Drug giant Pfizer to cut 6,000 jobs, 8 plants in wake of Wyeth purchase

Pfizer will cut 6,000 jobs, or 18% of its worldwide workforce, as it pares back operations following last year's purchase of rival Wyeth.

The world's biggest drugmaker - which sells Viagra UK and cholesterol drug Lipitor - said yesterday it plans to cease operations at eight plants in the U.S. and Ireland by 2015, and reduce activities at six factories in those countries, plus Germany and Britain.

Pfizer can be more competitive, both in its operations and drug pricing, by streamlining its plants and improving their processes, said Nat Ricciardi, president of manufacturing at Manhattan-based Pfizer.

Pfizer had 40 manufacturing sites before acquiring more than three dozen Wyeth facilities in the October merger. The company said in April it would cut 20,000 jobs as it integrates Wyeth, which it bought for $68 billion.
Pfizer gained an assortment of products from Wyeth, including the biotech drug Enbrel for rheumatoid arthritis, menopause treatments Premarin and Prempro, and Prevnar for children's pneumococcal diseases. Wyeth products contributed more than $5 billion in revenue to Pfizer during the first quarter.

Chicory acts like Viagra to Rams

Farmers have been told to feed chicory to their rams - because it makes them more sexual active.

The salad boosts the animals' sex drives and fertility, meaning they can mate with over double the number of ewes every year.
At a farmers conference in Dumfries was yesterday told chicory acts like Viagra UK.

Now the Scottish Agricultural College is to investigate the plant's properties. The college's John Vipond told the conference: "Because of the ongoing sale demand for rams to be at their maximum size you find that rams are not the sexual athletes they should be.

"Instead they are something of couch potatoes, only able to service 40 ewes a year when we should be looking to them to service at least 100.
"Chicory is one of the ways of getting round the problem."
A study into the plant at Lilburn Estate at Alnwick, Northumberland, discovered the connection between chicory, which was imported from New Zealand and sexual performance.

Bolivian president blames sex problems on chickens

Morales told an environmental conference on Tuesday that chicken producers inject the birds with female hormones, which he said can lead to baldness and sexual issues in men who eat the chicken.
There's an amount of confusion over exactly what Morales said, depending on which translation you read. The Associated Press reported that he said 'and because of that, men who consume them have problems being men' - suggesting he was talking about chickens causing impotence.
But another news agency, Agence France-Presse, reported his comments as 'when men eat those chickens, they experience deviances in being men.' Which sounds a bit more like he's blaming chickens for men becoming gay.

Either way, Morales' warning may be out of date: Chicken producers in Europe, the United States and many other countries say they abandoned the use of hormones in poultry several decades ago and many if not most Western nations ban them outright.
And in any case, Morales has his biochemistry the wrong way round - on the baldness issue, at least. Male pattern baldness is linked to dihydrotestosterone, a predominantly male hormone, not to female hormones. So you're probably okay to keep eating chickens and shouldn’t need the Viagra UK

Canadian Pharmacy spammers live on twitter

According to theregister.co.uk Canadian Pharmacy spammers has set up an account on Twitter, staying online for weeks despite complaints from a leading security firm.

The Twitter account @canadianshop features nothing beyond links to unlicensed sites selling Viagra and other prescription medicines - just the sort of thing that would normally bring down a ban-hammer in short order. Yet despite repeated complaints by IT security firm Sophos for more than a week nothing has been done.

The account has been live on Twitter for the last month. In contrast to the site's prolonged inaction, URL shortening service bit.ly has blocked most (though not all) of @canadianshop's custom links. "When bit.ly shuts one down, the bad guys can just create another one," a Sophos spokesman explained.

Many accounts on Twitter push out spamvertised links but @canadianshop is unusually obvious about it. "It has Canadian pharmacy wallpaper and explicit tweets saying what it's selling," the spokesman said.

"This isn't someone linking to something that pretends to be saucy content and then takes you to an online drugs store. Nor is it accounts that have been hacked and are spamming out pharma links. This is blatant promotion of pharmacy sites that are normally advertised via email spam, in order to sell Viagra UK.