7 days in healthcare (October 14th-17th, 2024)

/in /by

Summay

Biomedicine

  • New applications for anti-obesity drugs. Ozempic and similar drugs also promise to control opioid and alcohol abuse by up to 50%.
  • Very good survival in Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Immune therapy achieves survival in Hodgkin’s lymphoma by almost 100%. Conclusions of a phase III trial.

Global Health

  • Two million children could die of hunger in Africa. The problem is that a nutrient for malnutrition has stopped arriving, according to UNICEF. The problem affects Mali, Nigeria, Niger and Chad the most, which have already exhausted their reserves and may affect another eight countries.
  • Low- and middle-income countries experience delays in access to essential medicines, according to a large study covering 1982-2024 in 75 countries. Since the launch, the period was 2.7 years in rich countries; 4.5 in upper-middle-income countries; 6.9 in low-middle-income countries; and 8 years for low-income people.
  • Major changes in human health improvement may occur by 2050. The Global Health Outlook for 2050. This study by The Lancet Commission concludes that the probability of premature death in their populations – the probability of dying before the age of 70 – can be reduced by 50% compared to 2019 levels. The strategy called “50 by 50” is an aspiration that can be achieved if we focus on 15 priorities.

International health policy

  • A law on assisted dying enters the British Parliament. The new project was introduced on October 16 by Kim Ladbeater, a Labour MP. It is not the first time that a project of this type has been analyzed in the House, the first time being in 1936.

National Health Policy (Spain)

  • It is said that the State Public Health Agency will respect the competences of the autonomous communities. It is stated that the Agency will not assume any competence that the Ministry does not have now. The problem is that, by way of political consensus, the Agency comes out watered down and very far from the requirements so well set out in the SESPAS document.
  • The minister says that she will change the waiting list law to avoid “statistical traps”. One might have thought that the objective would be to solve the waiting list problem, but we already see that the most urgent thing is to correct supposed “statistical traps” in some autonomous communities.
  • Castilla-La Mancha announces for 2025 the largest OPE in the history of SESCAM with 5,200 places. It is sold as a great success, and not only by Castilla-La Mancha, but by practically all the autonomous communities, which represents the greatest attack on a modern personnel policy in the health system, imposing the criteria of a nineteenth-century Civil Service.
  • Waiting lists are falling for the first time since the pandemic, but they remain at historic highs. 848,340 patients are waiting for a non-urgent operation. In 2019, before the pandemic, the number of people waiting for an operation was around 700,000.
  • The PSOE, in favour of cheaper prices for generics and biosimilars. The PSOE presents a non-legislative proposal (PNL) in Congress to promote generics and biosimilars. It is proposed that generics and biosimilars should always be cheaper than brand name medicines.
  • The irrational proliferation of medical schools continues. The autonomous communities open new medical schools against the criteria of the Ministry of Health and the deans. Spain has doubled the number of centres offering this degree in just over a decade; the autonomous executives want to implement them in their territories and the private ones see business due to the high demand.
  • Spain will bear the highest cost linked to the ageing of Europe in the coming decades. Brussels points to Spain as the economy where the cost of population ageing will be highest.

Companies

  • International
    • Sanofi joins its rivals in research into nuclear cancer treatments.
  • National
    • Health insurance will increase by more than 10% in 2025. Prices have risen by almost 50% in the last ten years, with an average growth of between 4% and 7%. This means that the average insurance policy has gone from 650 euros per year in 2015 to 950 euros in 2024 and could reach 1,100 euros next year.
    • Sanitas buys the eight Ibermedic centres in Madrid

Biomedicine

Global Health

International health policy

National health policy

Companies

 

 

This post is also available in: Spanish