Ethics Newsline®

VARIOUS DATELINES
Drug prices, a recurrent theme in international news, surfaced in three major stories last week:

• In Canada, a prominent cancer specialist is calling for scrutiny of drug prices following news that a popular chemotherapy drug soon will be sold by only one company — at double its current $500-per-vial price. The Globe & Mail and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald report that changes to Canada’s intellectual property law will give the firm Sanofi-Aventis a monopoly on the drug oxaliplatin, and let it charge $1,000 for a 100-milligram vial, a price the company says was approved by the Canadian government and is not unreasonable.
• China last week said it will clamp down on “unjustified fluctuations” in drug prices, launching an investigation into the practices used to market over 1,500 drugs, according to a report from the official government newspaper People’s Daily. In the past, marketers had escaped price controls by simply changing the name of the same concoction, according to the report.
• India’s government, also under pressure to reduce drug prices, has lowered the permissible increase in the cost of a pharmaceutical from 20 percent per year to 10 percent, according to the Economic Times, the nation’s second-largest financial publication. As of late last week, the government had asked various companies to explain price increases on 52 drugs, threatening to cut prices arbitrarily if it is not satisfied with the reasons.