Online Medicine

HOUSTON -- (February 28, 2008) -- Vaccinating school-age kids up to age 18 not only protects youngsters, but the entire community, say flu experts at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

This added strategy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Immunization Advisory Committee was needed to try to get a handle on the annual flu epidemic, but Glezen says the biggest hurdle now is developing the infrastructure to deliver vaccines to this population.

"If we develop the infrastructure, vaccinating this age group will be a great way to reduce illness in the family and in the entire community," said Glezen. "Having an infrastructure in place will also put us in better shape for the next pandemic."

The indirect effects of vaccinating all school-age children are significant because they are the primary spreaders of flu illness every year. But Glezen says that for these recommendations to work, it will require cooperation between medical groups, public health professionals and the schools.

Read additional flu information at http://www.bcm.edu/news/features/item.cfm?newsID=1066.

Having trouble losing weight?  Did you know that stress can actually make you fat?  The reason why is because when we’re stressed our bodies crave quick energy.  So the foods we typically turn too for fast energy are high in fat and high in calories.  So what should you do to reduce your stress?  1. Get Your Zzzzzzz’s.  Research shows that when we get don’t get enough zzz’s we crave quick energy foods.  2. Exercise- Exercise produces a natural high from hormones called endorphins 3. Breathe- Deep breathing brings oxygen to your body and naturally reduces stress.  Take up yoga for the ultimate stress reducer! 4. Nourish Your Body- Eat high energy foods such as almonds, and whole grain cereals and breads.

WASHINGTON: Doctors in India have apprently not reached the stage of killing their patients to have quick access to their key organs such as kidneys and livers etc. Believe it or not, such is not the case with the medical fraternity in the United States. In a bizarre case, a California-based surgeon, Dr. Hootan C. Roozrokh, has been charged with prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs to hasten the death of one of his patients, Ruben Navarro, to retrieve his organs sooner.

A court is expected to beging a preliminary hearing of three felony counts against Dr. Roozrokh today in relation to Mr. Navarro's treatment as a donor. At the heart of the case is whether Dr. Roozrokh, who studied at a transplant fellowship program at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was pursuing organs at any cost or had become entangled in a web of misunderstanding about a lesser-used harvesting technique known as "donation after cardiac death."

Several days after Navarro was hospitalized at California's Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, a decision was made to remove his ventilator. According to the criminal complaint, Dr. Roozrokh ordered excessive doses of morphine and Ativan, an anti-anxiety medicine, both of which are used to comfort dying patients. In the most shocking accusation, the complaint said Dr. Roozrokh introduced Betadine, a topical antiseptic, into Navarro's system; Betadine, the complaint said, is "a harmful substance that may cause death if ingested."

Navarro died about eight hours later of what the coroner ruled was natural causes. In the end, however, because his death was not more immediate, his organs had deteriorated too much to be usable for transplant. Prosecutors have charged Dr. Roozrokh with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, mingling a harmful substance (Betadine) and prescribing a controlled substance (morphine and Ativan) without medical purpose. Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer said the charges were the result of overzealous prosecutors. But the case has sent a shudder through the tight-knit field of transplant surgeons.

If convicted on all counts, Dr. Roozrokh could face eight years in prison -- while also worrying donation advocacy groups that organ donors could be frightened away. David Fleming, the executive director of Donate Life America, a nonprofit group that promotes donations, said the case had "given some support to the myths and misperceptions we spend an inordinate amount of time telling people won't happen."

The New York Times quoted Fleming as saying that about 18 people a day die in the United States waiting for transplants, and this has created a tremendous demand for donor organs. However,over the years the medical community has established strict protocols to govern organ harvesting. Transplanting organs from patients whose hearts have stopped, or cardiac-death donations, began to go out of vogue in the late 1960s and early '70s after medical advances like life support and subsequent changes in the legal definition of death made donations from those declared brain dead more efficient.

But health officials have encouraged cardiac-death donations in recent years. There were 670 cardiac-death donations through the first nine months of 2007, the most in any year this decade, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees organ allocation. Over the same period, there were 12,553 brain-dead donations, according to the network.

In brain-death donations, the donor is legally dead, but machines keep the organs viable by machines. In cardiac-death donations, after the patient's ventilator is removed, the heart slows. Once it stops, brain function ceases. Most donor protocols call for a five-minute delay before the patient is declared dead. Transplant teams are not allowed in the room of the potential donor before that.

MUMBAI: Shasun Chemicals has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Merck & Co Inc.

As per the agreement, Shasun will grant Merck the use of its proprietary cross-coupling copper technology to manufacture and commercialise active pharmaceutical ingredients.

The Buchwald cross-coupling technology is one of the most popular technologies in the pharmaceutical area allowing increasingly complex new drugs to be manufactured in an efficient and economical way.

"This is an important milestone for Shasun in making this technology widely accessible and paving the way for further collaborations," said Michel Spagnol, chief technology officer of Shasun.

At 1:19 pm, Shasun Chemicals shares were up 5.66 per cent at Rs 59.70 on BSE.

WASHINGTON: Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said on Monday. Researchers led by the Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull reviewed a series of studies, both published and unpublished, on four antidepressants, examining the question of whether a person’s response to these drugs hinged on how depressed they were before getting treatment.

They were Eli Lilly and Co’s Prozac, also known as fluoxetine, Wyeth’s Effexor, also called venlafaxine; GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, also called Seroxat or paroxetine, and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co’s drug Serzone, also called nefazodone, which it no longer markets in the US. They are all so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

The researchers found that compared with placebo, these new-generation antidepressant medications didn’t yield clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially had moderate or even very severe depression. The study found that significant benefits occurred only in the most severely depressed patients.

“Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration for the licensing of the four drugs. “Although patients get better when they take antidepressants, they also get better when they take a placebo, and the difference in improvement is not very great. This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments,” Kirsch said in a statement.

But Mary Ann Rhyne, a spokeswoman for Paxil maker GSK, said the study only looked at data submitted prior to the drug’s US approval. “The authors have failed to acknowledge the very positive benefit these treatments have provided to patients and their families who are dealing with depression and they are at odds with what has been seen in actual clinical practice,” Rhyne said.

“This analysis has only examined a small subset of the total data available, while regulatory bodies around the world have conducted extensive reviews and evaluations of all of the data available,” she said.

Doug Petkus, a spokesman for Wyeth, maker of Effexor, said he had not seen the study and could not comment.