Thursday, Nov 06th
Last update08:31:35 AM GMT
Health Glance
There’s a usual route for firms that want to market a generic drug: Buy samples of the brand-name version and run tests to show regulators that the generic is identical. If the firms can’t get their hands on the samples, they can’t get to the starting line.
A growing number of generic drug makers say they’re getting shut of the race because of a loophole in the law that gives their brand-name rivals a competitive edge.
It has been prescribed since 1978 and reports of the ingredient sodium valproate causing birth defects such as spina bifida go back almost as far. FACS is believed to have affected up to 20,000 babies – ten times more than Thalidomide.
FACS is, Dr Turnpenny points out, less dramatic than the missing and distorted limbs caused by Thalidomide, but the neurological effects are far worse. ‘About ten per cent of foetuses exposed to sodium valproate will have a major congenital malformation such as cleft palate. Twelve per cent are likely to be diagnosed with a neuro-developmental disorder.’
In what may be a ground-breaking decision, the Italian Court of Rimini has ruled that causation between an MMR vaccine and the resulting autism in a young child “has been established.”
The unnamed child received the vaccine in March of 2004 and on returning home immediately developed adverse symptoms. During the next year the child regressed, receiving the autism diagnosis one year later and is now 100% disabled by the disease.
TVNL Comment: Not only does the world continue to suffer from nuclear fallout but when the first hydrogen bomb was tested, scientists did not know if the reaction would be contained. There was a risk that the entire atmosphere would explode in a chain reaction. The people who made the decision to "test" this never asked you if you were OK with this risk. They risked your life, and all life on this planet. Those men are terrorists and should be eliminated from existence, as should all men like them, to protect the future of life itself.
The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.
A woman who lost the use of her limbs after a devastating stroke nearly 15 years ago has taken a sip of coffee by guiding a robotic arm with her thoughts.
The 58-year-old used a brain implant to control the robot and bring a flask of the coffee to her lips, the first time she had picked up anything since she was paralysed and left unable to speak by a catastrophic brain stem stroke.
Who would think that sunscreen causes cancer? It has been only a fairly recent development, but it still could cause some serious shock and awe when everyone figures out that conventional sunscreen found in drugstores nationally could be a potential risk factor for skin cancer. Sunscreens are made to protect and help your body, so why are we finding out that sunscreen causes cancer? It could be simply widespread ignorance, or it could be that the FDA has kept this secret under wraps for at least a decade.
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