• Down comes the pediatrician’s wall of baby pictures, another HIPAA casualty [Anemona Hartocollis/NY Times, resulting letters to the editor, earlier, NPR with somewhat different slant]
• Had the Washington Post stayed on story of Maryland health exchange fiasco, it might have held power to account [my Free State Notes]
• FDA rules requiring that certain drugs be kept out of hands of anyone but patients may inadvertently establish monopoly for some off-patent compounds [Derek Lowe via Alex Tabarrok]
• Richard Epstein argues Hobby Lobby right result, wrong reasoning [new Cato Supreme Court Review, more]
• Defensive medicine: so much easier to go ahead and order the ultrasound [White Coat]
• Fate of melanoma-scanning device and the FDA [Alex Tabarrok via Elizabeth Nolan Brown] Can agency learn from European private certification? [more]
• Seredipitous offshoot of study on rats helped premature infants; but would this have been quite as likely to appear in HuffPo if framed as “what we owe lab-animal research” rather than “what we owe federal research”? [Sam Stein; related, first volunteer given new trial Ebola vaccine, and a hat tip to lab-animal research on that too [Wellcome, U.K.]

Filed under: animal rights, defensive medicine, FDA, HIPAA, Maryland