 US Gets Tougher versus Cholesterol
Did Russia distribute contaminated polio vaccines?
NEW US GUIDELINES LOWER LDL TARGET TO 70
WASHINGTON
United States health officials have released tough new cholesterol guidelines, which may raise the number of patients on cholesterol-lowering drugs, as well as the dosage they take. The new guidelines affect patients at high risk for heart attack, whose maximum for bad cholesterol is 70 (mg/dL), down from 100.
To that end, researchers recommend more rigorous treatment for patients already suffering from heart disease, at risk of brain hemorrhage, or with high blood pressure, according to the revised treatment guidelines published in Circulation on July 13.
"The lower, the better for high-risk people. That's the message on 'bad' cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, from recent clinical trials," said Scott Grundy of the American Heart Association.
When treating medium-risk heart patients, doctors should also consider treatment that would bring levels of LDL cholesterol down to 100, from the previous recommendation of 130, the experts said.
The tougher norms were issued after the results of five clinical studies showed that the levels of cholesterol doctors currently recommend were not strict enough to minimize the risk of heart problems.
The United States has about 30 million people with heart trouble. One-third of those patients, or 10 million, are at high risk of heart ailment and follow a regimen of statins and other anticholesterol drugs. The changes should increase by millions the number of people being treated. Likewise, the doses taken by patients already being treated should increase so as to lower LDL levels, which is good news for pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Merck, makers of Lipitor and Zocor, the "blockbusters" of the sector. Other drug makers favored are Bristol-Myers-Squibb and AstraZeneca, makers of Pravachol and Crestor.
MILLIONS EXPOSED TO CONTAMINATED POLIO VACCINE?
PARIS
Hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa may have been injected with a Soviet polio vaccine contaminated by a monkey virus that has now been linked to cancer.
Shoddy standards in Soviet vaccine plants meant that decontamination of the so-called simian virus 40 (SV40) was only 95-percent effective, according to a report in the New Scientist. This meant that for nearly 20 years after SV40 was supposed to have been screened out, the Soviet Union continued to ship potentially infected vaccines to its Eastern European allies and elsewhere.
"The vaccine was almost certainly used throughout the Soviet bloc and probably exported to China, Japan, and several countries in Africa," the British science weekly said. "That means hundreds of millions could have been exposed to SV40 after 1963."
Pharmaceutical labs previously used cells from rhesus monkeys to prepare doses in commercial quantities. In 1960, SV40 was found in monkeys and soon after was detected in injected polio vaccines. In 1963, it was supposed to have been eliminated from all new vaccines worldwide.
The New Scientist report quotes a leading researcher on the SV40 problem, Michele Carbone of the Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, who found infectious SV40 virus in two out of three stored samples of live Soviet vaccines. He found no SV40 virus in the third sample, but there was no infectious poliovirus either, which may indicate that the sample had degraded. Carbone also tested the Soviet decontamination method, which used magnesium chloride in a bid to destroy SV40 in the vaccine. He found it was only 95-percent effective, meaning that five percent of any virus may still have been lurking in Soviet polio vaccines.
It was only in 1981 that the danger was eliminated, when the Soviet Union switched to a vaccine seed free of SV40.
CHINA UPS BUDGET VERSUS TB
BEIJING
China plans to radically increase funding for the fight against tuberculosis, which costs the lives of up to 150,000 Chinese every year. The Ministry of Health intends to spend "hundreds of millions of yuan" (tens of millions of dollars) on curbing the killer disease, compared with just US$4.8 at present.
This follows criticism from international organizations that Chinese efforts to fight tuberculosis have stalled over the past decade, after rapid initial successes.
Figures vary for annual deaths in China from tuberculosis, or TB, ranging from 130,000 reported in the China Daily to 150,000 estimated by the World Bank. One reason for the enormous death toll could be that a rising number of cases go unnoticed.
The World Health Organization reported a decline in the number of notified cases in 2002 to 36 per 100,000 people from 37 the year before. "There has been little progress in TB control in China since the mid-1990s," the WHO said in its 2004 report on global tuberculosis control.
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