[wsj] Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for [...]

[BBC] Another Danish pharmaceutical company is withdrawing products from Greece in protest at the government’s decision to cut the prices of medicines by 25%.
The Leo Pharma company says it is suspending sales of two popular drugs because the price reductions will cause job losses across Europe.   The Greek government is struggling with a debt crisis.  [...]

[msnbc] The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.
A new, separate report by a group headed by the United Nations reached a very different conclusion on maternal mortality, [...]

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. government’s cancer research network is “approaching a state of crisis” as waste and inefficiency cause 40 percent of late-stage trials it funds to be abandoned before completion, a report found.
The government-funded National Cancer Institute’s clinical trials group isn’t able to effectively study the benefits of new and current treatments, according to [...]

[nytimes] This could be one glimpse of the future of health insurance.  The UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, is teaming up with the Y.M.C.A. and retail pharmacies to try a new approach to one of the nation’s most serious and expensive medical problems: Type 2 diabetes.
Rather than simply continuing to pay [...]

[NYTimes] Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will supply hundreds of millions of doses of their pneumonia vaccines to the world’s poorest countries at heavily discounted prices under a novel agreement announced Tuesday.
But at least one expert maintains that the prices are still too high.
The deal was announced by the GAVI Alliance, a nonprofit organization, which estimated the [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]

[AmedNews] Over these last seven months, I have received many letters, e-mails and texts from people who identify themselves as physicians and whose messages suggest that the AMA doesn’t do anything for them.
It’s a sad irony that they are unaware that their ability simply to practice medicine acceptable to the public is due to the [...]

[Economist] MORE than a week after the earth convulsed beneath it, Haiti has still to plumb the depths of suffering and want. The numbers are still only more-or-less informed guesses, but their magnitude is grim: perhaps 200,000 killed, 250,000 more injured and some 3m in desperate need of help. The generosity of the world’s response [...]