Year: 2018

U.S. health officials Thursday approved a new generic version of EpiPen, the emergency allergy medication that triggered a public backlash because of its rising price tag. The new version from Teva Pharmaceuticals is the first that will be interchangeable with the original penlike injector sold by Mylan. The Food and Drug Administration announced the approval in a statement. EpiPen injections are stocked by schools and parents nationwide to treat children with severe allergies. They are used in emergencies to stop potentially fatal allergic reactions to insect bites and stings and foods like nuts and eggs. EpiPen maker Mylan has dominated the $1 billion market for the shots for two decades. Several other companies sell competing shots containing the drug epinephrine, but they aren’t heavily marketed or prescribed by doctors. In 2016, Congress blasted Mylan in letters and hearings for raising EpiPen’s to $600 for a two-pack, a five-fold increase over nearly a decade. The company responded by launching its own lower-cost generic version for $300. Mylan continues to sell both versions at those prices, according to data from Elsevier’s Gold Standard Drug Database. Teva’s generic shot will be the first version that pharmacists can substitute even when doctors prescribe the original EpiPen. A Teva spokeswoman declined to comment on the drug’s price but said it would launch “in the coming months.” Generic drugs can be priced as much as 80 percent lower than the original product. But those price cuts usually appear after several companies have launched competing versions. Teva’s …

In 1995, a patient sick with the Ebola virus, in what was then called Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, miraculously recovered from this deadly disease. At that time, when the virus first jumped from animals to man, Ebola meant almost certain death. Doctors found that this patient had antibodies to fight the virus in his bloodstream even after he recovered.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, invited the patient to the U.S., where researchers cloned the cell that had helped him beat Ebola. “We brought the person back to the United States to draw his blood and try to clone the B cells that make the antibodies that this person had produced … to then, essentially, clear his virus and, hopefully, protect him against any future exposure,” Fauci told VOA.  Because the NIH scientists made numerous copies of that cell, it is called a monoclonal antibody — in this case, mAB114. It’s hoped that it can be used to target the Zaire strain of Ebola currently spreading in eastern Congo. Fauci said mAB114 is still experimental. “We have done a number of tests in an animal model and have shown that when you infect an animal up to five days after they become infected, and you passively transfer this antibody, you can actually protect the animals from getting sick and they recover,” he said. Not all treatments that work in animals work in …

More than 100 cases of measles have been diagnosed this year in 21 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. As of July 14, 107 people had contracted the viral infection in Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and the nation’s capital. Measles is a highly contagious virus that spreads through the air via coughing and sneezing. The illness starts with a fever, runny nose, cough, red eyes and a sore throat. It’s followed by a rash that spreads over the body. While the disease is treatable, the CDC said, one or two out of every 1,000 children who get measles die from complications. This year’s outbreak is on pace to surpass last year’s, when 118 people from 15 states and the District of Columbia were reported to have measles. In 2016, 86 people from 19 states contracted the illness. The CDC said the majority of people who contracted measles were unvaccinated. Prevention is key, because the virus can be spread easily. The measles virus can live for up to two hours in an airspace where the infected person coughed or sneezed, according to the CDC. Measles is so contagious that if one person has it, 90 percent of unimmunized people in close contact with the infected person will also become infected. In 2015, the United States experienced a large, multistate measles …

The scientific community has long acknowledged that vaccines work and have saved millions of lives. However, a vocal community, particularly in the U.S., believes that vaccines expose children to health risks and can cause harm. It can be easy to write off these opinions, but psychology researchers have long known of many cognitive biases that can lead people to make poor judgments. Several of these researchers are interested in how people end up receiving and believing fallacious ideas as they relate to vaccines. Cognitive misers The human mind isn’t like a computer. Our brains aren’t composed of truth values coded as ones and zeros. Emotion, confidence and memory can all impact how we form beliefs. The problem is we often don’t recognize when we aren’t thinking logically. Gordon Pennycook, a researcher at Canada’s University of Regina, said he’s interested in “the tendency for people to be lazy in the way that they think.” Essentially, he said, high-level reasoning takes a lot of mental effort, and we humans are cognitive misers. If we don’t have to think that hard, we won’t. “Part of the problem, though,” Pennycook told VOA, “is that when it comes to more complicated domains, like in the realm of science, our intuitions are often wrong. So we need to spend more time thinking about it.” In 2015, Pennycook published a paper titled On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bulls**t that focused on whether people find meaning in statements randomly made up of common buzzwords. One example: “Hidden meaning …

