Chinese groups and the International Labour Organization on Monday launched a three-year campaign that aims to increase HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention among the country's migrant worker population in the provinces of Anhui, Guangdong and Yunnan, as well as the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, China Daily reports (Guan, China Daily, 7/29).

Two international teams of scientists working on independent studies have discovered that rare deletions and duplications in genetic material appear to occur in greater numbers in people who have schizophrenia. The studies are published in the July 30th online issue of the journal Nature.

The government could start paying impartial experts to visit doctors to talk about the safety, effectiveness and cost of prescription drugs and other treatments.

The idea would be to give presentations along the lines of those given by company drug reps. But the federally funded presentations would provide a counterweight to the industry messages on specific drugs.

A bill to that end is likely to be introduced today in both houses of Congress, according to the Prescription Project, a nonprofit that backs this sort of thing. (To see the bill language, click on the PDF image at right.)

The bill would expand on an idea that’s been around for a while now. Pennsylvania has funded one such program, and Harvard doc Jerry Avorn has been a big booster of the practice, sometimes called “academic detailing.”

Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, held a hearing on the issue earlier this year, and he’s one of the sponsors of the bill.

A draft of the bill we read today doesn’t specify how much the feds would spend on the program, but it authorizes the government to contract with nonprofit groups such as medical societies and schools of medicine and pharmacy to create educational materials.

The bill also directs officials to contract with 10 entities — drawn from academic institutions, state or local governments and non-profit groups — to “train and deploy healthcare professionals to educate physicians and other drug prescribers.”

A spokesman for the drug trade group PhRMA told the WSJ a while back that the industry encourages doctors to use many sources of information, and “it would be a big mistake to discount or ignore information provided by sales representatives who work for the companies that spend 10 to 15 years developing each new drug.”

Photo of the Capitol dome by alykat via Flickr

Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) recently introduced legislation (S 3343) that would require physicians to disclose their financial ties to imaging services ordered under Medicare when making self-referrals, CQ HealthBeat reports.

The number of deaths worldwide from AIDS-related causes decreased by 10% in 2007 to two million, compared with 2.2 million in 2006, according to UNAIDS' 2008 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, which was released Tuesday ahead of the XVII International AIDS Conference, the Los Angeles Times reports (Maugh, Los Angeles Times, 7/30).There were about 2.

The Washington Post on Tuesday examined the Washington, D.C.-based La Clinica del Pueblo, which has a mission to provide low-cost and culturally appropriate health care to the Hispanic community. The clinic offers mental health counseling, HIV/AIDS testing and outreach, family planning services, classes and other services.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) have led an effort to restructure FDA by "giving it broad powers to levy fines, order drug recalls and restrict drug industry advertising," and a "series of crises during the past year ... have given ammunition to the lawmakers, both longtime critics" of the agency, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Summaries of a recent editorial and opinion piece that addressed health care issues in the presidential election appear below.San Francisco Chronicle: The estimated $482 billion federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 is a "numbing number" because neither presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) nor presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen.

The nearly 10-year decline in U.S. infant mortality rates has stalled and disparities between black and white infant mortality persist, according to CDC data, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the data, black infants are 2.4 times more likely to die before age one than white infants.In 2005, 13.

If Bristol-Myers Squibb winds up buying ImClone, Bristol itself could become a more appealing acquisition target.

Bristol — a perennial buyout candidate — has been busy turning itself into a biotech-pharma hybrid. The company already owns about 17% of ImClone, and the two companies co-market ImClone’s cancer drug Erbitux.

Buying ImClone would give Bristol full U.S. rights to Erbitux, as well as the rights to several experimental biotech drugs in ImClone?s pipeline. Those are just the kind of assets most old-school Big Pharma companies are hungry for these days.

In a note this morning, Sanford Bernstein’s Tim Anderson writes that “Buying ImClone makes BMY a more sellable company itself.”

Meanwhile, Bristol is busy slimming itself down in other ways that might make it more attractive to a potential buyer. The company is closing many of its manufacturing plants and cutting thousands of jobs. And earlier this year, Bristol sold off its ConvaTec wound-care and ostomy business for more than $4 billion, sharpening the company’s focus on specialty biotech drugs.

But Bristol?s market cap is over $40 billion, which means there aren?t that many companies big enough to digest it.

One possibility could be Pfizer. Bristol are Pfizer already working together on an experimental blood thinner in Bristol?s pipeline. (Bristol also partnered with AstraZeneca on another experimental drug, which could complicate a deal somewhat.) Pfizer’s been sitting on a lot of cash, and it’s shown an appetite for buying partners in the past. And — perhaps most importantly — the company doesn’t have anything in its own pipeline to replace the revenues it will lose a few years from now when its cholesterol blockbuster Lipitor faces generic competition.

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