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from Global Investing:
BRICS: future aid superpowers?
Britain's aid programme for India hit the headlines this year, when New Delhi, much to the fury of the Daily Mail, described Britain's £200 million annual aid to it as peanuts. Whether it makes sense to send money to a fast-growing emerging power that spends billions of dollars on arms is up for debate but few know that India has been boosting its own aid programme for other poor nations. A report released today by NGO Global Health Strategies Initiatives (GHSi) finds that India's foreign assistance grew 10.8 percent annually between 2005 and 2010.
The actual sums flowing from India are, to use its own phrase, peanuts. The country provided $680 million in 2010. Compare that to the $3.2 billion annual contribution even from crisis-hit Italy. The difference is that Indian donations have risen from $443 million in 2005, while Italy's have fallen 10 percent in this period, GHSi found. Indian aid has grown in fact at a rate 10 times that of the United States. Add to that Indian pharma companies' contribution -- the source of 60- 80 percent of the vaccines procured by United Nations agencies.
Other members of the BRICS group of developing countries are also stepping up overseas assistance, with a special focus on healthcare, the report said. BRICS leaders meet this week to ink a deal on setting up a BRICS development bank.
Here are the numbers for the other BRICS (according to GHSi report entitled "How the BRICS are reshaping global health and development")
from The Great Debate:
Plan B: where politics trump science. Again.
By Amanda Marcotte
The views expressed are her own.
Wednesday morning Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA’s long-awaited decision taking age restrictions off Plan B emergency contraception. The change would have allowed those 16 and under to buy Plan B, moving it from behind the pharmacist counter and into the shelves alongside aspirin and condoms. But now that won’t happen.
The decision confounded the medical community as well as the women’s rights world. Since no HHS Secretary has ever overruled an FDA decision of this sort before, the widespread assumption, best articulated by Matt Langer at Wonkette, was that Sebelius was working under “marching orders from an administration now fully in re-election mode” and fearful of getting a reputation as somehow “soft” on teen sexual activity.
from Breakingviews:
Pharma center of gravity shifts eastward
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Drug research tends to follow spending. Take Merck’s pledge to invest $1.5 billion in research and development in China over five years. Emerging economies’ citizens are growing wealthier and living longer, while their governments’ fiscal health is robust. Merck’s step suggests the pharmaceutical industry’s center of gravity is shifting eastward accordingly.
from Breakingviews:
Pharma stocks no safe haven in austerity storm
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Shares of pharmaceutical companies traditionally weather economic storms with aplomb. In 2008, for example, drug stocks sustained less damage than the S&P 500. Yet the sector today looks astonishingly cheap relative to the rest of the stock market. Austerity measures from strapped governments everywhere explain this conundrum.
from DealZone:
Deals wrap: Walgreen prescribes drugstore.com buy
Walgreen plans to buy drugstore.com for $429 million, expanding the online presence of the world's largest drugstore chain. Drugstore.com shareholders will receive $3.80 a share, which is more than double the company's closing stock price on Wednesday.
A sale of the British government's $107 billion stake in Lloyds Banking Group and RBS may start next year, Bloomberg said, citing four people familiar with the matter.
from DealZone:
Deals wrap: CVS’s $1.25 billion deal
Drugstore chain CVS Caremark agreed to buy Universal American's Medicare prescription drug business for about $1.25 billion, doubling the size of CVS Caremark's business that provides prescription drug coverage under the U.S. government's Medicare Part D program.
Miner BHP Billiton's acquisition strategy was back in the spotlight as market talk resurfaced it was looking at a $40 billion-plus bid for Anadarko Petroleum, although banking sources said they were unaware of any imminent offer.
from The Great Debate:
Let cancer patients have this pill
One more day -- or week, or month, or perhaps even a year. It may not seem like much time, but patients with incurable cancer know better. For Christi Turnage of Mississippi, who lives with stage IV breast cancer, it means seeing her daughter start kindergarten, celebrating her 27th wedding anniversary, and watching her sons graduate from college.
Her family and her oncologist credit her quality of life for the past two years to the drug Avastin, a biologic that combats cancer by cutting off the blood supply to tumors. But advanced breast cancer patients like Turnage have been forced to spend precious time battling something else: the possibility that federal regulators will vote today to remove approval of Avastin for their treatment.
from The Great Debate:
Don’t demonize drug samples. They are crucial to our healthcare
The following is a guest post by Grace-Marie Turner, founder and president of the Galen Institute, a non-profit research organization focusing on patient-centered solutions to health reform.
Medical researchers recently confirmed a link between chronic fatigue syndrome and a recently discovered retrovirus. Armed with this knowledge, some doctors are now prescribing HIV drugs to their sickest patients.
from Global Investing:
What fund managers think
Bank of America-Merrill Lynch's monthly poll of around 200 fund managers had a few nuggets in the June version, aside from the usual mood-taking.
Gold is too expensive. A net 27 percent of respondent thought it overvalued, up from 13 percent in May. Then again, the respondents to this poll have reckoned gold is too pricey since September 2009.
from DealZone:
DealZone Daily
Pfizer will present a nearly $4 billion offer for Germany's Ratiopharm this week, sources tell Reuters, launching a possible bidding war with Teva Pharmaceutical and Actavis. A decision is unlikely before the end of the month.
Hedge fund Elliot Associates offers to buy Novell Inc -- the world's No. 2 maker of Linux -- sending its shares up 28 percent. Speculation is that other bidders could come in and drive the price up further.
