The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sometimes finds out that a drug it has approved for the market has dire and unanticipated side effects. A …
Author: Jonathan Rabinovitz
Autism in Africa?
Autism has sometimes been described as a disease of industrialized high-technology societies. If that’s truly the case, it could have serious implications for our understanding …
Autism therapies: It still comes down to parents
There has been a recent flurry of new discoveries about the nature and cause of autism (revised estimates about the role of the environment vs. …
Who pays for autism therapy?
The battle to get health insurers to cover a particular therapy for children with autism - Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA - is heating up, …
What’s a parent to do: Risk of autism appears to run higher in siblings
You may have heard about a new UC Davis study showing that parents of a child with autism are substantially more likely to have another …
FDA begins to revamp approval process for medical devices
Medical device makers complain of a regulatory obstacle course at the U. S. Food and Drug Administration, which delays them from getting their new products …
$20 million Coulter endowment to boost bioengineering start-ups
"This is more like business." That's what Russ Altman, MD, PhD, chair of bioengineering, said about a new endowment that was announced today. The Wallace …
New class of physician-scientists showcase research
How can we better study frostbite? Why do so many patients skip their ophthalmology appointments? Does it make a difference where on the spine neural …
Failure to vaccinate linked to pertussis deaths
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today released disappointing numbers about adults who had received the tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (Tdap) vaccine. (It's …
Publish or perish: Grad students facing tougher barriers
Being the first author on a paper in an esteemed journal is the objective for graduate students nationwide. Such an achievement opens the door to …
Comfort from FDA with one question
Here's a small sign that things are turning around at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. A few days ago, my blog entry about the …
FDA walks line between innovation and safety
"We're scared. We don't know what to expect." That's what one medical device company executive told me about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's plans …
Improving vaccine response to flu pandemics
The H1N1 influenza did not cause the devastating pandemic that many feared, but it did draw attention to how our nation lacks the ability to …
Payback time for NIH grant recipients?
What if scientists who benefit from grants from the National Institutes of Health had to devote some small portion of their time explaining to the …
Beyond Berwick brouhaha: Medicare chief another step to health-care reform
The White House announcement that President Barack Obama was doing an end run around the U.S. Senate and doing a recess appointment of a new …
African measles deaths from vaccination gap
Amid all the debate in the United States about whether vaccines are safe, people sometimes lose sight of what happens when children miss their measles …