Hospital Seeing More Babies Born Exposed to Prescription Drugs

A hospital in Knoxville, TN has reported dramatically increasing rates of babies who have absorbed narcotics or other pain medicines taken by their mothers (becuase of addiction or for childbirth). After birth, these babies experience withdrawal from these drugs that involves seizures and even temporary blindness among other symptoms. The pain medicines are ingested by the babies when the dose is high enough that the drugs are absorbed by the placenta and subsequently the baby. Doctors attribute this problem to the overuse of pain medicines and hope to solve it by more closely monitoring pain medicine prescriptions for pregnant women.

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nature

Is Chuck Schumer going to blunt US cannabinoid research?

On 20 April the duo announced a bill that would make New York the 41^st state to deem possession or sale of the active ingredients in so-called ‘synthetic marijuana’ drugs a crime punishable by jail time. The drugs in question—known to the mostly teenagers who like to smoke them as K2, Spice, Killer Buzzz, Blaze and Mr. Nice Guy—are mixtures of herbs such as oregano laced with laboratory-produced cannabinoids, a class of chemicals that also includes marijuana’s psychoactive component, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

The dangers ofsynthetic cannabinoids are clear. A studypublished this month inPediatricsdocumented more than 4,000 US hospital cases in which teens who used K2 and other drugs required emergency intervention for symptoms such as a dangerously rapid heart rate. But medical researchers warn that the march toward nationwide criminalization that started with a 2010 Kansas law banning three synthetic cannabinoids has already begun to stifle research on the chemicals, which are known to stimulate appetite and ameliorate nausea and pain. “It would be a disaster if they criminalized all synthetic cannabinoids,” says pharmacologist Nathan Lents at the City University of New York. “We already have to jump through hoops to do our research. These substances clearly have untapped potential as therapies.”

Therapeutic benefits aside, momentum is growing for broad criminalization not only among states but at the federal level. A US Senate bill introduced last March by Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, would criminalize all synthetic cannabinoids nationwide. “That would be so traumatic,” explains Lents, “because that law classifies all cannabinoids as schedule 1 drugs.” A ‘schedule 1’ drug has no known medical use, and so is very tightly controlled by the federal government. A researcher conducting experiments with any schedule 1 substance must submit protocols signed by the president of his university to the US Drug Enforcement Agency in order to obtain small amounts of the chemical, which then must be kept locked in a safe when not in use, and must fill out mountains of paperwork accounting for the chemical’s use in experiments. Lents says requiring researchers to jump through such hoops chokes research and draws already spare funding away from cannabinoid labs. “There’s already not a lot of political will because these substances are seen as somehow morally reprehensible. A schedule 1 designation would make it even harder to study them.”

'Mad cow' disease found in California dairy cow

Continue reading the main story

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A dairy cow in California has bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow" disease, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has confirmed.

The diagnosis, the fourth in the US and its first since 2006, would not affect beef exports, said the department's veterinary chief.

"Both human health and animal health are protected," John Clifford said.

The first outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States occurred in 2003, and hurt global trade in beef.

In a statement, Mr Clifford said that the recently diagnosed dairy cow in central California had not entered the food supply.

"There is really no cause for alarm here with regard to this animal," he said.

The disease was detected as part of a screening programme that tests an estimated 40,000 animals every year, the USDA said.

Canada said it did not expect the diagnosis to affect food trade between the two nations.

Fourth case

Two of South Korea's biggest retailers have halted sales of US beef.

The EU said it was satisfied that the appropriate steps had been taken to prevent the disease entering the food chain, and would not be imposing a ban.

Mad cow disease, or BSE, is always fatal in cattle, and research suggests humans can contract a similar deadly brain disease, vCJD, by eating infected meat from infected animals.

The disease causes personality change, loss of body function, and eventually death.

Although infected meat is no longer widely viewed as a risk, there has been continuing concern in the UK over human-to-human transmission through blood transfusions.

The USDA noted that the disease is not transmitted via cow's milk.

According to the USDA, there were only 29 worldwide cases of mad cow disease in 2011.

