Orshe

Rising medical costs, higher unemployment and a rapidly aging population are putting the health-care system under tremendous financial strain. This all sounds close to home but a story in today’s WSJ says those problems are confronting health care in Germany, whose system is often held up as one of the world’s models.

Drug and device companies, along with other industry players, spend about $1 billion a year to fund the continuing medical education classes doctors have to take to keep their licenses current. We may soon get more insight into how that money flows: A little-discussed provision in the House health care bill would require drug makers to disclose their spending on CME, the WSJ reports.

Researchers are studying whether swine flu can be transmitted in the blood, as part of an ongoing effort to keep the blood supply safe from infectious disease. That’s the subject of my latest column.

There’s also another new effort underway to improve the safety of blood transfusions by monitoring adverse reactions and errors through a collaboration between the federal government and organizations involved in blood collection, transfusion, and tissue and organ transplantation.

The flu had been rampaging through our kids’ school for weeks –- some days, their classes were less than half-full -– and we hadn’t been able to find any pediatricians or pharmacies with the H1N1 vaccine in our suburban Denver community.

So when the county announced a free H1N1 clinic for students, I figured we should take advantage. The first clinic was this past Saturday, at a local high school.

Kids taking the latest generation of antipsychotic meds gain significant amounts of weight–as much as 19 pounds on average in just 11 weeks for kids taking Zyprexa, according to a study published today in JAMA. Abilify, Risperdal and Seroquel were all linked to weight gain as well. Here’s the WSJ story.

The feds greenlighted the Pfizer-Wyeth deal yesterday, and the transaction is likely to be wrapped up today. Next question: Where will the synergy axe fall?

Pfizer has said it would cut about 15% of the companies’ combined workforce. That’s just under 20,000 jobs.

That figure includes roughly 8,000 jobs that Pfizer pledged in January to eliminate; the company said the cuts would “span sales, manufacturing, research and development, and administrative organizations.”

Medicare just started reimbursing doctors less for very small amounts of the cancer drug Avastin. Oddly enough, that could mean Medicare will start spending lots more money on the eye drug Lucentis. Here’s why.

Clinical trial guidelines from PhRMA, the big drug industry trade group, go into effect tomorrow.

Here are a few interesting details, followed by a big grain of salt:

The guidelines basically ban ghostwriting. That’s noteworthy because of reports over the past few years that several big drugmakers paid professional writers to make major contributions to articles that were published in medical journals under the names of academic physicians.

Parasitic infections and other diseases more familiar to the developing world are increasingly afflicting poor and minority populations in the U.S., the WSJ reports this morning. Public-health experts say they still don’t have a handle on how best to respond.

But the United States has a track record of successfully facing down public-health threats linked to poverty.

Having people with contagious conditions like, say, swine flu siting in a crowded ER waiting room is not an ideal public health situation. So Stanford Hospital is testing a drive-through ER, where patients get treated in their cars.