Tag Archives: control

Despite protests, BLM returns wild horses to range in Nevada

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Fish Creek Mares Indian Lakes aka Broken Arrow 2015

April 12, 2015

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Despite the protests of a rural county and rancher, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has returned some 160 wild horses to the range in central Nevada.

The agency returned the horses to the Fish Creek Herd Management Area near Eureka on Tuesday after being cleared to do so by the Interior Board of Land Appeals.

The BLM originally had planned to return some 100 mares treated with a fertility control vaccine and 80 studs to the HMA on Feb. 20. They were among 424 horses removed from the HMA during a roundup that ended earlier in February.

The bureau routinely thins what it calls overpopulated herds on public land across the West, sending horses that aren’t adopted by the public to pastures in the Midwest for the rest of their lives.

The agency also routinely releases mares treated with fertility control drugs back to the range after being rounded up. Varying numbers of studs also are released back to the range to help maintain the genetic viability of herds.

Eureka County commissioners and rancher Kevin Borba filed an appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals to block the return of any of the 424 horses to the range and to challenge the BLM’s assessment of how many horses the HMA can support.

But the board affirmed the BLM’s authority to return 162 of the horses to the range. Arguments in the case continue on the underlying claims.

Borba has said the BLM has drastically reduced his livestock allotments in the HMA while allowing well over twice as many horses in it as it can support. He and Eureka commissioners seek the removal of more horses.

Horse advocates praised the BLM’s return of the horses to the range, saying it’s in line with recommendations released in 2013 by a National Academy of Sciences panel calling for increased emphasis on fertility control to keep horse numbers down.

“Now is the time to move forward with innovative management that makes sense, keeping wild horses on their range and saving millions of tax dollars in the long term,” Neda DeMayo, president of Return to Freedom, said in a statement. “It is time for a new direction instead of wasting time and money obstructing positive solutions that will benefit the horses, wildlife, ranchers and the range.”

But not all horse advocacy groups support the use of fertility control drugs on mares.

“We want to see drug-free holistic management used for native wild horses,” said Anne Novak, executive director of Protect Mustangs. “(The fertility control vaccine) PZP sterilizes after multiple use and we’re concerned that will ruin survival of the fittest.”

Borba has said he thinks the fertility control vaccine is far less effective than the BLM and horse advocates claim, and horse numbers will further explode as a result. Ranchers view wild horses as competition for scare forage in the arid West.

Cross-posted for educational purposes only from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Experimenting on wild horses creates cheap R & D for drugmakers

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PM PZP Syringe Yearling Meme

Did you know that America’s wild horses are used in extensive fertility control EXPERIMENTS for decades involving forced drugging of PZP, a pesticide made from slaughterhouse pig ovaries on federally protected and state wild horses, field spaying, and more. Which wild horse and humane groups are involved in cruel experimentation that results in killing wild horses to perform necropsies, ripping out ovaries in the field to look for PZP damage, carving up pregnant mares, etc.?

The horse’s reproductive system is very close to a human reproductive system. . .

With many developing countries hungry for long-lasting human contraception, is the pharmaceutical industry being subsidized by tax dollars to fund fertility control experiments on wild horses with the immunocontraceptive PZP and other experimental drugs? Are they cashing in on a cheap laboratory–on the range? As you will read below, the cost to research and develop a new drug is $2.6 billion dollars so follow the money and the decades of PZP and fertility control experiments points to the obvious.

Cost to Develop and Win Marketing Approval for a New Drug Is $2.6 Billion

BOSTON – Nov. 18, 2014 – Developing a new prescription medicine that gains marketing approval, a process often lasting longer than a decade, is estimated to cost $2,558 million, according to a new study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.

The $2,558 million figure per approved compound is based on estimated:
Average out-of-pocket cost of $1,395 million
Time costs (expected returns that investors forego while a drug is in development) of $1,163 million
Estimated average cost of post-approval R&D—studies to test new indications, new formulations, new dosage strengths and regimens, and to monitor safety and long-term side effects in patients required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a condition of approval—of $312 million boosts the full product lifecycle cost per approved drug to $2,870 million. All figures are expressed in 2013 dollars.
The new analysis, which updates similar Tufts CSDD analyses, was developed from information provided by 10 pharmaceutical companies on 106 randomly selected drugs that were first tested in human subjects anywhere in the world from 1995 to 2007.

“Drug development remains a costly undertaking despite ongoing efforts across the full spectrum of pharmaceutical and biotech companies to rein in growing R&D costs,” said Joseph A. DiMasi, director of economic analysis at Tufts CSDD and principal investigator for the study.

He added, “Because the R&D process is marked by substantial technical risks, with expenditures incurred for many development projects that fail to result in a marketed product, our estimate links the costs of unsuccessful projects to those that are successful in obtaining marketing approval from regulatory authorities.”

In a study published in 2003, Tufts CSDD estimated the cost per approved new drug to be $802 million (in 2000 dollars) for drugs first tested in human subjects from 1983 to 1994, based on average out-of-pocket costs of $403 million and capital costs of $401 million.

The $802 million, equal to $1,044 million in 2013 dollars, indicates that the cost to develop and win marketing approval for a new drug has increased by 145% between the two study periods, or at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5%.

According to DiMasi, rising drug development costs have been driven mainly by increases in out-of-pocket costs for individual drugs and higher failure rates for drugs tested in human subjects.

Factors that likely have boosted out-of-pocket clinical costs include increased clinical trial complexity, larger clinical trial sizes, higher cost of inputs from the medical sector used for development, greater focus on targeting chronic and degenerative diseases, changes in protocol design to include efforts to gather health technology assessment information, and testing on comparator drugs to accommodate payer demands for comparative effectiveness data.

Lengthening development and approval times were not responsible for driving up development costs, according to DiMasi.

“In fact,” DiMasi said, “changes in the overall time profile for development and regulatory approval phases had a modest moderating effect on the increase in R&D costs. As a result, the time cost share of total cost declined from approximately 50% in previous studies to 45% for this study.”

The study was authored by DiMasi, Henry G. Grabowski of the Duke University Department of Economics, and Ronald W. Hansen at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.

ABOUT THE TUFTS CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF DRUG DEVELOPMENT

The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (http://csdd.tufts.edu) at Tufts University provides strategic information to help drug developers, regulators, and policy makers improve the quality and efficiency of pharmaceutical development, review, and utilization. Tufts CSDD, based in Boston, conducts a wide range of in-depth analyses on pharmaceutical issues and hosts symposia, workshops, and public forums, and publishes Tufts CSDD Impact Reports, a bi-monthly newsletter providing analysis and insight into critical drug development issues.

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