Daily Archives: April 21, 2011

Prescribed drug, generic, same drug class… doesn’t matter, does it?

Posted on April 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

You’d better get ready for therapeutic substitution

What is therapeutic substitution? It is the practice whereby the drug prescribed for you is not dispensed as written, or even as the generic of what was specified. Rather, the drug dispensed is a generic for the CLASS of drugs to which the specified drug belongs.

Thus, if your prescription says Crestor®, you could get a generic for Lipitor®. Please note that Crestor and Lipitor are not the same compound, and do not have the same efficacy, although they are both statins. Individual patient reaction—for both the indication and side effects—of these two drugs is often different.

Yet, therapeutic substitution is exactly what Pfizer, the manufacturers of Lipitor, is hoping for. After all, generic Lipitor will be introduced after November 30, 2011, and Pfizer would like nothing better than to drive down the market share of the remaining branded statins. As an added bonus, Pfizer will probably be coming out with its own generic version of Lipitor, as well.

My latest HND piece examines the encroaching phenomenon of therapeutic substitution, and lists a few drugs for which this practice has already been occurring. Bear in mind that the volume usage of those drugs does not even come close to statins. Indeed, Lipitor all by itself is the biggest selling (legal) drug of all time, and it is just one of several statins.

There is considerable pressure to institute therapeutic substitution on a much wider scale. The fear is that if the single biggest class of drugs goes this way, no one will be able to put the therapeutic substitution genie back into the bottle.

But, who cares about patient outcomes if “the system” can save a little money, right?

Read the complete article. (Shaw’s Eco-Logic)

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Posted in Health care

“Energy efficient”… incendiary devices?

Posted on April 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

The CFL Fraud

Source:  American Thinker

by Edmund Contoski

[SPPI Note: An extensive examination of the mercury scare can be found on the SPPI home website here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/mercury/ ]

A compact fluorescent light (CFL) on the ceiling burst and started a fire in a home in Hornell, N.Y. December 23, 2010.  “Those are the lights everybody’s been telling us to use,” said Joe Gerych, Steuben County Fire Inspector.  “It blew up like a bomb. It spattered all over.”  Fire Chief Mike Robbins said the blaze destroyed the room where the fire started and everything in it, and the rest of the house suffered smoke and water damage.  The Arkport Village Fire Department as well as the North Hornell Fire Department required about 15 minutes to put out the fire. Link

“Bulb explodes without warning,” reported NBCactionnews.com, May 21, 2010.

“Tom and Nancy Heim were watching TV recently, when Tom decided to turn on the floor lamp next to his recliner chair.  ‘I heard this loud pop…I saw what I thought was smoke, coming out of the top of the floor lamp,’ says Tom.  Nancy suddenly found glass in her lap.  She says, ‘I did not see it. I just heard it, and I noticed I had glass on me.’” Link

On February 23, 2011, TV NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee covered “a newly-released investigators’ report that blames a February 12 fatal fire in Gallatin on one of those CFL bulbs.”  Ben Rose, an attorney for the rehabilitative facility in which Douglas Johnson, 45, perished, said, “This result is consistent with our own private investigation. …We have heard reports of similar fires being initiated by CFLs across the country.“ Link

Here are some examples from across the country: (SPPI)

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Posted in Energy

What went wrong? Trying to do the very worst things for all the wrong reasons, maybe?

Posted on April 21, 2011 | 2 Comments

Blame Game
Has the green movement been a miserable flop?

Bradford Plumer
April 21, 2011 | 12:00 am

What the hell went wrong? For months now, environmentalists have been asking themselves that question, and it’s easy to see why. After Barack Obama vaulted into the White House in 2008, it really did look like the United States was, at long last, going to do something about global warming. Scientists were united on the causes and perils of climate change. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had stoked public concern. Green groups in D.C. had rallied around a consensus solution—a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions—and had garnered support from a few major companies like BP and Duke Energy. Both Obama and his opponent, John McCain, were on board. And, so, environmental advocates prepared a frontal assault on Congress. May as well order the victory confetti, right?

Instead, the climate push was … a total flop. By late 2010, the main cap-and-trade bill had fizzled out in the Senate; not a single Republican would agree to vote for it. Greens ended up winning zilch from Congress, not even minor legislation to boost renewable electricity or energy efficiency. Worse, after the 2010 midterms, the House GOP became overrun with climate deniers, while voters turned apathetic about global warming. All those flashy eco-ads and all that tireless eco-lobbying only got us even further from solving climate change than we were in 2008.

