AIDS Treatment News Table of Contents, February 2, 2006
Medicare Prescription Nightmare: Overview January 28, 2006
Hundreds of thousands if not millions of patients had problems getting their Medicare Part D prescriptions filled in January 2006, and many failures continue. Some states have provided emergency relief as a temporary measure. This article -- which applies only to persons eligible for MediCARE, which is about 20% of people in HIV care -- explains some of the major problems and what is being done to relieve them, and suggests online and telephone resources for information, and for reaching people who can answer questions when necessary.
FDA, Companies Test RFID Tracking to Prevent Drug Counterfeiting
The U.S. has an apparently growing problem with fake, counterfeit drugs entering the mainstream drug supply, and being fraudulently sold at full price in regular pharmacies and hospitals; some have no active ingredient, or too little, or substitute a cheap drug for an expensive one. The FDA has asked the manufacturers to develop technology to track all shipments electronically as they move through the distribution chain; currently, RFID (radio frequency identification) is the preferred method for doing so. This article explains what is happening, and why we do not believe that this use of RFID is a privacy threat -- though other privacy issues are among the most important questions we face today.
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