QDIS Blog

Boy does the plan B fiasco keep getting stranger and stranger. I’ve posed on it several times as has Mark Sedak over at Eye on FDA. Here is the latest from the New York Times.

Ex - FDA Chief: Agency Meant to OK Plan B - New York Times:

Mark has a post specifically dealing with this latest news and has some very good questions that need to be answered. The question I have is how can Dr. Crawford say with a straight face that he couldn’t figure out how to enforce an age limit for the OTC version of plan B?! Maybe he should talk to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms for advice on how they deal with sales of cigarettes or alcohol and see how they deal with it. That excuse is just ridiculous.

Here’s link to Dr. Crawford’s testimony (pdf).

Here’s links to a page on the Center for Reproductive Rights containing other pdf’s of other people testimony who were involved in the plan B discussions.

Testimony of Dr. Janet Woodcock (Part 1)

Testimony of Dr. Janet Woodcock (Part 2)

Testimony of Dr. Steven Galson (Part 1)

Testimony of Dr. Steven Galson (Part 2)

Also, former commissioner Mark McClellan was deposed on June 13th (2 days ago) but those transcripts are not yet available. I haven’t had time to read through them all, but since they are in pdf format, you can easily search them electronically. If I find anything interesting, I’ll be sure and post.

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The New York Times had an article a few weeks back that caught my eye and I haven’t had a chance to post about it.

Rising Diabetes Threat Meets a Falling Budget - New York Times:

Further diabetes articles from the New York Times.

One of the fastest rising diseases today is diabetes. Now for those not familiar with diabetes, there are basically two types; Type 1 (which use to be called juvenile diabetes) and Type 2 (use to be called adult onset). Now I am familiar with Type 1 since my wife has been diabetic for many years now. The interesting fact is that diabetes has risen quite a bit in recent years.

Detailed data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is available with breakdown by age and other factors.

The sad fact though is that money for diabetes related issues is going down even though over 225,000 Americans are affected and the number continues to grow. Another fact is that almost b50% of the people who have diabetes don’t know it and usually don’t until they require hospitalization for complications or another reason and it then gets caught. Diabetes is the primary underlying cause for kidney disease, blindness and non-trauma related amputations.

Graphic: Falling Behind in Research Spending

Some interesting facts:

$ per case for West Nile disease: $16,936
$ per case for Lyme disease: $1,415
$ per case for diabetes: $68

This is based on 14.7 million cases of diabetes reported in 2004 but does NOT include the estimated 6.1 million undiagnosed cases.

Here are many other new articles recently on diabetes.

American Diabetes Association Home Page

Yahoo news search result.
Google news search results.
MSN news search results

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