BSE rose to global prominence in the 1990s with a major outbreak in the UK that prompted fears of large-scale transmission to humans.

The disease has killed more than 150 people and 184,000 cows globally, mainly in Britain and Europe.

The US and many other nations took steps to reduce the spread of the disease, changing animal feed practices seen as enabling transmission among herds.

The California diagnosis is the fourth case of BSE found in the US.

The first was a Canadian-born cow diagnosed in 2003 in Washington state; the others were detected in 2005 in Texas and in 2006 in Alabama.

News of the diagnosis appeared to have an short-term impact on cattle prices: live cattle futures on one US exchange dropped by the daily limit of three cents per pound on reports of the confirmed case, but quickly rebounded

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death

This NYT article tells the story of several terminally ill patients who used psychedelics like ecstasy,  magic mushrooms and LSD to calm anxieties before a death they knew was coming. The drugs helped them to change their outlook on life and death and approach the latter with a more peaceful state of mind than they would have otherwise. This could be a very interesting argument in favor of allowing these Schedule I drugs for certain medical uses because, in the cases discussed in this article, the costs/risk seem non-existent compared to the benefits.



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Post-Prozac Nation

The Science and History of Treating Depression

By SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

Published: April 19, 2012

Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as Prozac. In her 1994 book “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote of a nearly transcendental experience on the drug. Before she began treatment with antidepressants, she was living in “a computer program of total negativity . . . an absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” She floated from one “suicidal reverie” to the next. Yet, just a few weeks after starting Prozac, her life was transformed. “One morning I woke up and really did want to live. . . . It was as if the miasma of depression had lifted off me, in the same way that the fog in San Francisco rises as the day wears on. Was it the Prozac? No doubt.”

 

New York Times Magazine - Full Article

    

Obama Says Legalization Is Not the Answer on Drugs

The issue was placed on the agenda of the Summit of the Americas this weekend by the host, Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos. Even so, Mr. Santos suggested that he had in mind some unspecified middle ground short of fully decriminalizing the drug trade that for years has undermined societies throughout the region, notably in Colombia.

“We have the obligation to see if we’re doing the best that we can do, or are there other alternatives that can be much more efficient?” Mr. Santos said during an informal panel discussion with Mr. Obama and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil just before the summit meeting began. “One side can be all the consumers go to jail. On the other extreme is legalization. On the middle ground, we may have more practical policies.”

In his turn, Mr. Obama said, “I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are ones that are doing more harm than good in certain places.”

But, he added, “I personally, and my administration’s position, is that legalization is not the answer.” Drug operations could come to “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint,” he said, and “could be just as corrupting if not more corrupting then the status quo.”

The prominence of the drug-enforcement issue at the meeting, which drew more than 30 leaders from North, Central and South America and Caribbean nations, in part reflected a positive development: the increased prosperity in Latin America in recent years has made economic issues less of a problem, and at the same time has emboldened Latin American leaders to take a bigger role in setting the agenda when they meet.

Leaders at a summit meeting of many of the Western Hemisphere nations on Saturday discussed alternatives to what many consider a failed “war on drugs” that is too reliant on military action and imprisonment. But President Obama said flatly that “legalization is not the answer.” Mr. Santos, in opening the meeting on Saturday afternoon, said the leaders should stop stalling in re-examining the region’s approach to the war on drugs, which he dated more than four decades back to President Richard Nixon in 1971. President Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala has called for full legalization of narcotics, though no specific proposals are on the table here.

“Despite all of the efforts, the immense efforts, the huge costs, we have to recognize that the illicit drug business is prospering,” Mr. Santos told the leaders. “This summit is not going to resolve this issue,” he added. “But it can be a starting point to begin a discussion that we have been postponing for far too long.”

Smokeless in Seattle

IT was January of 1998 when a friend and I drove to a basement in South Seattle to set up a pot garden. We were terrified. If a police officer pulled us over, how would we explain these bags of rapid-bloom fertilizer — in winter?

Still, we had to go. A friend was suffering from the late stages of a degenerative muscular disease. He spent all day strapped into something that looked like a hospital bed crossed with an easel. Smoking pot helped ease his pain; after his wife held joints to his lips, he would eat soup. He would watch TV. He’d laugh.

