corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16917

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

The Associated Press
EU raids drug makers in antitrust probe
Business Week 2009 Dec 9
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9CFRRAG0.htm


Full text:

European Union antitrust regulators said they made surprise raids on the offices of drug makers in several European nations Wednesday to seek evidence that they struck anticompetitive business deals or used a dominant market position to squeeze rivals.

They did not name the companies and said the raids were a preliminary step in an antitrust investigation. If they find the firms guilty, they can fine them up to 10 percent of annual global turnover.

In October, pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-Aventis SA, Novartis AG and Ratiopharm International GmbH said their French offices had been raided.

The EU’s competition commissioner Neelie Kroes warned in July that major drug makers face a wave of antitrust investigations. The EU concluded a broad inquiry into the pharmaceutical sector by saying that drugs companies are deliberately stalling cheaper generic versions of their own medicines once exclusive patents expire.

Until now, the EU has only gone public about one other investigation involving France’s Les Laboratoires Servier for hindering the launch of generic versions of its heart disease drug perindopril.

Regulators said they suspected that Servier did deals with generic rivals Krka, Lupin, Matrix, Niche Generics Ltd and Teva to hold back cheaper versions.

The EU says generic drugs are on average 40 percent cheaper than their branded rivals two years after they launch. It warned that it knew of at least 200 settlement agreements — some including payments to delay drug launches — between generic and brand-name drug makers that could restrict the rollout of generic versions.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909