Health Highlights: May 30, 2003
Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of The HealthScout News Service:
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Lawsuit Shines Light on Drug Company Tactics
An array of doctors earned thousands of dollars — many as much as six-figure sums — from a drug company to talk up a then-new drug to their peers, urging that it be prescribed for uses beyond those approved by the Food and Drug Administration, reports the New York Times.
The tactic came to light in court papers filed in the case of a whistleblower who claims the drug company — Warner-Lambert, now owned by Pfizer — illegally marketed the drug Neurontin, which has brought in more than $2 billion in revenue. By law, drug companies cannot market a drug for unapproved uses, but it’s legal for doctors to prescribe a drug as they see fit, according to the Times.
Besides paying doctors to speak to other physicians, the drug company paid doctors to attend speeches by these doctors, apparently hoping they’d be convinced to broaden their prescription practices for Neurontin, the court papers show. The company also paid doctors to prescribe the drug in high doses and to write reports on how well the drug worked for patients, and it paid to publish at least one medical textbook that discusses Neurontin, the filings indicate.
Until 2002, Neurontin was approved only to treat epilepsy when a patient’s primary drug did not work. Since then, the FDA also has OK’d its use by shingles patients for pain. However, in the year 2000, 88 percent of Neurontin prescriptions were for uses not approved by the FDA, the Times reports.
A Pfizer representative told the Times that the lawsuit focuses on events that happened several years before it acquired Warner-Lambert and that Pfizer adheres to “the highest ethical standards.”
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SARS Cases Fall in China, Rise in Toronto
China has nearly tamed its SARS epidemic, with new cases dwindling and no evidence of a feared spread to the countryside, a senior health official said Friday. The official also denied claims that China tried to hide early indications of the virus.
Encouraging news also came Friday from Singapore, where the World Health Organization removed that country from its list of SARS-affected nations, saying no new cases have been reported there in 20 days — double the maximum incubation period for the virus, reports the Associated Press.
But in Canada, Toronto’s case cluster of the deadly disease has almost tripled, from 12 to 33 probable cases, and the number of people quarantined has almost doubled.
China’s executive deputy health minister, the highest-ranking official to respond to the cover-up charges to date, said an article in the People’s Daily newspaper in early February reported on a pneumonia with symptoms now associated with SARS that already had killed five and sickened 305 people in Guangdong province — the area in which the WHO believes SARS originated. The official repeated China’s contention that any underreporting should be blamed on an inadequate public health network in the country.
China reported seven new SARS cases in the 24 hours ending Friday morning, six of them in Beijing. A total of 5,600 cases and 328 deaths have been reported nationwide since the epidemic began, The New York Times reports.
Daily reports of new SARS cases nationwide averaged 151 in early May but fell to 14 in the final third of the month as the epidemic “started to be effectively controlled,” said Gao Qiang, the health minister. The disease has largely been confined to Guangdong, Beijing and a few provinces near the capital, he said, and “there has not been large-scale spread in rural areas.”
In Toronto, however, Health Canada’s reversion to World Health Organization guidelines for case definitions has resulted in 33 probable and 29 suspect cases of SARS in the latest cluster. The Toronto Star also reports there are 29 SARS patients still in the hospital — five from the first outbreak and 24 from the current outbreak; 12 are in critical condition. In addition, there are 107 people under investigation for potential SARS.
More than 7,000 people are in quarantine in Ontario, including 396 health-care workers. And more than 3,100 health-care workers from two hospitals are in working quarantine, the Star reports.
Meanwhile, Taiwan reported seven new SARS cases and no deaths Friday, its lowest daily number in three weeks, the Associated Press says. In Hong Kong, officials reported four more cases Friday and one fatality, raising the death toll there to 274.
Worldwide, SARS has killed at least 755 people out of more than 8,300 people infected, the vast majority of them in Asia.
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Irradiated Meat OK’d for School Lunch Programs
Schools across the United States may soon offer irradiated meat on lunch menus, following the government’s lifting of a ban against the product.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) move on Thursday gives local school districts the option of ordering meat decontaminated with gamma rays, X-rays or electrons as early as next January, the Washington Post reports.
The department issued the new regulations over the objections of several consumer groups, which have voiced lingering concerns about the technology’s safety for the 27 million students in the nation’s school lunch program.
“While there is not a lot of evidence that irradiation harms anybody, neither has there been any group of people who has consumed irradiated food over a long period of time,” Arthur S. Jaeger, associate director of the Consumer Federation of America, told the Post.”We have said all along that we don’t think school kids are the place to start serving irradiated ground beef.”
Proponents of the irradiation, including the federal government and meat industry representatives, call irradiation a valuable process for killing disease-causing microbes such as salmonella and E. coli and cite 40 years of testing that have established its safety.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the process in 1997, and two years later the USDA approved the sale of irradiated meat in grocery stores. Yet irradiated meat accounts for less than 5 percent of overall meat sales, according to industry estimates.
It also costs as much as 16 percent more than regular ground meat, which some analysts believe will give school systems little incentive to order the product.
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Marlboro Tops in Key Carcinogen
Marlboro cigarettes, the world’s most popular brand, contain much higher levels of a known carcinogen than nearly every other brand, according to a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The Washington Post reports the levels of nitrosamines, a cancer-causing compound derived from nicotine, were at least twice as high in Marlboros as they were in local brands in 10 of 13 nations the CDC tested.
Scientists believe nitrosamines are one of the two most potent carcinogens found in tobacco smoke, according to the Post, which adds this is the first study to document the threat posed by American brands.
Researchers suspect what makes Marlboros so popular also makes them potentially deadlier. The type of American tobacco, and the way it is cured, creates the distinct flavor as well as the nitrosamines, the Post writes.
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