A.M. Vitals: Coca-Cola Found Fungicide in OJ From Brazil

Orange Juice Worries: Coca-Cola said it found an unapproved fungicide in some of it and its competitors’ orange juice imported from Brazil, though it wouldn’t identify the brands, the WSJ reports. Coke makes Simply Orange and Minute Maid.? The FDA is testing OJ from supermarket shelves for the fungicide, but the EPA said consumption of juice that includes fungicide at the levels that have been reported doesn’t raise health concerns.

Polio Milestone: India has gone a full year without any reported cases of polio, the Associated Press reports. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria would be the only countries where polio is considered endemic if no cases from the last year in India turn up, the AP says. The country’s health minister says vaccination must continue to keep the virus at bay.

Warning Letter: The FDA warned Johnson & Johnson that the company’s failure to report problems with insulin pumps made by its Animas Corp. unit could mean fines and an injunction, Dow Jones Newswires reports. J&J said it is “dedicated” to resolving the FDA’s concerns; the company says some patients have experienced deterioration of the keypads on the pumps.

Healthier Beneficiaries: Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that Medicare Advantage plans that offer gym memberships tend to attract healthier beneficiaries, Kaiser Health News’ Capsules blog reports. The study can’t tell whether health plans intended that effect or simply wanted to boost market share, Capsules says. The plans aren’t allowed to select seniors based on health status.

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A.M. Vitals: Pfizer CEO Says Lipitor Share is As Expected

Hanging On: Pfizer CEO Ian Read said the company’s name-brand Lipitor is retaining 37% to 38% of the overall U.S. market share for the drug as new generic versions compete for customers, the WSJ reports. Speaking at the J.P. Morgan health-care conference in San Francisco, Read said it would be hard for Lipitor to top that share. In June, more generic versions are expected to hit the market, priced at a 80% to 90% discount to the list price for the name-brand compared to 50% for current generics, the paper says.

Pot and Lung Function: A study of more than 5,000 people published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that measures of lung function didn’t decline with marijuana use and may actually have improved, Reuters reports. Up until the equivalent of 2,555 lifetime joints, lung volume and air-flow rates increased. But researchers warned the results don’t mean pot is safe, Reuters reports.

WebMD Off the Block: The CEO of WebMD resigned and the health-information company took itself off the market amid its own projections of a 2% to 8% revenue decline and “significantly lower” net income this year, the WSJ reports. Anthony Vuolo, chief operating officer and chief financial officer, will become interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor to Wayne T. Gattinella, the paper says.

Assessing Life Expectancy: A review published in JAMA identifies 16 scales used to evaluate whether an older patient is likely to die within six months to five years, the New York Times reports. It’s not clear if the assessment scales, which are also posted at ePrognosis.org, will actually improve patient care, and authors caution they aren’t perfect.

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A.M. Vitals: CVS to Pay $5 Million to Settle FTC Charges

CVS and FTC Settle: CVS Caremark will pay $5 million to settle FTC charges that the company’s Rx America unit posted prices for certain Medicare Part D prescription drugs that were far lower than the actual prices, Dow Jones Newswires reports. The mistaken rates were posted in 2007 and 2008 at CVS and Walgreen pharmacies and prompted Medicare consumers to choose Rx America without realizing how high their drug costs would be, DJN says. CVS says the incorrect prices were posted inadvertently and that the problem took place before it acquired Rx America.

Parsing Health-Care Spending: A report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality finds that 1% of the non-institutionalized U.S. population accounted for almost 22% of health-care spending in 2009, while the bottom half of the population accounted for just 2.9%, NPR’s Shots blog reports. Beyond the sick population, people who spent the most tended to be elderly, female, white and on public insurance; the low-spenders were healthy, young, and more likely to be Hispanic or African-American, Shots reports.

Brazilian Orange Juice: Coca-Cola says only a “relatively small number” of consumers have contacted the company with questions about the fungicide carbendazim, which is not approved in the U.S. but has turned up in some orange juice from Coke and its competitors imported from Brazil, the WSJ reports. The FDA has said it will pull from store shelves OJ with anything more than trace elements of the fungicide. PepsiCo., which also uses some juice imported from Brazil, said it’s testing its own products but wouldn’t say whether the fungicide has been detected.

Two Hearts Jump-Started: A case study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine describes how a man with two hearts — one his own, one from a donor — had both organs defibrillated after they developed irregular rhythms in the hospital, the Los Angeles Times’ Booster Shots blog reports. The man, who also had a pacemaker, had the second heart implanted in a relatively uncommon procedure that is done “when the original heart is too weak to work by itself or the donor heart is a different size than the patient’s original heart,” the LAT says.

