Morning Read: Profiting from America’s addiction to salt

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:

Profiting from America’s addiction to salt: Americans have recently been forced to confront the consequences of our oil addiction, but the toll from our salt addiction could be equally damaging in the form of decades and decades of spiraling health costs. Plus, analysts estimate that deeply cutting Americans’ salt intake could save 150,000 lives per year.So it’s worth reading the New York Times’ feature on how food companies have fought efforts through the years to regulate salt content in processed foods. Consider it last weekend’s “required reading.”

For years the food industry has employed a strategy known as “delay and divert” to keep regulators and critics off its back and allow it to keep pumping salt down Americans’ throats. And it’s easy to understand why. The industry “craves salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.”

The death of the blockbuster drug: It has been four years since any company launched a real mass-market blockbuster, that is, a drug that generates billions of dollars in sales based on the fact that it’s widely used, not just expensive. Currently, 74 percent of the market is generic drugs, compared to 51 percent in 2003.

Big money for Tetraphase: Antiobiotics developer Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals has closed a $45 million Series C round of financing. The Watertown, Massachusetts, company will use the funding to move its drugs into Phase 1 and 2 trials.

Illinois joins the party: Illinois is working on two bills that set aside $10 million in tax credits to assist state-based angel investors in startup companies that commercialize new technologies.

Telemedicine looking up: The interactive telemedicine business has been growing by almost 10 percent annually, to more than $500 million in revenue in North America this year. And it’s big in prisons.

The view from Nash: For one physician, the takeway message of health reform is “No outcome, no income.”

Photo from flickr user kevindooley