"Health News - Medicine, Diet and Fitness"

Senate to follow

The House today passed significant reforms to the Food and Drug Administration’s drug safety review system. Part of a comprehensive FDA bill, the bill was a compromise between Senate and House legislation that passed overwhelmingly earlier this year. The bill, which includes strong consumer protections, will be voted on in the Senate tomorrow.

Statement by CALPIRG’s Federal Men’s health Care Advocate Paul Brown:

Child rapist ‘prescribed Viagra’

A French paedophile accused of raping a five-year-old boy just over a month after he was released from jail was taking the impotence drug viagra that he says was prescribed by a prison doctor, his lawyer said on Sunday.

Francis Evrard, a 61-year-old repeat offender who spent 18 years in prison for raping children before being freed on July 2, snatched the boy from a street in the northern town of Roubaix on Wednesday.

Police said the pair were discovered later in the day partly clothed in a garage used by Evrard after the use of a new nationwide search system. Officers found a packet of (more…)

VIAGRA USE ‘NO LONGER TABOO

The number of prescriptions being written out in Gloucestershire for men with impotence is on the rise.GPs dished out more than 18,300 prescriptions last year, up from 16,500 in 2005/06.

With eight tablets of viagra costing as much as £46.99, the bill to the NHS is running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The figures were released this week by the Prescription Pricing Authority, which bills all 150 primary care trusts in England.

Medication including (more…)

Trafficking in prescription drugs — many of them bogus — exceeds the use and sale of illicit drugs in many countries, according to the U.N.’s drug office, and the trend is driven in part by Internet sales, Reuters reported Sept. 5.

In the U.S., sale and abuse of prescription medications is second in scope only to marijuana. Stimulants and painkillers are among the top sellers.

Online, phony pharmacies sell drugs that are often equally fraudulent, sometimes with deadly results. Fake malaria drugs have killed people in Cambodia, while a phony anemia medicine resulted in deaths in Argentina.

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AstraZeneca Study Information Provided To Regulatory Agencies In May 2007 Currently The Subject of Their Ongoing Safety Reviews

(Posted by Tom Lamb at DrugInjuryWatch.com)

On August 9, 2007 the FDA and Health Canada issued email alerts about possible serious cardiac events in patients using the prescription heartburn drugs Nexium (esomeprazole) and Prilosec (omeprazole), made by AstraZeneca (AZN).

Prexige Associated With Reports Of Liver Damage, Liver Transplants, And Death

(Posted by Tom Lamb at DrugInjuryWatch.com)

An August 11, 2007 Bloomberg article, “Novartis’ Prexige Painkiller Drug Pulled by Australia”, let us know about the latest prescription drug recall.

According to this Bloomberg article, eight serious adverse reaction reports about the use of the painkiller Prexige being associated with liver damage have been made to Australia’s drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, “including two deaths and two liver transplants”.

Oregon State University researchers say it’s possible to get a snapshot of the drug use in a particular community by drug-testing samples of wastewater from public sewage systems, the Associated Press reported Aug. 21.

Researchers recently tested samples from 10 U.S. cities and found wide variations in use of methamphetamine, for example. Drug-use patterns also emerged: cocaine and ecstasy use tended to peak on weekends, for example, while use of meth and prescription drugs remained steady throughout the week.

Tests for 15 different drugs were conducted; the most common substance detected was caffeine. “It’s a community urinalysis,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a researcher from the University of Washington who was part of the Oregon State team.

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This Second Edition Has Detailed, Useful Information For Doctors And Pharmacists

(Posted by Tom Lamb at DrugInjuryWatch.com)

The August 9, 2007 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has an insightful book review by John P. Burke, M.D., of LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, UT, which does a very good job of introducing us to a valuable new book, “Medication Errors”, second edition, edited by Michael R. Cohen.

As has been reported previously, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that at least 1.5 million Americans are sickened, injured, or killed each year by medication errors.

SACRAMENTO—Members of the OURx Bill of Rights Coalition gathered in the state Capitol this morning to applaud Governor Schwarzenegger’s signature of AB 2911 (N

Washington, DC — In a victory for consumers, the Senate today passed the “Food and Drug Administration Revitalization Act” sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) by a vote of 93 to 1.

The bill attempts to please both the powerful pharmaceutical industry and consumer groups.