Mexico’s Curbs on U.S. Role in Drug Fight Spark Friction

MEXICO CITY — In their joint fight against drug traffickers, the United States and Mexico have forged an unusually close relationship in recent years, with the Americans regularly conducting polygraph tests on elite Mexican security officials to root out anyone who had been corrupted. 

But shortly after Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office in December, American agents got a clear message that the dynamics, with Washington holding the clear upper hand, were about to change  “So do we get to polygraph you?” one incoming Mexican official asked his American counterparts

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A Drug War Informer in No Man’s Land

Mr. López played a leading role in what is widely considered the biggest drug-trafficking case in Mexican history. The episode — which inspired the 2000 movie “Traffic” — pitted the Mexican military against the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Throughout the 1990s, Mr. López worked closely with them both. He served as a senior adviser to the powerful general who was appointed Mexico’s drug czar. And he was an informant for the D.E.A.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

From Informant to Fugitive Mr. López was once a powerful police chief in Mexico and a valued D.E.A. informant. Today he is a fugitive, sought by the Mexican government after the arrest of his boss, Mexico’s former drug czar.

His two worlds collided spectacularly in 1997, when Mexico arrested the general, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, on charges of collaborating with drug traffickers. As Washington tried to make sense of the charges, both governments went looking for Mr. López. Mexico considered him a suspect in http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/us/us-mexico-dea-informant.htmlthe case; the D.E.A. saw him as a potential gold mine of information.

The United States found him first..... 

Eggs, Too, May Provoke Bacteria to Raise Heart Risk

By GINA KOLATA

Published: April 24, 2013 107 Comments

For the second time in a matter of weeks, a group of researchers reported a link between the food people eat and bacteria in the intestines that can increase the risk of heart attacks.

Macida

Two weeks ago, the investigators reported that carnitine, a compound found in red meat, can increase heart disease risk because of the actions of intestinal bacteria. This time they reported that the same thing happens with lecithin, which is abundant in egg yolks.

The lecithin study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is part of a growing appreciation of the role the body’s bacteria play in health and disease. With heart disease, investigators have long focused on the role of diet and heart disease, but expanding the scrutiny to bacteria adds a new dimension.

“Heart disease perhaps involves microbes in our gut,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Stanley Hazen, chairman of the department of cellular and molecular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.

In the case of eggs, the chain of events starts when the body digests lecithin, breaking it into its constituent parts, including the chemical choline. Intestinal bacteria metabolize choline and release a substance that the liver converts to a chemical known as TMAO, for trimethylamine N-oxide. High levels of TMAO in the blood are linked to increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

To show the effect of eggs on TMAO, Dr. Hazen asked volunteers to eat two hard-boiled eggs. They ended up with more TMAO in their blood. But if they first took an antibiotic to wipe out intestinal bacteria, eggs did not have that effect.

To see the effects of TMAO on cardiovascular risk, the investigators studied 4,000 people who had been seen at the Cleveland Clinic. The more TMAO in their blood, the more likely they were to have a heart attack or stroke in the ensuing three years.

Carnitine — the red meat chemical — and lecithin are chemically related, Dr. Hazen said. As with lecithin, when carnitine is digested, choline is released and can be acted on by intestinal bacteria.

The results of the new studies, though, do not directly prove that reducing TMAO protects against heart disease. That would require large studies following people who lowered their TMAO levels, which should be possible with a vegetarian or high-fiber diet.

Dr. Hazen said that people who are worried about heart attacks may want to consider reducing lecithin and choline in their diet, which would require eating less of foods high in fat and cholesterol. Dr. Hazen said it also may be wise to avoid supplements or vitamins with added choline.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Joseph Loscalzo of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston suggested that in the future there may be other ways to reduce blood levels of TMAO. People might take probiotics to help grow bacteria that do not lead to an increase in TMAO. Or perhaps drugs could squelch the synthesis of TMAO. Those probiotics and drugs, though, do not yet exist, and even the specific bacteria responsible for the increase in TMAO are not yet identified.

Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism

1. Carsten K. W. De Dreu¹, 
2. Lindred L. Greer, 
3. Gerben A. Van Kleef, 
4. Shaul Shalvi, and 
5. Michel J. J. Handgraaf

Author Affiliations

1. Edited by Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved December 21, 2010 (received for review October 12, 2010)

Abstract

Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members. In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group. Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.

• hormones
 
• social discrimination
 
• evolution
 
• moral dilemmas
 
• endocrinology

Footnotes

• ¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: c.k.w.dedreu@uva.nl.
• Author contributions: C.K.W.D.D., L.L.G., G.A.V.K., S.S., and M.J.J.H. designed research; L.L.G. and S.S. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; C.K.W.D.D. analyzed data; and C.K.W.D.D., L.L.G., G.A.V.K., S.S., and M.J.J.H. wrote the paper.
• The authors declare no conflict of interest.
• This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/06/1015316108

NATURE NEWS 

Hepatitis C drug nears approval

23 Apr 2013 | 11:01 BST | Posted by Lauren Morello | Category: Drug discovery

Posted on behalf of Beth Mole.

A highly anticipated new drug for treating hepatitis C has sailed through its first phase III clinical trials, according to two papers published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Sofosbuvir, a new antiviral developed by Gilead Sciences of Foster City, California, is one of several drugs in the pipeline that could replace hepatitis C treatments that incorporate the immune-boosting drug interferon, which can cause harsh side effects including depression, anaemia and severe flu-like symptoms. Up to 170 million people worldwide are infected with blood-borne hepatitis C virus (HCV), including as many as 4 million people in the United States. Long-term exposure to the virus can cause chronic liver disease and cancer. Current therapies that combine the antiviral drug ribavirin and interferon cure up to 75% of those treated, but take as long as a year to do so.

China bird flu cases now at 102

By Melissa Gray and Paul Armstrong, CNN

updated 5:38 AM EDT, Mon April 22, 2013

An H7N9 bird flu patient walks in the corridor of a hospital after his recovery and approval for discharge in Bozhou, in central China's Anhui Province, on Friday, April 19. China has reported 83 cases of H7N9 avian influenza. Seventeen people have died from the virus which, while common in birds, hadn't been detected in humans before the first cases were reported in March.

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Bird flu scare spreads in China

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• The cases include 20 deaths, and 102 infection cases
• Seventy patients are hospitalized with the virus
• The new strain wasn't known until three weeks ago
• International experts in China to monitor the H7N9 strain

(CNN) -- The number of bird flu cases in China jumped Sunday to 102, including 20 deaths, the World Health Organization announced.

Seventy patients remain hospitalized with the virus. The WHO said there is still no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

So far the virus has mainly affected eastern China, with 11 deaths and 33 infection cases reported in Shanghai, 24 cases, including three deaths, in Jiangsu Province, 38 cases, including five deaths, in Zhejiang Province, while Anhui Province has confirmed three cases, with one ending in death.

Further afield, four people -- including one in Beijing in northern China and three in central Henan Province -- have tested positive for the H7N9 virus.

The current strain of bird flu, H7N9, was not detected in humans until last month.

Map: Bird flu spread

Poultry markets closed over bird flu

A team of international experts are currently in China conducting a week-long assessment of the virus, the WHO said on Friday.

"Right now it is still an animal virus that rarely infects humans," Dr. Michael O'Leary, the head of the WHO's office in Beijing, told reporters.

READ: Chicken still on menu, WHO says

On Thursday, the central government suspended wild bird sales to try to prevent the spread of the virus, although many questions remain as to the source of infection. It follows a ban on live poultry trading in affected provinces. A large number of birds have also been slaughtered, state-run Xinhua said.

O'Leary said there was legitimate reason for concern about the new virus, but suggested it was premature to begin mass culling of poultry.

"I eat chicken every day," O'Leary said with a laugh. "Chicken is of no concern at all."

Until March, the virus had only been present in birds, which is why they've become the focus of the investigation.

However, 40% of patients with H7N9 had not come into contact with poultry, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Authorities are continuing to monitor more than 1,000 people who have come into close contact with confirmed cases.

