More than half of new drugs entering the German healthcare system have not been shown to add benefit, argue researchers in The BMJ today.
Beate Wieseler and colleagues at the German health technology assessment agency IQWiG (Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care) say that international drug development processes and policies are responsible and must be reformed.
Between 2011 and 2017, IQWiG assessed 216 drugs entering the German market following regulatory approval, they explain. Almost all of these drugs were approved by the European Medicines Agency for use throughout Europe.
Yet only 54 (25%) were judged to have a considerable or major added benefit. In 35 (16%), the added benefit was either minor or could not be quantified. And for 125 drugs (58%), the available evidence did not prove an added benefit over standard care in the approved patient population.
The situation is particularly shocking in some specialties, they add. For example, in psychiatry/neurology and diabetes, added benefit was shown in just 6% (1/18) and 17% (4/24) of assessments, respectively.
Some people have argued that limited information at the time of regulatory approval (and thus widespread use by patients) is the price to be paid for early access to innovative drugs, explain the […]
Animals are free to roam under the shade of trees and shrubs at a co-operative farm in Portugal.
Credit: Ricardo Lopes/The Guardian
A farm in Portugal is showing how the ancient art of silvopasture – combining livestock with productive trees – may offer some real answers to the climate crisis.
The land to the north of the village of Foros de Vale Figueira in southern Portugal has been owned and farmed through the centuries by Romans, Moors, Christians, capitalists, far rightists, even the military. It has been part of a private fiefdom, worked by slaves as well as communists.
Now this 100-hectare (247-acre) patch of land just looks exhausted – a great empty grassland without trees, people or animals, wilting under a baking Iberian sun.
But look closely and you can just see the future: tips of thousands of tiny oak and nut trees following the contours and poking through thick mulches of grass and leaves.
“This will be the new montado,” says Alfredo Cunhal, referring to a pre-medieval Portuguese system of […]
There is a difference between exercising religious beliefs and imposing them on others. Our Constitution fiercely protects the former and expressly prohibits the latter.
— Rep. Joseph Kennedy III
It’s easy for significant stories to get lost in the sound and fury of Donald Trump’s frontal assault on American democracy, epitomized by his militarized co-opting of Washington’s Fourth of July celebration. As my interview with Angie Maxwell, co-author of “The Long Southern Strategy,” shows, Trump’s presidency was decades in the making, with racism, sexism. and fundamentalism all playing crucial roles. The forces that brought him to power are ultimately far more consequential than he is.
That’s why a cluster of recent developments involving questions of religious privilege deserve far more attention from the public and the media than they have received. These events reflect both the advancement of a theocratic, “dominionist” worldview that elevates the state-sanctified religious liberty of some at the obvious expense of others — and a rising tide of liberal, secular resistance.
On July 2, federal prosecutors announced they would retry humanitarian aid volunteer Scott Warren on two charges related to aiding migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Warren, whom
Credit: 401kcalculator.org
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The US budget deficit jumped 23.1% in the first nine months of the fiscal year compared with the same period a year ago, according to the US Treasury.
Russian submarine now leaking radiation
The wreck of a Soviet nuclear submarine which sunk in the Barents Seaafter a fire in 1989 is emitting high levels of radiation, a joint Russian and Norwegian investigative team has reported.
The Komsomolets was a nuclear-powered titanium-hulled attack submarine capable of deep-diving and equipped with two torpedoes carrying nuclear warheads.
The wreck lies 1,680m, roughly one mile, beneath the waves off Bear Island, in the western Barents Sea around 260 miles northwest of the Norwegian coast.
On Monday afternoon a remote-controlled mini-sub took water samples from a ventilation pipe on the submarine with one reading indicating radiation levels are up to 100,000 times higher than those in normal sea water.
Low levels of radiation have occasionally been detected at the wreck over the past 30 years by both Russian and Norwegian research teams.
The last time radiation was measured was in 2008, when a Russian scientists said they had detected a small radioactive leak.
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