A mobile blood-testing lab. Hand-washing stations on street corners. Motorcycle taxi drivers forbidden from sharing spare helmets. If Ebola is coming, the city of Goma in eastern Congo wants to be ready. An outbreak suspected of killing 43 people is spreading across the lush farmlands of eastern Congo, where ethnic and military conflicts threaten to hobble containment efforts. Goma, a lakeside city of 1 million people near the Rwandan border, is more than 350 kilometers (220 miles) south from the epicenter of the outbreak in the town of Mangina in North Kivu province, and no cases have been confirmed there. But the virus has already spread to neighboring Ituri province, and the number of infected is rising daily. Residents in the busy trading hub are taking no chances. “It’s not only me who fears the appearance of Ebola. The whole community here is scared,” said shopkeeper Dany Mupenda. “To protect ourselves we stick to the rules of hygiene to avoid being one of the victims of this epidemic.” UNICEF has set up hand-washing stations around the city. Health workers check residents’ temperatures in public places and at the entrance to the city. The hospital has set up a mobile lab to test suspected cases. 900 lives It is the kind of preparation that has become routine in Congo, which has experienced 10 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered on the Ebola River in 1976. In all, it has killed 900 people. Ebola causes diarrhea, vomiting and hemorrhagic fever and can be spread through bodily fluids. An epidemic between 2013 and 2016 killed more than 11,300 people in West Africa. …

Scientists in Florida are on the cusp of developing promising methods to control toxic algae blooms like the “red tide” that has been killing marine life along a 150 mile (240 km) stretch of the Gulf Coast, the head of a leading marine lab said Wednesday. Michael Crosby, president and chief executive of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, welcomed a red tide emergency order issued this week by Governor Rick Scott, designating more state money for research, cleanup and wildlife rescues. Scientists field-testing solutions Interest in mitigation technologies has been heightened by a 10-month-long toxic algae bloom off Florida’s southwestern coast that has caused mounds of rotting fish to wash up on beaches from Tampa to Naples. The red tide also has been implicated in at least 266 sea turtle strandings and is suspected or determined to have caused 68 manatee deaths so far this year, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission figures. In hopes of combating future outbreaks, scientists are field testing a patented process that would pump red-algae-tainted seawater into an ozone-treatment system and then pump the purified water back into the affected canal, cove or inlet, Crosby said. Experiments carried out in huge 25,000-gallon tanks succeeded in removing all traces of the algae and its toxins, with the water chemistry reverting to normal within 24 hours, he said. Scientists also are studying the possible use of naturally produced compounds from seaweed, parasitic algae and filter-feeding organisms that could be introduced to fight red tides. …

The dismissal of a lawsuit filed by young people claiming government climate policy falls short will be appealed and marks a minor setback in pursuing legal action on behalf of youth and their rights, experts said. The legal complaint arguing that the state of Washington must do more to cut carbon emissions was dismissed Tuesday by a judge who said it was a matter for politicians, not courts. The judge’s ruling marked the first time a court has dismissed a case filed by youth demanding authorities ramp up efforts to curb climate change by arguing their constitutional rights to due process are being violated, experts said. A half-dozen similar cases have been filed in states including Florida and Alaska, said Our Children’s Trust, a youth advocacy group that provides legal assistance. Tougher plan sought The Washington complaint, filed in February, asked that a statewide target to emit 50 percent fewer greenhouse gases by 2050 be invalidated in favor of more ambitious goals, court documents said. The dismissal will be appealed, lawyer Andrea Rodgers of Our Children’s Trust told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Scientific consensus holds that the emission of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming. Washington Superior Court Judge Michael Scott wrote in his dismissal that he hoped the activists “will not be discouraged,” but Rodgers said they were “devastated” and wanted to “present their constitutional claims in a court of law.” Several of the cases by young people base their arguments on their rights to fair treatment and due process under the U.S. Constitution. The remaining cases could still be effective in …