Posted by Shreya

F.D.A. Bars Generic OxyContin

In a major policy move, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it would not approve generic versions of the powerful narcotic OxyContin, the painkiller that symbolized a decade-long epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

Enlarge This Image

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

The F.D.A.'s decision to bar generic versions of OxyContin is likely to result in higher prices of the drug.

The move represents a victory for OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, which in 2010 introduced a formulation of the drug that was less prone to tampering.

The original version of OxyContin, which was approved in late 1995, could be easily crushed, a step that released its entire narcotic payload at once rather than over time as intended. The new version turns into a jellylike mass when crushed.

Some state attorneys general and pain treatment experts had also urged the F.D.A. to block the release of generic versions of OxyContin, arguing that failing to do so would feed street demand for strong narcotics. But the decision is also likely to result in higher prices for OxyContin, a time-release form of a narcotic called oxycodone, because it will not face generic competition.

The decision by the F.D.A. came on the day when the patent for the original version of OxyContin was set to expire. That would have allowed generic producers to introduce their own version of the formulation. F.D.A. officials said that several producers had applications to sell a generic form of OxyContin pending before the agency.

As part of Tuesday’s decision, the F.D.A. also said it had approved a label for the new version of OxyContin stating that it was less prone to abuse through inhaling or injecting it.

The decision is the first time that the agency has allowed a manufacturer to state that a narcotic drug has tamper-resistant properties, said an agency official, Dr. Douglas C. Throckmorton.

Dr. Throckmorton said the F.D.A. had looked at data from several studies, some of it underwritten by Purdue Pharma, in arriving at its decision. He said that while the data was not perfect, the agency had concluded that it was enough to show that the new version of OxyContin was safer, in its abuse resistance, than the original version.

As a result, the efficacy of that original version — and by extension the efficacy of any generic version of it — no longer outweighed its risks, since the therapeutic value of older and new versions of the drug were the same, he added.

“We recognize that we are looking at new territory,” Dr. Throckmorton said, referring to the standards under which it would allow claims for abuse resistance.

The decision by the F.D.A. comes at a time when the efficacy of strong narcotics like OxyContin for the treatment of long-term pain has come under increasing scrutiny. Citing poor outcomes, some insurers are also seeking to limit how doctors use the drugs.

Along with Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of another long-acting narcotic painkiller, Endo Pharmaceuticals, has also petitioned the F.D.A. seeking a similar claim of abuse resistance for a newer version of one of its drugs, Opana. If that claim proves successful, generic versions of the original form of Opana would also be barred.

Over the last year, Purdue Pharma and Endo have pushed for federal legislation that would require many opioids to be tamper-resistant, and lobbied in favor of similar state laws.

In Canada, an effort last year by some doctors and local officials to deter sales of generic versions of OxyContin there fell flat. While companies like Purdue Pharma insist the public’s health is their main concern, others note that producers introduced tamper-resistant versions of their products just as the drugs were about to lose patent protection.

In court papers filed in response to a lawsuit filed by Endo, the F.D.A. described the company’s action as a “thinly veiled attempt to maintain its market share and block generic competition.”

At time of introduction in late 2010, the price of the new version of OxyContin was about $6 per 40 milligram tablet, the same then as the price that was not tamper resistant. Since then, the price of the new version has risen to about $6.80 for a tablet of that strength. Opana costs about the same amount for a pill of the same painkilling strength.

When the F.D.A. approved the original formulation of OxyContin in 1995, the agency allowed its maker to claim that the drug’s time-release formulation was “believed to reduce” its potential to be abused. That contention proved disastrously wrong.

Drug Makers Use Safety Rule to Block Generics

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have deployed an array of tactics aimed at preventing low-cost copies of their drugs from entering the marketplace.

Multimedia

Graphic

Contention in Making Generic Drugs

But federal regulators contend the latest strategy — which relies on a creative interpretation of drug safety laws — is illegal.

The new approach is almost elegant in its simplicity: brand-name drug makers are refusing to sell their products to generic companies, which need to analyze them so they can create the copycat versions.