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A.M. Vitals: Drug Kills Fat Cells in Monkeys; Human Trials May Be Next

Killing Fat Cells in Monkeys: A study published in Science Translational Medicine finds that a drug previously shown to cause weight loss in obese mice by killing certain fat cells can do the same in obese monkeys, raising hopes it might also work in humans, the WSJ reports. The drug was developed at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and rights have been licensed to Ablaris Therapeutics, part of Arrowhead Research Corp. The company said a trial in obese patients with advanced prostate cancer could begin next year.

Seeking Signs of Awareness: Research published in The Lancet describes how the use of an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine was used to detect signs of consciousness in three patients previously thought to be in a vegetative state, the New York Times reports. Experts say the exam — which involved asking patients to imagine performing simple movements, like making a fist, when they heard a beep, then looking for certain patterns of brain activity — needs to be validated in larger studies before it can be introduced into clinical practice.

Legal Developments: Merck said in a regulatory filing yesterday it has received requests from federal investigators about how the pharma company marketed the heart drug Integrilin and the antibiotic Avelox between Jan. 2003 and June 2010, the WSJ reports. Both drugs were from Schering-Plough, which Merck purchased in 2009. The company also said it would pay $49.5 million to settle some class-action lawsuits over Vioxx, the painkiller pulled from the market in 2004.

Sobering Cuts: A report from the National Association on Mental Illness finds 29 states cut their mental-health budgets between fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2012, with four states making cuts of more than 30%, Kaiser Health News reports. Most states are increasing funds for fiscal 2012 alone, but that can’t make up for the previous cuts — particularly given that demand for services has risen in recent years as the economy has faltered, the report says.

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A.M. Vitals: Lilly, Amylin Scrap Diabetes-Drug Partnership

End of an Alliance: Eli Lilly and Amylin Pharmaceuticals yesterday said they’d scrapped their diabetes-drug partnership, with Amylin paying $250 million to Lilly upfront and as much as $1.2 billion later depending on sales of drugs containing the molecule exenatide, the WSJ reports. The original drug, Byetta, hasn’t been as successful as was originally hoped; a longer-acting version, Bydureon, is up for U.S. approval in early 2012. Amylin gets all U.S. rights to the molecule at the end of the month, with rights outside of the U.S. passing over sometime between late next year and the end of 2013, the paper says.

Bypass Surgery Doesn’t Improve Outcomes: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that a bypass surgery to improve blood flow to the brain didn’t prevent strokes in high-risk patients with blocked carotid arteries, the New York Times reports. The study was ended early after it became clear that while the surgery did improve blood flow to the brain, it caused strokes in the first month after the operation, the paper says. In September researchers reported that drugs were more effective in preventing a recurrence of stroke than were stents used in arteries in the brain.

‘Personhood’ Measure Defeated: Mississippi voters rejected the so-called “personhood” measure that would have given legal rights to fertilized eggs, the WSJ reports. As the paper reported last month, opponents had argued the amendment would not only outlaw abortion, but would also lead to the banning of some birth-control methods and medical procedures and would affect in vitro fertilization.

Checkup at Walmart?: Walmart wants to be a big player in primary healthcare, NPR and Kaiser Health News report, citing a request for information seeking partners in the effort sent out by the mega-retailer. (A Walmart spokeswoman confirmed the proposal to KHN and NPR but wouldn’t give details.) Analysts say Walmart may want to expand the services now offered by its in-store clinics, possibly to include management of chronic conditions like asthma and arthritis, the news organizations report.

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A.M. Vitals: More Aggressive Cholesterol Screening for Kids to Be Advised

Screening Kids: Guidelines expected to be presented Sunday by members of National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute panel will call for screening more kids for high cholesterol, the Associated Press reports. Panel members wouldn’t reveal details of the new recommendations ahead of the presentation — which will be at a meeting of the American Heart Association — but said they would include “more aggressive recommendations for cholesterol screening and treatment in children,” the AP says.

Waiting for Monday: Will cases concerning the health-care overhaul law be reviewed by the Supreme Court soon? On Monday at 10 a.m. the court will issue its next round of orders on pending cases, the WSJ’s Law Blog reports, which means there could be some health-law news then. Kaiser Health News has a helpful scoreboard tracking challenges to the law.

Oops: Brain researchers say presidential candidate Rick Perry’s debate gaffe the other night — he couldn’t come up with the third federal agency he’d like to see axed — can be explained by several different possible mechanisms, the New York Times’ Well blog reports. Distraction, a racing mind, interference from past memories or stress all could have interfered with the candidate’s brain’s ability to retrieve the information he was searching for, the NYT says.

Controversial Notion: Results from a 26-patient study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest alcoholics with very severe hepatitis needn’t wait until they have been sober for six months before they receive a life-saving liver transplant, the Associated Press reports. That idea is likely to be controversial since donor organs are already in short supply, with more than 1,400 Americans dying in 2010 before they could receive a liver transplant, the AP says.

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