Pharma Blog Watch

Canadian Drug Importation (Drug Wonks)
In his entry, blogger Peter Pitts responds to an announcement that U.S. Customs officials will no longer seize prescription drugs imported from Canada, which Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) calls a "victory" for seniors in a release on his website.

"It's a victory all right. A victory for profiteers masquerading as pharmacists," Pitts writes. "And a victory for prescription drug counterfeiters who now need only a Canadian address to infiltrate the medicine chests of America."

New vs. Old Drugs (GoozNews)
In his blog, Merrill Goozner discusses a recently published study showing that the new antipsychotic drugs are no better than the old ones. New drugs are often just slightly modified versions of old ones, he writes. For example, "[Johnson & Johnson's] paliperidone is nothing more than the metabolite of Risperdal."

"We've seen all this before. Sometimes the companies subtract out the inactive portion of an older molecule (AstraZeneca did that and came up with Nexium to replace Prilosec)," he writes. "Then they make great claims that the new drug is somehow better. But it rarely is."