Growing pot was illegal at the time, but stories like ours, and a strong public campaign, persuaded 59 percent of Washington State voters to legalize medical marijuana that fall. In the 14 years since, an entire industry has emerged to serve incapacitated patients like my friend, who couldn’t grow pot himself. Doctors write authorizations, dispensaries sell the stuff, trade magazines flourish.

In the eyes of most opponents and many supporters of easing pot laws, medical marijuana is supposed to be a slippery slope to full legalization. But in Washington, the opposite is happening: a momentous initiative to legalize marijuana for all adults, which will be on the ballot this fall, is being opposed by the medical marijuana industry that the previous initiative created.

Initiative 502, as the measure is known, would allow adults 21 and older to possess up to an ounce of marijuana without penalty. The state would issue licenses to marijuana farmers, distributors and even stores, which could then sell pot over the counter like beer.

The plan, supported by the likes of John McKay, a former federal attorney, and Rick Steves, the travel writer, is about more than stoners’ rights: legalizing and regulating the pot market would wrest profits from murderous foreign cartels while helping the beleaguered state budget. Officials recently estimated the measure could generate up to $606 million in tax revenue in the first year.

Every recent poll except one has shown most Washington voters are now ready to pass the initiative. But support has slipped since last fall, down to only 51 percent, according to SurveyUSA. The flagging enthusiasm correlates with the escalating effort to stop the initiative.

In late February, Dr. Gil Mobley, a physician with a local clinic providing medical-marijuana authorizations, began a campaign called No on I-502, a new name for a group that, before, called itself Patients Against I-502. It anticipates donations from lawyers and doctors, said its treasurer, Anthony Martinelli, and pot dispensaries may also finance a fall volley of television commercials.

The campaign claims that a provision in Initiative 502 would penalize medical marijuana users who drive with active THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana, in their blood, even a day or a week after the last time they got high. (Any driver who exceeds a limit of five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood would be automatically guilty of driving under the influence.) They also complain that the law would have zero tolerance for drivers under 21 years old with active THC in their blood. Mr. Martinelli goes so far as to claim that the measure “will take away driving for all cannabis users.”

The anti-502 effort has also played on civil liberties fears. A glossy medical-marijuana magazine, Dope, warned recently that patients would be required to apply for licenses if they wanted to grow cannabis and that the Drug Enforcement Administration could then access their names.

This type of opposition isn’t uncharted political territory: In 2010, a group of medical marijuana dispensaries banded together to help narrowly defeat a legalization initiative in California.

What’s the threat? A legal, regulated market for all consumers — not just sick people — could negate demand for a niche medical pot industry altogether.

“The medical marijuana industry is driven by profit,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which supports medical marijuana legalization. “It’s not driven by compassion anymore. It is driven by the need to make money.”

What’s more, the opposition doesn’t even have a compelling case. I haven’t found a single scientific study showing that even the heaviest of pot users would exceed the five-nanogram cutoff after 24 hours. And the civil liberties attacks are simply dishonest. The rules would remain the same as they currently are for medical marijuana — no registration requirements and no database.

For their part, I-502’s critics insist that they have no financial motivation and that they support legalization, just not this initiative and its D.U.I. regulations. But it’s more than a little strange to defend the status quo, in which nearly 10,000 people are arrested in Washington for possession each year, on civil liberties grounds. And it’s not as if voters would accept a law that didn’t include restrictions on smoking and driving.

Washington State has a chance this fall to siphon profits from cartels while stopping senseless arrests, or it can let the status quo prevail. It’s a simple choice, particularly given that concerns from the medical marijuana industry are, at best, red herrings.

Science

Mystery "Nodding" Disease Haunts East Africa

n Mahenge, a town in a mountainous and isolated area of southern Tanzania, a great number of people suffer from epilepsy. Some of the most severe cases are found in people who were normal until they were around 4 or 5 years old, when they began to have seizures characterized by repeated downward movements of their heads. For many years, Western colleagues doubted or dismissed reports of the nodding seizures, first described in a 1964 paper. Now an apparent outbreak of a similar nodding syndrome in Uganda and southern South Sudan over the past few years has attracted many more researchers to look for possible causes. They are chasing several suspects, including a parasitic worm, but so far there's no proven culprit. Without a clear explanation of the condition's cause or effective treatments, defeating the disease will be no easy task.

