secretary, told the country’s Senate in November that the vaccine also didn’t prevent people from developing symptoms. He wasn’t encouraging its use, he said, because the number of people dying from the disease was low, according to Mexican media reports.

Democrats’ Price Controls Undermine Biden’s Cancer Moonshot

Forbes reported:

President Biden proudly lauded the price controls that Democrats have begun implementing on prescription drugs as part of last August’s Inflation Reduction Act. He also touted his administration’s Cancer Moonshot, which aims to halve the cancer death rate over the next 25 years.

These policies are in direct conflict with one another. Pharmaceutical companies are already responding to the IRA’s looming price controls by scaling back their research and development efforts. As a result, there will almost certainly be fewer new treatments for cancer — and other illnesses — in the years to come than there would have been without the IRA.

Fewer effective drugs will make the Cancer Moonshot’s goal of halving the cancer death rate over the next 25 years a lot harder to achieve — if not impossible.

FDA Sets a Decision Date for Sage’s Postpartum Depression Pill

The Boston Globe reported:

An experimental drug that in a clinical trial helped some women quickly recover from postpartum depression could be approved by federal regulators by Aug. 6. The medicine, developed by Sage Therapeutics, is poised to become the first pill for the condition, which afflicts as many as 1 in 8 new mothers.

The Cambridge company on Monday announced the Food and Drug Administration’s decision date for the drug. Sage is still waiting to hear if the agency will convene an advisory committee of independent scientists to review the medicine’s safety and effectiveness before August.

Vaccines Slip, Dupixent Climbs for Sanofi as It Readies Multiple Launches in 2023

Fierce Pharma reported:

Sanofi is used to reporting strong Dupixent sales growth by now, but a decline in flu vaccine revenues brought an unusual twist for the drugmaker in the fourth quarter.

Sanofi’s fourth-quarter vaccine sales slipped 16% to 1.7 billion euros ($1.83 billion). The decline was expected, Sanofi’s vaccines head Thomas Triomphe explained on a conference call, citing a “challenging vaccination environment marked by both patient and provider fatigue.”

Despite the quarterly drop, Sanofi’s vaccine sales for the full year increased by 6.3% to 7.2 billion euros. The company has new manufacturing capacity in the U.S. that helped its influenza business deliver a “record” year despite the fourth-quarter troubles, the company said in a press release.

Meanwhile, Dupixent continued to shine as the company’s star product. Thanks to new indications, including a European approval for children with asthma and FDA nods for eosinophilic esophagitis, young children with atopic dermatitis and prurigo nodularis, the drug reached 225,000 new patients throughout the year. Sanofi projects Dupixent will bring in 10 billion euros in 2023.