Safeguarding the new benefit, which applies only to pills, may be even tougher.
Vertex also is in late-stage tests of a new AIDS drug, a protease inhibitor that requires only two pills a day versus six or more for rival remedies.
He says that doctors should probably only use sleeping pills for acute, short-term problems.
The vaccine differs from birth control pills not only in the size of its benefit to recipients, but also because the vaccine benefits more than simply the person who receives it.
FORBES: The Pill, the Pox and the Limits of Religious Freedom
Although he prefers using behavioural therapy where possible, he says, some children are so disturbed that pills are the only option, at least initially.
Ambien, sold by French drug giant Sanofi-Synthelabo (nyse: SNY - news - people ), is currently the only one of these new sleeping pills approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
One serious criticism is that despite the claim that 59% of irritable bowel patients who got placebo pills got better versus only 35% who took nothing got better, when you look more closely at the data, the difference between the two groups was surprisingly small.
He estimates that only 5% of his chronic pain patients take these pills daily.
Scharf, who has worked on clinical trials or done consulting for most companies in the field, has no doubt that some patients will take these pills every day, but he says they are only the beginning.
Only five-10-thousandths of what the company claimed the pills contained on the packaging was in a serving of Disney and Marvel Complete tablets for children ages 2 to 4, court documents filed by the FTC alleged.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, a 2011 survey by Pfizer found that 80% of pills sold online as "Viagra" were counterfeit drugs that only contained about 30% to 50% of the active ingredient sildenafil.
When we polled 1, 000 people, we found 52% would be likely to take pills that had been returned unused by other patients and checked for safety, while only 19% said they would be very unlikely to do so.
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