NATURE | NEWS

Memory 'trick' relieves drug cravings

Altering memories of drug use could stop ex-addicts from relapsing

Researchers have come up with a way to help prevent recovering drug addicts from relapsing — without using other pharmaceuticals to help. The approach involves modifying addicts' behaviour by weakening their memory of drug taking, which relieves their cravings and might help to prevent relapse.

Addicts tend to associate a drug's effects with drug-taking equipment and a certain environment, which can make them vulnerable to relapse if they encounter those conditions. The technique, studied by Lin Lu of the National Institute of Drug Dependence at Peking University in Beijing and his colleagues, aims to break that link by briefly reactivating the memory of drug taking and following it with an 'extinction session' of repeated exposure to the same memory cues.

The short reminder of drug-taking seems to take the memory out of storage and make it easier to overwrite

http://0-www.sciencemag.org.luna.wellesley.edu/content/336/6078/241/F4.expansion.html

Is an Egg for Breakfast Worth This?

The Humane Society of the United States plans to release on Thursday the results of an undercover investigation into Kreider Farms, a major factory farm that produces 4.5 million eggs each day

“It’s physically hard to breathe because of the ammonia” rising from manure pits below older barns, said the investigator, who would not allow his name to be used because that would prevent him from taking another undercover job in agriculture. He said that when workers needed to enter an older barn, they would first open doors and rev up exhaust fans, and then rush in to do their chores before the fumes became overwhelming.

Mice sometimes ran down egg conveyer belts, barns were thick with flies and manure in three barns tested positive for salmonella, he said. (Actually, salmonella isn’t as rare as you might think, turning up in 3 percent of egg factory farms tested by the Food and Drug Administration last year.)

In some cases, 11 hens were jammed into a cage about 2 feet by 2 feet. The Humane Society says that that is even more cramped than the egg industry’s own voluntary standards — which have been widely criticized as inadequate.

An automatic feeding cart that runs between the cages sometimes decapitates hens as they’re eating, the investigator said. Corpses are pulled out if they’re easy to see, but sometimes remain for weeks in the cages, piling up until they have rotted into the wiring, he added.

Other hens have their heads stuck in the wire and are usually left to die, the investigator said.

Impatience to Get Thin Sends Some to Canada

The intragastric balloon, filled with liquid and left in the stomach for up to six months, is not approved for use in the United States, though it’s available in Europe, South America and other parts of the world. Clinical trials required to win federal Food and Drug Administration approval are being initiated, but many Americans aren’t waiting.

Since the balloon’s introduction in Canada in 2006, people like Mrs. Kwarciak have been streaming north in growing numbers. Drawn by the relative ease of balloon placement, Americans account for nearly a third of patients undergoing the procedures in Canadian clinics just over the border.

“The nice thing about the balloon is that you have such a sense of satiety,” said Mrs. Kwarciak, who has lost 25 pounds since she had the procedure. “I feel full all the time. I have to remind myself at times to eat.”

...   The combination of potential risks and little benefit is the main reason there is no intragastric balloon on the market in the United States. An earlier version called the Garren-Edwards Gastric Bubble was approved in 1985. But officials at the Food and Drug Administration soon became concerned about the severe and frequent complications associated with the device, an agency spokeswoman said.

By 1988, the manufacturer, American Edwards Laboratories, stopped selling it, voluntarily withdrawing the balloon from the market entirely in 1992. In the interim, randomized clinical trials comparing the bubble with a sham or placebo device found that diet and exercise were equally effective for weight loss.

Getting the new intragastric balloon is not cheap: In Canada, an outpatient procedure that takes less than an hour costs $8,000.

