” align=”right”>WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The brain infection risk from Biogen Idec's multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri appears highest during the third year of treatment, U.S. health officials said in an updated warning released on Friday. The potentially fatal infection, known as progressive multiform leukoencephalopathy (PML), occurs in an estimated 1.5 per 1,000 patients treated with Tysabri during months 25 to 36, the Food and Drug Administration said. The drug is given through a monthly infusion. Biogen withdrew the drug in 2005 after the first reports of the brain infection. Tysabri returned to the market with restrictions in 2006. PML concerns have crimped use of the drug, which generates sales of more than $1 billion a year. The FDA said on Friday the PML risk was 0.3 per 1,000 patients during the first two years of treatment. After three years, the rate was 0.9 per 1,000. Limited data is available beyond four years. The estimates have been added to the prescribing instructions for Tysabri,
Read ahead
Source: news.yahoo.com
MONDAY, April 4, 2011 (Health.com) — While you may consider yourself lucky to be working long hours—or working at all—in the current economy, your diligence may be undermining your health in the long run. People who work an average of 11 or more hours per day have a 67% higher risk of suffering a Read ahead
Source: news.health.com
” align=”right”>WASHINGTON – AARP lobbied for the new health care law and now it stands to profit, Republican lawmakers charged Wednesday as they called for the IRS to investigate whether the powerful interest group representing older Americans should be stripped of its federal tax exemption. Three veteran GOP representatives released a report that estimates the seniors lobby could make an additional $1 billion over 10 years on health insurance plans whose sales are expected to pick up under the new law. They also questioned seven-figure compensation for some AARP executives. “Based on the available evidence, substantial questions remain about whether AARP should maintain its tax-exempt status,” said the report, released by Reps. Wally Herger of California, Charles Boustany of Louisiana and Dave Reichert of Washington. AARP said profit had nothing to do with its support for President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, which expands coverage to nearly all Americans, a longstanding goal of the organization.
Read ahead
Source: news.yahoo.com
NEW YORK – A vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates used phantom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million, the largest fraud by one criminal enterprise in the program’s history, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. Federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere charged 73 people. Most of the defendants were captured during raids Wednesday morning in New York City and Los Angeles, but there also were arrests in New Mexico, Georgia and Ohio. The scheme’s scope and sophistication “puts the traditional Mafia to shame,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a Manhattan news conference. “They ran a veritable fraud franchise.” Unlike other cases involving crooked medical clinics bribing people to sign up for unneeded treatments, the operation was “completely notional,” Janice Fedarcyk, head of the FBI’s New York office, said in a statement. “The whole doctor-patient interaction was a mirage.” The operation was under the protection of an Armenian … Read ahead
Source: news.yahoo.com
Animal sciences professor and Division of Nutritional Sciences director Rodney Johnson and his colleagues found that the plant compound luteolin can reduce brain inflammation and reverse age-related memory deficits in mice. | Photo by L. Brian Stauffer” rel… Read ahead
Source: news.illinois.edu
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court is trying to sort out whether drug companies can be sued for claims of serious side effects from childhood vaccines without driving vaccine makers from the market and risking a public health crisis. The court heard arguments Tuesday in an appeal filed by Pittsburgh-area parents who want to sue drug maker Wyeth, which is owned by Pfizer Inc., for the health problems they say their 18-year-old daughter suffered from a vaccine she received in infancy. Several justices appeared sympathetic to the parents’ plea to be allowed to make their case in court. Wyeth, backed by the Obama administration and many public health groups, argued that Congress shielded drug companies from most vaccine lawsuits when it created a special vaccine court 24 years ago to handle the claims. But if lawmakers wanted to prevent lawsuits like the one at issue Tuesday, “they could have said simply that no vaccine manufacturer may be held civilly liable if the vaccine is properly prepared … Read ahead
Source: news.yahoo.com
In recent years, airplane crashes have killed about a thousand people annually, whereas plane emissions kill about ten thousand people each year, researchers say.Earlier studies had assumed that people were harmed only by the emissions from planes while taking off and landing. The new research is the first to give a comprehensive estimate of the number of premature deaths from all airline emissions.”We found that unregulated emissions from … Read ahead
Source: news.nationalgeographic.com
Latest at news.nationalgeographic.com
MILAN (Reuters) – An experimental melanoma drug from GlaxoSmithKline managed to shrink secondary tumors in the brains of nine patients with advanced disease, according to results of a small clinical trial on Sunday. The development is encouraging because secondary tumors, or metastases, in the brain are a major problem in the deadly form of skin cancer. Dr. Georgina Long from Melanoma Institute Australia, who led the early-stage Phase I… Read ahead
Source: news.yahoo.com
French and Irish professors conducted the research. “We were not overly surprised to learn that children with disability are more vulnerable to bullying, because of a lower self-esteem, sometimes differences in appearance or because they have special needs,” said lead author Mariane Sentenac, of the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. Sentenac and her colleagues used data from the Irish and French 2006 Health Behavior in School-aged Children World Health Organization collaborative study. In all, 12,048 students ages 11, 13 and 15 participated. Students responded to items on how frequently they had been bullied at school in the past couple of months. They also answered questions on whether they had a disability or chronic illness such as cerebral palsy, diabetes, arthritis or allergy. Twenty percent of the students in Ireland and 16.6 percent in France reported having one of these conditions. In France, 41 percent of boys with a disability or chronic illness reported being bullied … Read ahead
Source: news.bioscholar.com
Latest at news.bioscholar.com
The study looked at health spending; behavioural risk factors like obesity and smoking; and 15-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. and 12 other nations-Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries. Fifteen-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. have fallen relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years. Forty-five year old U.S. white women fared the worst-by 2005 their 15-year survival rates were lower than that of all the other countries. Moreover, the survival rates of this group in 2005 had not … Read ahead
Source: news.bioscholar.com
Latest at news.bioscholar.com