Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

New FDA-approved drug makes severe food allergies less life-threatening

Summary: A new antibody drug called omalizumab, which lessens the severe allergic reactions people have to some foods, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Context: Over the course of several injections, this drug has been shown to help patients tolerate increasing volumes of whatever it is they’re allergic to, including things like nuts, milk, eggs, and wheat; about 17% of people who received the drug in clinical tests didn’t experience any benefits, so this isn’t a universal, panacea solution, but it did allow the majority of subjects in most trials to tolerate, for instance, the equivalent of several peanuts, despite being deathly allergic to peanuts, reducing their severe allergic responses down to minor versions of the same; this is one of many drugs that was originally approved to treat other things, in this case asthma, hives, and nasal polyps, but which has now been successfully repurposed for other utilities.

—Ars Technica

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Capital One is buying Discover Financial for $35 billion

Summary: Capital One has announced that it will buy Discover Financial Services for more than $35 billion.

Context: If this deal is allowed by regulators, it would create a new credit card company worth more than $52 billion; Discover has suffered a fair bit of internal and regulatory tumult in recent years, and has been approached by many financial institutions about an acquisition over the course of the past decade, as many banks and credit card-issuers would love to have their own payment system to help them become less reliant on entities like Visa and Mastercard, and that’s something Discover offers, though on a smaller scale; the acquisition would also allow Capital One to increase the number of wealthy cardholders they have on their books, balancing out the large number of low credit-score credit card customers they currently have on their roster.

—The Wall Street Journal

South Korean doctors walk out, protesting plan to increase their ranks

Summary: Medical interns and residents walked off the job at major South Korean hospitals yesterday to protest a government plan to increase the number of doctors in the country by allowing more students into local medical schools.

Context: South Korea has one of the lowest doctors-per-capita ratios in the wealthy world, and that combined with a rapidly aging population has made attaining medical care more and more difficult; the government says it needs to increase the number of doctors in the country to address this shortage, but the protesting medical professionals say that the real issue is overwork and low compensation, including shifts that last longer than 24 hours and 80-plus hour weeks, which makes holding onto medical professionals difficult.

—The New York Times

While the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have been horrendous by most metrics, they’ve been pretty good for US defense companies, bringing in more than $80 billion in major arms deals in 2023 (through September), alone, which is more than five-times the norm.

—The Wall Street Journal

$139

Approximate price of a monthly dose of Type 2 diabetes / weight-loss drug Ozempic in China via online retailer JD.com, which is a lot cheaper than the $970 some people pay for the same in the US.

That lower price is possible because of the country’s thriving gray market for drugs, and though lower prices are also available in the US and other countries (via similar gray markets), there’s little regulation of such markets in any region, and that sometimes leaves customers with less-than-pure versions of what they order (though these options also point at a gap between how cheaply a drug can be attained by some people or agencies, compared to how much it generally costs on the open market).

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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