Providing News & Views for Parents
A great read from NPR. Here’s an excerpt:
A full-term pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, but elective deliveries are often planned for two or three weeks earlier. And even though 37 weeks is also still considered full term, studies show that babies born even a few weeks too early are at greater risk for health problems than those who are born later. That has some doctors campaigning to curb the trend of scheduled labor and delivery. [Read more...]
UPDATE on FDA: Pharmacies Can Still Make Preterm Birth Drug
Naked money grab. Those are the only words I could think of today after speaking with Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Plano obstetrician Randall Burt. It seems to me that’s what KV Pharmaceutical was doing when it apparently went trolling around for an old, cheap medication that desperate people would do just about anything to get, made a synthetic version of it, called it Makena, and announced it would charge an obscene amount of money for it. [Read more...]
This is important to so many moms and babies, it’s difficult to calculate. This WebMD article announces the Food and Drug Administration’s agreement to allow women at risk for preterm birth (ie have had a previous preterm birth) to continue to receive shots of 17-Hydroxyprogesterone from compounding pharmacies for 15 to 20 bucks a pop. The price of medicine had been set to increase to $1,500 because the FDA had approved KV Parmaceutical version - Makena - and women using the compounding version would be forced to take the KV version.
This news caused many women taking weekly shots of 17 OHP to go into a full-on panic [Read more...]
Baby & Child Health News