U.S. health officials are eliminating special regulations for gene therapy experiments, saying that what was once exotic science is quickly becoming an established form of medical care with no extraordinary risks. A special National Institutes of Health oversight panel will no longer review all gene therapy applications and will instead take on a broader advisory role, according to changes proposed Wednesday. The Food and Drug Administration will vet gene therapy experiments and products as it does with other treatments and drugs. It’s an extraordinary milestone for a field that has produced only a few approved treatments so far, and not all experts agree that it doesn’t still need special precautions. With gene editing and other frontiers looming, “this is not the right time to be making any moves based on the idea that we know what the risks are,” said Stanford bioethicist Mildred Cho. What is gene therapy? Gene therapy aims to attack the root cause of a problem by deleting, adding or altering DNA, the chemical code of life, rather than just treating symptoms that result from a genetic flaw. When it was first proposed, there were so many safety worries and scientific unknowns that the NIH created a panel of independent scientists, called the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, or RAC, to assess each experiment and potential risks to patients. The risks were underscored in 1999, when a teen’s death in a gene experiment put a chill on the field. Since then, much has been learned about safety, and …

Britain’s hottest summer in decades has revealed cropmarks across the country showing the sites of Iron Age settlements, Roman farms and even Neolithic monuments dating back thousands of years, archaeologists said Wednesday. Cropmarks — patterns of shading in crops and grass seen most clearly from the air — form faster in hot weather as the fields dry out, making this summer’s heat wave ideal for discovering such sites. Archaeologists at the public body Historic England have been making the most of the hot weather to look for patterns revealing the ancient sites buried below, from Yorkshire in the north down to Cornwall in the southwest. “We’ve discovered hundreds of new sites this year spanning about 6,000 years of England’s history,” said Damian Grady, aerial reconnaissance manager at Historic England. “Each new site is interesting in itself, but the fact we’re finding so many sites over such a large area is filling in a lot of gaps in knowledge about how people lived and farmed and managed the landscape in the past,” he said. The archaeologists are mapping the sites to determine the significance of the remains beneath and how best to protect them. While some may be significant enough to merit national protection from development, local authorities or farmers may be left to decide what to do at other sites. “We’ll hopefully get the help of farmers to help protect some of these undesignated sites,” Grady said. …

If you quit smoking and gain weight, it may seem like you’re trading one set of health problems for another. But a new U.S. study finds you’re still better off in the long run. Compared with smokers, even the quitters who gained the most weight had at least a 50 percent lower risk of dying prematurely from heart disease and other causes, the Harvard-led study found. The study is impressive in its size and scope and should put to rest any myth that there are prohibitive weight-related health consequences to quitting cigarettes, said Dr. William Dietz, a public health expert at George Washington University. “The paper makes pretty clear that your health improves, even if you gain weight,” said Dietz, who was not involved in the research. “I don’t think we knew that with the assurance that this paper provides.” The New England Journal of Medicine published the study Wednesday. The journal also published a Swedish study that found quitting smoking seems to be the best thing diabetics can do to cut their risk of dying prematurely. 10 pounds or more The nicotine in cigarettes can suppress appetite and boost metabolism. Many smokers who quit and don’t step up their exercise find they eat more and gain weight — typically less than 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms), but in some cases three times that much. A lot of weight gain is a cause of the most common form of diabetes, a disease in which blood sugar levels are higher than normal. …