A Vermont federal district court gave good news to advocates of a VT law to ban the use of prescriber information for marketing by the drug industry. Our friends at the Prescription Project posted the following blog [available at http://blog.prescriptionproject.org/?p=626] on this victory:

Vermont District Court upholds data-mining law

[On Thursday, April 23, 2009] the Vermont District Court upheld a 2007 law banning the use of prescriber-identifiable information to market prescription drugs. In his opinion, Judge J. Garvan Murtha affirmed the Vermont Legislature’s findings that the use of data-mining as a pharmaceutical sales tactic promotes the overuse of more expensive, less-tested drugs, and that banning the practice for marketing purposes protects public health and contains costs.  Importantly, the decision explicitly deferred to the legislature to decide how to rein in rising health care costs.

The Court’s decision supports a unanimous November 2008 ruling by the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a similar law in New Hampshire that bans the use of prescriber-identifiable information for marketing purposes, and is a strong signal for other states that are currently considering data-mining restriction laws, including Connecticut and Massachusetts.

A Healthy Blog, part of the coalition supporting the Massachusetts data-mining bill, found inspiration in Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell’s response to the decision: “It is a testament to our Legislature and to the courage of this small state that we continue to lead the way on important public health issues,” he said.

Here’s the full decision [at http://www.prescriptionproject.org/tools/solutions_resources/files/0040.pdf ].

And to commemorate the World Malaria Day this past Saturday, we bring you a post by Sonia Shah, a guest blogger on international human rights and drug policy on the PAL blog.  She posted this interesting history of the role of malaria in the growth of the US nation, a reminder of how much we have in common with the developing nations struggling with this contintuing health threat.  See it at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3843

We here at Prescription Access Litigation focus on pharmaceutical issues in the United States – how much drugs cost, how they’re marketed, etc. And as many problems as there are here in the U.S. with people getting access to medicines for life-threatening conditions, those problems increase exponentially in developing countries. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry’s misplaced priorities mean that we have at least five different hardly-distinguishable prescription drugs for heartburn but almost no new treatments for the diseases that affect billions but that aren’t “profitable” – malaria, tuberculosis, and countless other diseases of which we in the U.S. have the luxury of ignorance.

Sonia Shah, the author of the excellent expose, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients, has started a new website, ResurgentMalaria.com.

As she describes it, ResurgentMalaria.com is ” the first-ever website devoted to independent commentary and news about malaria, a wily scourge that has stalked humankind since we evolved from apes. Created in conjunction with my new book on malaria (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009), ResurgentMalaria.com features the latest news without the spin, provocative commentary, in-depth histories, and a lively discussion on what it all means.”

A recent entry here on this blog quoted Bill Gates (whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made malaria eradication one of its top priorities), who said “Malaria kills 1 million people a year; baldness hasn’t killed anyone yet. Less than 10 percent of the money spent on curing baldness is spent on fighting malaria.”

(from Chicago Tribune, Microsoft’s Gates says computers not cure-all, February 25, 2008)

Bill Gates, the cofounder and chairman of the Microsoft, and cofounder and cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently spoke at the University of Chicago. A major focus of the Foundation, which is one of the largest in the world, is on international health and in particular on diseases striking people in the Third World that get scant attention from pharmaceutical companies.

He offered this insight into the skewed priorities of the pharmaceutical industry:

“Malaria kills 1 million people a year; baldness hasn’t killed anyone yet. Less than 10 percent of the money spent on curing baldness is spent on fighting malaria.”

(from Chicago Tribune, Microsoft’s Gates says computers not cure-all, February 25, 2008)

‘Nuff said.

Although, it’s worth noting that the Institute for One World Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company , just announced a partnership with Amyris Biotechnologies and sanofi aventis for the development of semisynthetic artemisinin, a key ingredient in first-line malaria treatments. The project has been ongoing since 2004, and was funded with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hat Tip: Julie’s Health Club