TV News LIES

A remarkable study published in the Cochrane Libary found no evidence of benefit for influenza vaccinations and also noted that the vast majority of trials were inadequate.

The authors stated that the only ones showing benefit were industry-funded. They also pointed out that the industry-funded studies were more likely to be published in the most prestigious journals...and one more thing: They found cases of severe harm caused by the vaccines, in spite of inadequate reporting of adverse effects.

The world's biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable. Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.

Last year, the company came to a tentative settlement with the Kano state government which was to cost it $75m.

Cigarette smoke causes immediate damage to the lungs and to DNA, and President Barack Obama's administration will make stop-smoking efforts a priority, federal health officials said on Thursday. Smoking hurts not only the smokers, but people around them, and taxes, bans and treatment all must be used together to help get smoking rates down, U.S. Surgeon-General Dr. Regina Benjamin said in a report on smoking.

"The chemicals in tobacco smoke reach your lungs quickly every time you inhale causing damage immediately," Benjamin said in a statement. "Inhaling even the smallest amount of tobacco smoke can also damage your DNA, which can lead to cancer."

The Senate has passed a $15 billion bill that would block the impending 25% cut in the Medicare payment rate to physicians and instead keep rates steady through 2011. The cut was scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2011. If the House passes the bill -- which is likely -- it would be the fifth and longest extension of Medicare physician payment rates enacted this year. And it essentially puts doctors back in the yearly "last-minute-extension" cycle Congress has followed for most of the past decade.

What the bill does not do is fix the sustainable growth rate (SGR) problem, and doctors would be subject to a cut of more than 25% for treating Medicare patients in 2012 unless Congress figures out a long-term solution in the meantime.

The first new weight-loss pill in a decade moved closer to U.S. approval on Tuesday, when a panel of expert advisers backed Orexigen Therapeutics's Contrave despite heart risk concerns. It was the third new weight-loss drug to come before U.S. regulators this year, the Food and Drug Administration having rejected two rival medicines in October.

Orexigen's stock more than doubled to $12.20 from Monday's close of $4.76 when it reopened in after-hours trade Tuesday. Shares of competitors Vivus Inc and Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc also rose, as investors bet Contrave's approval could revive their fortunes.

A smokeless tobacco company has agreed to pay $5 million to the family of a man who died of mouth cancer in what the family's attorney and an expert called the first wrongful death settlement from chewing tobacco. Attorney Antonio Ponvert III told The Associated Press on Tuesday that U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co. agreed to pay $5 million to the family of Bobby Hill of Canton, N.C.

"This company manufactures and sells a dangerous and defective product that it knows causes addiction, disease and death in consumers who use it as intended," Ponvert said. The company, which makes Copenhagen and Skoal brands and was headquartered in Greenwich, Conn. before it was acquired by Altria last year, confirmed the settlement in a regulatory filing, but declined further comment.