Rare Disease

The CDC has released guidelines with detailed information on the type of personal protective equipment and the procedure for donning and removing, for healthcare workers managing Ebola patients.

Brincidofovir is being developed by the company against several different viruses, including smallpox and Ebola.

Health officials from CDC and the state of Texas are reeling in the wake of today's report that a second nurse at the Texas hospital that treated Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for the virus. The news came while health leaders were still trying to determine how 26-year-old nurse Nina Pham contracted Ebola while caring for the first patient diagnosed with the disease on US soil. Meanwhile, the largest nurses' union says its members report that most hospitals are not ready for an Ebola patient.

If Congress had not pushed back the deadline for implementing ICD-10 last spring, the United States now would have a specific code for tracking Ebola, according to an infographic from the Coalition for ICD-10.

With the enormous amount of data being collected and entered into EHRs, the human brain (in this case the physician brain) is probably tuning out information that would probably stay if there was a conversation with the patient instead.

As Texas health officials monitor 80 people for symptoms of the Ebola virus, the question arises: could this public health threat have avoided if the ER at Texas Presbyterian admitted the patient with the disease when it first had the chance? Was the patient's insurance status an issue, as some have suggested?

For patients who develop infections while staying in a hospital, the chances of it becoming drug resistant increases 1% for each day of hospitalization, according to researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

The study, conducted in cynomolgus monkeys, explored several candidate vaccines from NIAID's preclinical services program.

The FDA, in a press release, has warned consumers to be aware of such products being sold online.

Specialty drugs expected to account for 40% of total prescription spending by 2016, according to Catamaran Corporation.

New research found that the risk of developing breast cancer increased in women who had mutations of a gene related to BRCA2, the PALB2 gene.

The World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency Friday over the Ebola outbreak in western Africa that has killed almost 1,000 people. The outbreak of the deadly virus is "extraordinary event" and a public health risk to other countries, it said.

The study, published in NEJM, proposes enhanced surveillance in women with PALB2 mutations, similar to women harboring BRCA2 mutations.

ABT-414 is being developed to treat glioblastoma multiforme.

In conjunction with provider-oriented payment reform, tools like VBID that change the focus from how much to how well we spend our healthcare dollars.

This spring as the feds have been drawing up new rules for the program, a pitched battle has broken out between hospitals and drug manufacturers who say the program, known as 340B, is now bloated and badly regulated.

Once strictly the domain of research labs, gene-sequencing tests increasingly are being used to help understand the genetic causes of rare disease, putting insurance companies in the position of deciding whether to pay the $5,000 to $17,000 for the tests.

Recent controversy over the cost of Sovaldi (Gilead Sciences)-a $1000-per-dose treatment for hepatitis C-has sparked a debate as to whether there should be federal caps on the costs of certain prescription drugs.

Those with chronic illnesses such as leukemia, hepatitis C, and multiple sclerosis may face a significant increase in their out-of-pocket expenses for specialty drugs. This is because payers are replacing fixed-dollar copayments with coinsurance rates that require patients to contribute a higher percentage of the cost for their specialty medications.

Examining the financial impact that patient assistance programs and the 340B Drug Pricing Program have on improving medication cost.

When it comes to managing chronic conditions and rare disease, the cost of treatment can be astronomical.