Pharmaceutics

Drug companies are working to develop a pure, more powerful version of the nation’s second most-abused medicine, which has addiction experts worried that it could spur a new wave of abuse. The new pills contain the highly addictive painkiller hydrocodone, packing up to 10 times the amount of the drug as existing medications such as [...]

US pharmaceutical companies have moved their operations overseas over the course of the past decade. Instead of testing trial medicines on Americans, more and more of these tests are being carried out on poor people in faraway places. Russia, China, Brazil, Poland, Uganda, and Romania are all hot spots for what is called clinical research [...]

Accidental drug overdoses from prescription pills have more than doubled in the past decade as deaths from illegal drugs decreased, a Florida study found. Prescription medications were implicated in 76 percent of all overdose deaths in Florida between 2003 and 2009, while illicit drugs like cocaine and heroin were present in 34 percent of deaths, [...]

International donors including Britain and billionaire Bill Gates pledged $4.3 billion on Monday to fund vaccination programs to protect children in poor countries against diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia. The funding would allow more than 250 million of the world’s poorest children to be vaccinated by 2015 and would prevent more than 4 million [...]