Since it’s already fashionable for medical establishments to hail the power of prescription drugs while claiming that vitamins kill you, who should be surprised when they take aim at your pets?
First Weight Loss Drug for Dogs in the UK
The world’s first anti-obesity drug for dogs has been launched….
Vets say obesity among animals is a growing problem, with increasing numbers of owners over-feeding them or not giving them enough exercise.
The drug – Yarvitan – costs £50 for an eight-week course of treatment, and must be prescribed by a vet.
Studies across Europe showed the drug helped dogs lose on average 8 per cent of their body weight.
The drug developers Janssen-Cilag claim Yarvitan can reduce the chance of a dog developing arthritis and can increase the life expectancy of an obese dog by 18 months.
For best results, they advise that owners should ensure that dogs are eating no more than the recommended daily amount.
Of course, they could just recommend that dog owners stop overfeeding their pets and start giving them more exercise, but where is the profit in that?
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Related Link:
FDA Approves First Dog Diet Drug in the U.S.
Pfizer to begin marketing Slentrol this spring.
Um…it’s fashionable for the medical community to promote actual medicines that go through clinical trials and through YEARS of research and testing to getting government approval than to just endorse a bunch of companies that slap together vitamins with no oversight or testing or publishing in peer-reviewed journals…nor have any regulatory agency monitoring their outrageous claims.
But no, no one wants to hear that. They just want to hear how evil the medical world is and how they’re keeping the cure for cancer from us so they can milk us for more money. They don’t want to hear that the vitamin and supplement industry is also a multi-billion dollar a year monster…only a monster that doesn’t have many rules governing their actions nor even have to prove any of their claims.
Glad you’re unbiased.
They eat what we eat, live where we live, exercise as much as we do and watch and learn attitudes from us. Our pets a reflection of ourselves, more than our children.
why would I want a skinny pet?
They just want to hear how evil the medical world is and how they’re keeping the cure for cancer from us so they can milk us for more money.
In 2003 a small biotechnology company called Esperion Therapeutics Inc developed a synthetic component of the “good” cholesterol that when given intravenously reduced artery disease in just six weeks. It was described as working like “liquid Drano for the arteries.” Researchers were excited about the results and the benefits the new drug promised. In December of 2003, Pfizer bought Esperion Therapeutics so that Pfizer “can bring our research capabilities to bear on an emerging new area…”. That was in 2003. Has anyone heard more about this new drug? I don’t think so. And you probably won’t since Pfizer makes Lipitor (which everyone has heard of) the world’s most prescribed drug for reducing LDL (bad cholesterol).
Nothing makes money like eliminating the competition.
Link to aquisition notice from Pfizer: http://tinyurl.com/3x98cg
Link in post #4 is supposed to be http://tinyurl.com/3x98cg
Something must have gotten lost in translation between the “slow down cowboy” and “kindacaptcha” messages when I tried to post the comment.
OR, you could replace 1/2 of your dog’s regular food with good old canned green beans. Watch the pounds melt away.
Ryan
Glad there will always be a drug for sale to do what good diet and exercise would on its own. Hooray for medical science!
#5 – That’s fascinating info, RonD. But the TinyURL only takes me to a San Diego hotel ad page. With the moderator’s permission, could you please post the entire URL? I really want to look at that.
The reason is that it is consistent with Pfizer reporting a sharp rise in full-year profits to $19.34bn in 2006, up from $8.9bn in 2005, partly because of strong sales of Lipitor. To celebrate, they’re cutting 10,000 jobs, or about 10% of its workforce, by closing three research sites and two factories in the US plus others in Germany, France, and Japan. The stated reason? The group is facing the patent expiry on its globally successful Lipitor. (All that is excerpted from a Jan. 22 report on the BBC: http://tinyurl.com/2bqwyx )
So Lipitor is about to go generic. And Pfizer has long held a patent on a (presumably superior) alternative drug. There are a LOT of ways this could shake out for Pfizer – and for the rest of us.
TJGeezer,
The tinyurl link will work if you type it into your browser manually. The symbol between the “3” and the “9” is the letter “x”. From some reason the blog is showing it as something else, like a tiny multiplication sign.
so the tiny url should end with: 3X98cg.
Here is the full link:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/12-21-2003/0002079411&EDATE=
#9 – Wow. Thanks. That is one interesting link.
So Pfizer paid $1.3 billion at a price of $35 per share, a 54 percent premium over Esperion’s then current share price. That’s a pretty hefty premium – they really WANTED that company. And last year they raked in $19.34 billion by not cannibalizing their own market for Lipitor.
That’s ugly, but they’re not in business to cut themselves off at the knees. What I”m wondering is whether they’ll finally do something with this now that they no longer have a stranglehold on the top statin on the market.
Someone – was it SN? – has suggested that companies that develop or buy up a patent be given a deadline to use it or forfeit the patent to the public domain. Right, like congress will let something THAT good for the U.S. people actually happen. But medicines really ought to be considered a special case. Companies that sit on useful therapies ought to lose the patent and pay criminal penalties, seems to me.
The real question is whether the patent they bought turned out to be a dud. Maybe further research showed it caused other intractable problems. Wish I knew a way to find out.
PS – Oops – I think I just hijacked the thread accidentally. Lipitor isn’t a doggie diet pill. Sorry! But that really is an interesting press release RonD found.
TJGeezer (#11), it’s not really unrelated to the wider topic at hand, and it’s Pfizer related too. If you find out more, feel free to post it here.