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The show must go on! The volcanic eruption in Iceland disrupted plans for a big crowd at tonight’s Nice, France world premiere of  “Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm” at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Health Care. But viewers can see the documentary, starring actor Dennis Quaid, here or on the Discovery Channel this Saturday and next at 8 a.m. (Check local cable listings.)

Susan G. Komen for the Cure is finding itself in a bucket of hot … chicken.

The breast cancer charity’s latest addition to the pink ribbon product army is KFC, which is selling “specially designed pink buckets of grilled and Original Recipe chicken.” Komen gets 50 cents from every sale, with a minimum $1 million donation from KFC and a target of $8 million to fund breast cancer research and local Komen affiliates.

Chances have been good that Sanofi-Aventis and Merck would re-establish their animal-health joint venture, as company officials have been more than hinting for months. Today, the reunion plans became official.

The combined business would be the largest seller of animal drugs and vaccines in the world, the companies said, although the deal still will have to pass muster with antitrust watchdogs. Here’s more from Dow Jones Newswires and Reuters.

A bunch of the blockbuster drugs that carried the drug industry for the past decade are about to go off patent. As we’ve noted along with everybody else, that’s going to be tough for pharma companies.

(See, for example, the news this week from Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which over the next two years will face generic competition on the two biggest drugs in the world, Lipitor and Plavix.)

It’s been a tough week for diet drugs. First, there were warnings that some people going to online auction sites to buy GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli weren’t getting the real thing. Instead, they were getting a counterfeit version that actually used the active ingredient from another diet drug — Abbott’s Meridia.

About 3,000 Medicare patients who’ve been getting care at a Mayo Clinic facility in Arizona will have to pay out of their own pocket or find another doctor.

We’ve been writing for a while now about the risk of cancer associated with CT scans, an issue doctors have begun to pay more attention to as the use of CT scans has soared.

A few papers published this afternoon in the Archives of Internal Medicine add a bit to the discussion; one estimated that the roughly 72 million CT scans performed in the U.S. in 2007 will ultimately cause some 29,000 cases of cancer.

The FDA just approved a new, extended-release version of Eli Lilly’s antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. If a classic pharma strategy holds true, the drug may also extend Lilly’s ability to make money from its Zyprexa franchise.

The company is likely to face generic competition on regular-selling Zyprexa in 2011. But a key patent on the extended release version of the drug is valid until 2018, a Lilly spokeswoman told the Health Blog.

Dendreon’s vaccine to treat prostate cancer has already been rejected once by the FDA. But the company recently re-applied for FDA approval, and it’s acting pretty confident while it waits to hear back from the agency.

Earlier this week, Dendreon said it would sell 15 million new shares of stock and use a chunk of the proceeds to speed up construction of new manufacturing facilities. The sale will increase shares outstanding by at least 13%, Dow Jones Newswires said.