Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has preliminarily agreed to a $3 billion settlement over the sales and marketing practices of several of its drugs, including the diabetes drug Avandia.
This represents the largest federal drug-company settlement to date, surpassing the $2.3 billion paid by Pfizer in 2009 for illegally promoting off-label uses of four of its drugs.
As it turns out, GlaxoSmithKline spent 11 years covering up trial data that showed Avandia was a risky drug for the heart. In 1999, drugmaker SmithKline Beecham began a study to compare Avandia with another diabetes drug, Actos. The results showed that Avandia worked no better than Actos and had greater risks to the heart.
Health Glance
How would you feel knowing that the doctor insisting that smoking is completely safe is actually being paid by the tobacco industry? This kind of information would be extremely off-putting to say the least. But unfortunately this conflict of interest is absolutely rampant among the mainstream health community, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, recent news has come out revealing that thousands of doctors, researchers, and medical experts in Texas are being paid handsomely by the pharmaceutical industry.
Medicare's prescription coverage gap is getting noticeably smaller and easier to manage this year for millions of older and disabled people with high drug costs.
A virus with the potential to kill up to half the world’s population has been made in a lab. Now academics and bioterrorism experts are arguing over whether to publish the recipe, and whether the research should have been done in the first place.
Do you want to know what country produced the food you eat? Too bad, says the World Trade Organization (WTO). That’s a barrier to free trade, so you don’t get to know.
Soda, which is loaded with sugar primarily in the form of high fructose corn syrup, is a leading contributor to the rising rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases facing Americans.
Scientists and security specialists are in the midst of a fierce debate over recent experiments on a strain of bird flu virus that made it more contagious.





























