Kim Dixon
ReutersSat, 24 Nov 2007 00:53 UTC
U.S. Food and Drug Administration staffers are recommending new warnings about psychiatric events observed in some patients taking Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Relenza, according to documents released on Friday.
An FDA advisory panel will review the recommendations for the anti-viral influenza drugs at a meeting next week.
The FDA held a similar meeting two years ago in response to reports of a dozen deaths of children in Japan who had been taking Tamiflu.
The UK has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in Europe largely due to a growing epidemic of the disease in the black African community and among gay men, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) warned today.
The sexual health crisis is also worsening due to rising rates of other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young adults, the government health watchdog also warned.
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Parents have been warned to remove food additives linked to hyperactive behaviour from children's diets by the EU's leading expert on the issue. Dr John Larsen, who heads the European Food Safety Authority's panel on additives, said the measure would be "prudent" to protect youngsters' health.
Nearly 11,000 patients have died during the past seven months because of a failure by NHS hospitals to prevent them developing blood clots, a report claims.
Guidelines introduced in April mean every patient at risk should be assessed for treatment to cut the toll of deep vein thrombosis, or DVT.
But only one in three trusts is taking action, according to the damning report from the All Party Parliamentary Thrombosis Group.
It estimates that the failure to implement the guidance has cost 10,700 lives from DVT in the past seven months - nearly three times the number of deaths from the MRSA superbug and C Difficile infections.
The death toll in a year is greater than that from breast cancer, Aids and traffic accidents combined.
Comment: Although not to be trivialised, DVT may be considerably less of a public health emergency than
this, which will receive no mass media coverage whatsoever.
M.C. Escher's ambiguous drawings transfix us: Are those black birds flying against a white sky or white birds soaring out of a black sky?
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According to a study that appears in the current issue of SCAN (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine discuss how men and women differ in their neural responses to psychological stress.
"We found that different parts of the brain activate with different spatial and temporal profiles for men and women when they are faced with performance-related stress," says J.J. Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor or Radiology and Neurology, and lead author of the study.
These findings suggest that stress responses may be fundamentally different in each gender, sometimes characterized as "fight-or-flight" in men and "tend-and-befriend" in women. Evolutionarily, males may have had to confront a stressor either by overcoming or fleeing it, while women may have instead responded by nurturing offspring and affiliating with social groups that maximize the survival of the species in times of adversity. The "fight-or-flight" response is associated with the main stress hormone system that produces cortisol in the human body - the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
Recently, psychologists have debated whether high or low self-esteem underlies violent behavior. New research suggests that the most dangerous people are "those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings." The research, which is published in the July issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, demonstrates that actual self-esteem may have little if any relation to aggression.
Psychologists Brad J. Bushman, Ph.D., of Iowa State University and Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University conducted two studies in which they explored the connection between narcissism, negative interpersonal feedback, and aggression in 540 undergraduate students. Narcissists, according to the authors, are emotionally invested in establishing their superiority, yet while they care passionately about being superior to others, they are not convinced that they have achieved this superiority. While high self-esteem entails thinking well of oneself, narcissism involves passionately wanting to think well of oneself. In both studies, narcissism and self-esteem were measured, and participants were given an opportunity to act aggressively toward a neutral third party, toward someone who had insulted them, or toward someone who had praised them.
Last month a close friend of mine, a man in his late 40s, got cancer. It was of the colon. He now confronts an uncertain future but his prognosis is good. He's an unrelenting fighter so my bet is that he'll join me in the cancer survivor's club. Mine was melanoma, back in 1992.
These days whenever I think of cancer I think of another cancer fighter, a cultural warrior named Devra Davis. Her new book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer is a disturbing, beautifully rendered work that details how corporate suppression, government inaction and social amnesia have combined to cause an epidemic that makes a mockery of President Nixon's War on Cancer in 1971.
Ten million cancers over the last thirty years were entirely preventable argues Davis.
Ontario could become the first jurisdiction in Canada to place restrictions on bisphenol A, a controversial chemical that is found in hundreds of consumer products, ranging from plastic baby bottles to sports helmets and the resin linings on the insides of most tin cans.
Although Health Canada is currently assessing the safety of bisphenol A, Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday the province won't wait until Ottawa rules on the chemical's safety.
He said Ontario plans to appoint an expert medical and scientific panel to advise it on potentially dangerous substances in widespread use, and a priority for this group will be to provide recommendations on how best to deal with bisphenol A.
We blame teen turmoil on immature brains. But did the brains cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil shape the brains?
It's not only in newspaper headlines - it's even on magazine covers. TIME, U.S. News & World Report and even Scientific American Mind have all run cover stories proclaiming that an incompletely developed brain accounts for the emotional problems and irresponsible behavior of teenagers. The assertion is driven by various studies of brain activity and anatomy in teens. Imaging studies sometimes show, for example, that teens and adults use their brains somewhat differently when performing certain tasks.
As a longtime researcher in psychology and a sometime teacher of courses on research methods and statistics, I have become increasingly concerned about how such studies are being interpreted. Although imaging technology has shed interesting new light on brain activity, it is dangerous to presume that snapshots of activity in certain regions of the brain necessarily provide useful information about the causes of thought, feeling and behavior.
Comment: Although not to be trivialised, DVT may be considerably less of a public health emergency than this, which will receive no mass media coverage whatsoever.