[The Sacramento Bee]- Using a combination of Facebook-like tools and personally controlled health records, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have engaged members of an online diabetes social network as participants in public health surveillance. In an article published April 27 in PLoS ONE, Elissa Weitzman, ScD, MSc, and Kenneth Mandl, M.D., MPH, of the Children’s [...]

[First Word]- The US Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned whether Vermont’s decision to enact laws that prohibit the use of prescription drug records for marketing purposes violates free-speech rights. All states currently allow pharmacies to collect and pass on data about the prescription-writing habits of physicians, but Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire banned use or [...]

[WSJ]- A government attempt to oust a longtime drug-company chief executive over his company’s marketing violations is raising alarms in that industry and beyond about a potential expansion of federal involvement in the business world.
The Department of Health and Human Services this month notified Howard Solomon of Forest Laboratories Inc. that it intends to exclude [...]

[WSJ]- Pfizer Inc. said four patients died in a clinical trial of an experimental treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, but only one was determined by the investigators to be drug-related.
The New York company added that the death rate associated with the drug, across several studies, “is within the range of rates reported for biologic therapies” for [...]

[RWJF]- First report showing longitudinal change demonstrates differing trends across geographic regions and individual hospitals and academic medical centers.
Chronically ill Medicare patients spent fewer days in the hospital and received more hospice care in 2007 than they did in 2003, but at the same time there was an increase in the intensity of care for [...]

[WSJ]- Doctors weigh treatment options differently when they are deciding for themselves and when they are treating patients, according to a new study.
Doctors were more likely to opt for treatments with a higher chance of death—but lower risk of serious side effects—for themselves than for their patients in a survey of 940 primary-care physicians evaluating [...]

[Business Times]- StemCells Inc. will discontinue an early-stage clinical trial in Batten disease because it couldn’t find enough eligible patients with the rare disease.
Batten disease, also known as neuronal ceroid lipfuscinosis or NCL, is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder in children.
Palo Alto-based StemCells in 2009 completed a Phase I safety trial in six patients with advances [...]

[NYTimes]- David Aldridge of Los Angeles had a kidney transplant in 2006, but he will soon need another. Like many people living with H.I.V., he suffers from kidney damage, either from the virus or from the life-saving medications that keep it at bay.
Until recently, such patients did not receive transplants at all because doctors worried [...]

[FirstWord]- The World Health Organization called for “urgent and concerted” efforts by the pharmaceutical industry, governments and health professionals to work together to combat the growing global threat of drug resistance. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan warned that “in the absence of urgent corrective and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in [...]

[Guardian]- A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries – these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that [...]