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As the 2009 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Annual Meeting started July 18, one of the first issues on the agenda was pharmacists who plan on entering academia and how graduate students can make the transition into a faculty position.

Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) jurisdiction over tobacco in June, but don?t look for any quick changes in tobacco policy, products, or marketing. The agency is asking the public for guidance before jumping into regulation.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved Multaq 400 mg tablets to help maintain normal heart rhythms in patients with a history of atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it is requiring manufacturers to put a boxed warning on the prescribing information for the smoking cessation drugs Chantix and Zyban.

So what is actually happening behind the retail counter? To get an idea, Drug Topics took a brief, unscientific survey of individual community pharmacists. All the respondents felt that pharmacist counseling reduces medication errors.

As of June 2009, it appears that North Carolina remains the only state to require any consistent public reporting of pharmacy-associated medication errors. In North Carolina, pharmacists must report errors associated with deaths.

A breakdown of where medication errors occur in the treatment process.

All retail/community pharmacies assert that medication safety is their first priority. Here's an example of what one pharmacy chain is doing about it.

Two new designs from Scriptchek add extra label space for patient information on prescription vials. The extended tab label more than doubles available label space. On the rectangular vial, three flat sides offer space for additional patient instructions, and its label offers up to four times more printing space.

Record budget problems have pushed California to eliminate funding for the largest poison control system in the nation. Keep reading to find out about a California pharmacy's fight to keep the poison control system going.

CVS, Merck, and Pfizer are just a few of the pharmaceutical heavyweights working together to electronically trace pharmaceutical products through the healthcare supply chain.

While pharmacies have not been immune to the downturn in the U.S. economy, the overall picture does not appear to be one of gloom and doom. For an update on aspects of the big picture for pharmacy, read on.

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Learn more about the 2008 top generic drugs by retail dollars

Find out more about the 200 top branded drugs by retail dollars

More than 80 community pharmacists from the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) and several patients met with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) May 13 to discuss concerns about the impact of the March 2007 CVS/Caremark merger and to urge the FTC to re-examine it.

Citizen petitions to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) work. Sometimes.

The major message of the 2009 National Community Pharmacists Association's Annual Conference on National Legislation & Government Affairs was "get into politics, or get out of pharmacy."

The stimulus package passed in February has catapulted the field of comparative effectiveness research into a defining moment.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced recently the approval of Creon (pancrelipase), a pancreatic enzyme replacement product designed to help patients with cystic fibrosis and others with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI) digest and absorb nutrients from foods.

Pharmacy schools and practicing pharmacists around the United States recently said they noticed an imbalance in racial diversity in the field. The disparity has become so apparent that it is driving several organizations to do something about it.

In 2009, economic uncertainties, fear of new influenza strains, and pain are contributing to problems with sleeplessness experienced by many among the U.S. population.

WellPoint's plan to sell its NextRx pharmacy benefits management unit to St. Louis-based Express Scripts is drawing criticism from independent pharmacists.

Pharmacists speak out about the right to refuse to dispense.

"A pharmacist on the line is a priority; I won't make a pharmacist wait unnecessarily. When a colleague calls me, I'll drop everything to take that call."

Parents with some understanding of the possible dangers of OTC cold remedies often still give them to their young children.

Direct-to-consumer advertising is an idea that won't win any fans among pharmacists.

Centric Health Resources in St. Louis, Mo., serves patients who have the rarest diseases and need the most expensive drugs.