Orshe

Merck CEO Kenneth C. Frazier discusses the high cost of pharmaceuticals in the U.S. and challenges posted by President Obama’s health-care reform legislation with WSJ’s Alan Murray.

Continued here:  Merck Bracing for Health-Care Reform Challenges/a>

The health-care overhaul law includes a provision requiring insurers to spend a certain proportion of premium dollars on patient care and quality-improvement programs.

It all sounds straightforward enough — large-group plans must spend at least 85% and individual and small-group plans, 80% — but the devil is always in the details.

Trial Disappointment: A trial conducted in Africa of a microbicide gel containing the anti-HIV drug tenofovir has ended because the gel didn’t protect women from contracting the virus, the New York Times reports. Part of the study — which also looked at whether two different pills protected against the virus — is continuing and data have not yet been released, making it difficult to figure out why, exactly, the gel didn’t appear to work, the paper says.

At its climax, a woman’s orgasm cascades into 80 different parts of the brain, according to researchers who compiled a unique set of brain scans documenting the female sexual response.

Figuring Out a Cleanup: Efforts in Japan to figure out how to properly and quickly clean up the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident have been hampered by a lack of leadership and diluted accountability, the WSJ reports. Making efforts even more difficult is uncertainty about the levels of contamination that pose a health hazard, the paper says.

Public opinion has tipped against the health-care overhaul passed last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s monthly tracking poll finds.

Some 51% of respondents in a major monthly poll now say they have an unfavorable opinion of the legislation passed by Democrats in March 2010, and just 34% of them feel favorably about it, according to a KFF telephone survey of 1,223 people carried out earlier this month.

The outbreak of listeriosis linked to cantaloupes from a Colorado farm field is heightening concerns over its presence in other foods–especially those founds behind the deli counter.

Food-safety experts warn consumers to be aware that listeria, a common environmental bacterium, is linked primarily with meat and animal products, as well as with dairy products such as soft or surface-ripened cheeses such as brie and feta.

Just hours after the announcement that the 2011 Nobel  Prize in medicine or physiology had been awarded to three scientists for their work on the immune system, Rockefeller University announced that one of the researchers, Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, had died a few days earlier.

Dr. Steinman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design, the university said.

Mood Lift?: A study shows that for women, drinking two to three cups of coffee per day is associated with a 15% lower risk of developing depression during a ten-year period, the WSJ reports. Other forms of caffeine were also tied to a lower risk of depression. However, this type of study can’t prove that caffeine prevents the condition.

Bill Clinton’s hamburger days are behind him, he says.

The former president now thinks of himself as a vegan, he tells CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, eschewing meat, dairy and eggs. (No word on whether he’s traded recipes with fellow Democrat and vegan Dennis Kucinich.)