Ineffective drugs take lives, waste money and make precious cures useless. Drugs have been recycled after their expiry date; they have been contaminated with fatal toxins; they have been made too weak or with no active ingredient at all.

Any efforts to improve public health by developing new medicines or by changing treatment policies will ultimately be pointless if the drugs patients actually take contain insufficient or incorrect ingredients.

Efforts to limit the commercial use of data on physician prescribing could have broad implications for regulatory programs that promote drug safety. At issue are a series of laws pursued by state legislators that would restrict access to information on the prescriptions written by individual doctors.

It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforce them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972 the movie critic Pauline Kael said...

Congress is poised to pass one of the worst public health laws ever conceived.

The same money can't be spent twice. ObamaCare tries to do precisely that, and the government will have to borrow the difference.

Wide-ranging, accessible, and provocative, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the future of American health care.

Genetically engineered animals embody an innovative technology that is transforming public health through biomedical, food, and environmental applications.