Posted by Michael Wonder on 10 Dec 2016
Big price hikes seen in drug that prevents overdose deaths
9 December 2016 - Two of the largest suppliers of the life-saving drug naloxone have dramatically increased their prices in recent years, threatening to make it less likely that someone can be saved from a potentially-fatal opioid overdose.
The warning published by the New England Journal of Medicine comes in the wake of recent of drug price gouging, most notably for Turing Pharmaceuticals' anti-parasite drug Daraprim and Mylan's EpiPens, designed to prevent death following a severe allergic reaction.
"It's certainly part of the larger trend in brand name drugs and old off-patent generics" that have been subject to large price hikes in recent years, said Ravi Gupta, coauthor of the opinion piece and a fourth-year medical student at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