So now greens are in the post-mortem stage, and, not shockingly, it’s a sensitive subject. On Tuesday, Matthew Nisbet, a communications professor at American University, released a hefty 84-page report trying to figure out why climate activism flopped so miserably in the past few years. Nisbet’s report is already causing controversy: Among other things, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, greensweren’t badly outspent by industry groups and that media coverage of climate sciencewasn’t really a problem. And he raises questions about whether greens have been backing the wrong policy measures all along. Is he right? Have environmentalists been fundamentally misguided all this while? Or were they just unlucky? (The New Republic)

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Posted in Activists, Cap and tax, Climate change, Crazy carbon schemes, Enviros, Green scams, Misanthropy

For the people-haters, there’s nothing like a good recession

Posted on April 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Recession cuts EU CO2 emissions by record 7.2 percent
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO | Wed Apr 20, 2011 10:41am EDT – Recession drove European Union greenhouse gas emissions down by a record 7.2 percent in 2009, putting the bloc ahead of schedule in making promised cuts, EU data showed on Wednesday.

“The strength of the 2009 recession affected all economic sectors in the EU,” the Denmark-based European Environment Agency said in a report. “Consumption of fossil fuels fell compared to the previous year, mainly for coal.”

Continue reading →

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Posted in Climate change, Crazy carbon schemes, Energy, Misanthropy

Misanthropists upset their carefully constructed narrative being exposed as yet more lies

Posted on April 21, 2011 | 2 Comments

Money not the problem in US climate debate
Environmental groups matched opponents’ spending power during arguments over cap-and-trade legislation, report claims.

David Adam

Environmental groups and their supporters spend more money on climate-change and clean-energy activities and campaigns than sceptical right-wing groups and their industry supporters, according to a report by a US social scientist, who questions some of the most common reasons given for US political inaction on global warming.

But the report has stirred controversy, with critics claiming that its conclusions are not backed up by the data it presents, and that it ignores studies offering contradictory evidence. (Nature)

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Posted in Activists, Misanthropy

Wouldn’t get too excited, these pollies frighten easily

Posted on April 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

At Last: UK Government Reviewing Unilateral Climate Change Act
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 11:48 Allegra Stratton, The Guardian

Given the financial and economic state we are in, the Government should suspend unilateral climate targets until such time as all other major nations have signed up to the same course. — Nigel Lawson, 12 May 2010.

Environmental campaigners have condemned the coalition’s inclusion of all of Britain’s 278 environmental laws in a list of “red tape” regulations considered by the public for the axe.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act, National Park Act, Clean Air Act and the Climate Change Act are among the packages of environmental safeguards included in the “red tape challenge” – a crowdsourcing exercise launched by the government to establish which regulations restrict business in the UK.

All of the UK’s more than 21,000 pieces of regulation are included on the government’s website for an evaluation. Users are told only the issues of tax and national security are exempted. Participants are assured the “onus” will be on ministers to make the case for keeping a regulation recommended for cutting. (GWPF)

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Posted in Regulation

What “green leap forward”?

Posted on April 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Hold the accolades on China’s ‘green leap forward’

By Bjorn Lomborg, Wednesday, April 20, 7:50 PM

As the world’s factory floor, China is not an obvious environmental leader. It is beleaguered by severe pollution and generates more carbon emissions than any other nation. Yet many have trumpeted it as an emerging “green giant” for its non-carbon-based energy production and its aggressive promises to cut carbon emissions. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described China’s “green leap forward” as “the most important thing to happen” at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

But the facts do not support this “green” success story.

China indeed invests more than any other nation in environmentally friendly energy production: $34 billion in 2009, or twice as much as the United States. Almost all of its investment, however, is spent producing green energy for Western nations that pay heavy subsidies for consumers to use solar panels and wind turbines.

China was responsible for half of the world’s production of solar panels in 2010, but only 1 percent was installed there. Just as China produces everything from trinkets to supertankers, it is exporting green technology — which makes it a giant of manufacturing, not of environmental friendliness. (Washington Post)

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Posted in Development, Low carbon

Hollywood types certainly have distinguishing reality from fantasy, don’t they?

Posted on April 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Cameron worried about Ahnold running amok in the persona of a nearly indestructible robot and yet the only problem turned out to be the Governator’s idiotic anti gorebull warbling legislation… Perhaps Cameron will feel better when he checks out our near-real time global thermometer.

A computer rebellion that wasn’t
Apr 20th 2011, 16:42 by K.N.C. | TOKYO

ON APRIL 19th 2011, Skynet went berserk; two days later it began a killing spree and tried to enslave the human race. Such is the setting for one branch of the “Terminator” series, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a stoic robot sent to destroy (or protect, depending on which film) a lad destined to lead mankind to safety.

James Cameron, who dreamt up the series and directed the first two films, reminded the world of the special date on April 19th, when he tweeted: “Skynet was supposed to go operational tonight. Instead of machines taking over, we have the very real threat of global warming.”

The series began in 1984, the year Apple introduced the Macintosh computer. Then, the date of Skynet achieving “self-awareness” was 1997. Later, it was pushed back to 2011, doubtless to make it feel suitably far in the future to be plausible (at least by Hollywood standards), yet sufficiently immediate to excite viewers. (The Economist)

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Posted in Activists, Climate change, Rubber room