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What We're Reading: Health Care Beat

Friday, February 10, 2012 - 10:01 AM

See what health reporter Fred Mogul is reading on his beat this morning.

  • The FDA opens a new front in the Affordable Care Act, the Los Angeles Times reports, issuing draft rules to allow "biosimilars" — essentially generic versions of medications made with living, often bioengineered, organisms. The move could deliver big savings and some uncertainty too, as generic drug manufacturers and biotechnology firms — many of them abroad — make and market these complex medications. Prices for insulin, anti-retroviral drugs, interferon, infertility medications and some cancer therapies could drop 25 to 45 percent.


  • It’s not surprising that there’s a learning curve doing surgery — like anything else — but some new data are “fairly dramatic,” according to the Wall Street Journal. They cite a New England Journal of Medicine study that examined New York Health Dept figures on ACL surgery. If an operation was among the first 10 such cases of a surgeon’s career, the patient was five times more likely to need another repair within a year as a patient whose surgeon had already performed more than 150 of the operations.

  • The Pharmalot blog reports that two months after Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled an FDA move to ease access to the Plan B pill, advocates want a federal judge to reopen a 2005 lawsuit. A coalition led by the Center for Reproductive Rights hopes to end a decade-long battle and allow the emergency contraceptive (also known as the morning after pill) to be immediately approved for unrestricted sale. Currently, the pill is available only to women age 17 and older without a prescription, and only behind counters.

  • Cat-owning Facebookers are loving this piece in The Atlantic about a common parasite transmitted by cats. Toxoplasmosis — the reason pregnant women are told to stay away from the litter box — might be rewiring brain circuits  that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety and sexual arousal. “This is wild, bizarre neurobiology,” one respected researcher says. The piece makes a convincing case it isn't fringe science — as did my late grandfather, a respected ophthalmologist and amateur parasitologist, some 30 years ago or more.

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