Word: merck
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...raids, early on Wednesday, were launched from Brussels to investigate whether big drug companies were fixing the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. They included forays on Pfizer, Merck, Bayer Schering Pharma and Roche as well as generic firms such as Teva and Sandoz. Hours later, with almost ironic understatement, the E.U. competition watchdog said it had merely launched a "sector inquiry into pharmaceuticals with unannounced inspections...
After nearly two years of waiting, the results came out on Monday on the long-awaited heart drug Vytorin - and the news wasn't good. Vytorin's manufacturers, Merck and Schering-Plough, announced that while the drug reduced levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol, in a group of 750 patients, the medication, which has been on the market since 2004, had little effect on the buildup of plaque in the arteries, a harbinger of heart attack and stroke...
...even there, Vytorin failed to show much effect. Vytorin is actually the combination of two drugs - one of the early statin medications, simvastatin (also known as Zocor), made by Merck, and ezetimibe, or Zetia, made by Schering-Plough. Ezetimibe is the first cholesterol-lowering medication that works by blocking absorption of cholesterol in the gut, rather than regulating the fat's production in the liver, like other statins do. ENHANCE compared the effect of Vytorin to simvastatin alone, and showed little difference between the two medications when it came to plaque size in the arteries. Simvastatin came off patent...
Probably not. Officials at the CDC and FDA stress that there is no serious health risk associated with this recall. The vaccines themselves have not been contaminated so far, but Merck decided to pull all the shots made on those machines as a precaution...
...Officials at Merck and Sanofi Pasteur - the companies that produce the 14 million doses of Hib vaccine administered each year - are working with CDC officials to ensure that the shortage is addressed as quickly as possible, but some doctors who received their entire supply of vaccine from Merck may not have vaccines for a few weeks. CDC is making available some doses from its national stockpile, an emergency supply created for just such situations, and Sanofi Pasteur is increasing production to make up for some of the shortfall...