... The balloon, usually filled with blue liquid, can rupture. The liquid will turn patients’ urine green, which is how they are alerted to the problem. A ruptured balloon may pass through the intestines on its own or require endoscopic or surgical removal if it obstructs the intestines. The most serious complication is a rupture in the abdomen, which can be life-threatening. Other complications include infections and ulcers.

Source
NEW YORK (AP) — Sales of the nation's two most popular prescription painkillers have exploded in new parts of the country, an Associated Press analysis shows, worrying experts who say the push to relieve patients' suffering is spawning an addiction epidemic.

From New York's Staten Island to Santa Fe, N.M., Drug Enforcement Administration figures show dramatic rises between 2000 and 2010 in the distribution of oxycodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. Some places saw sales increase sixteenfold.

Meanwhile, the distribution of hydrocodone, the key ingredient in Vicodin, Norco and Lortab, is rising in Appalachia, the original epicenter of the painkiller epidemic, as well as in the Midwest.

The increases have coincided with a wave of overdose deaths, pharmacy robberies and other problems in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Florida and other states. Opioid pain relievers, the category that includes oxycodone and hydrocodone, caused 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008 alone, and the death toll is rising, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Arsenic in Our Chicken

my topic today is a pair of new scientific studies suggesting that poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic

“We were kind of floored,” said Keeve E. Nachman, a co-author of both studies and a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future.  “It’s unbelievable what we found.”

He said that the researchers had intended to test only for antibiotics. But assays for other chemicals and pharmaceuticals didn’t cost extra, so researchers asked for those results as well.

It turns out that arsenic has routinely been fed to poultry (and sometimes hogs) because it reduces infections and makes flesh an appetizing shade of pink. There’s no evidence that such low levels of arsenic harm either chickens or the people eating them, but still...

Big Ag doesn’t advertise the chemicals it stuffs into animals, so the scientists conducting these studies figured out a clever way to detect them. Bird feathers, like human fingernails, accumulate chemicals and drugs that an animal is exposed to. So scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Arizona State University examined feather meal — a poultry byproduct made of feathers.

One study, just published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Environmental Science & Technology, found that feather meal routinely contained a banned class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones. These antibiotics (such as Cipro), are illegal in poultry productionbecause they can breed antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” that harm humans. Already, antibiotic-resistant infections kill more Americans annually than AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The same study also found that one-third of feather-meal samples contained an antihistamine that is the active ingredient of Benadryl. The great majority of feather meal contained acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. And feather-meal samples from China contained an antidepressant that is the active ingredient in Prozac.

Poultry-growing literature has recommended Benadryl to reduce anxiety among chickens, apparently because stressed chickens have tougher meat and grow more slowly. Tylenol and Prozac presumably serve the same purpose.

Researchers found that most feather-meal samples contained caffeine. It turns out that chickens are sometimes fed coffee pulp and green tea powder to keep them awake so that they can spend more time eating. (Is that why they need the Benadryl, to calm them down?)

The other peer-reviewed study, reported in a journal called Science of the Total Environment, found arsenic in every sample of feather meal tested. Almost 9 in 10 broiler chickens in the United States had been fed arsenic, according to a 2011 industry estimate.

These findings will surprise some poultry farmers because even they often don’t know what chemicals they feed their birds. Huge food companies require farmers to use a proprietary food mix, and the farmer typically doesn’t know exactly what is in it.

Law Could Hamper Drug Tourism in the Netherlands

Nearly a quarter of this city’s more than four million foreign tourists a year will visit its coffee shops, where the sale of small quantities of cannabis is tolerated.

But Amsterdam’s days as a destination for hazy holidays may be numbered. Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s right-wing coalition government is pushing to sharply restrict the operations of the coffee shops and to prohibit the sale of the drugs to nonresidents. If the measures survive a court challenge and the opposition of local officials, the first phase would begin May 1.

“I think that by the end of next year, there will be no drug tourism in the Netherlands,” Ard van der Steur, a Parliament member and a spokesman for Mr. Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, said in an interview in The Hague. “We have created an incredible criminal industry that we need to get rid of.”

Strictly speaking, the sale of marijuana and hashish (a resin extracted from the cannabis plant) is not legal. But a longstanding policy of tolerance — essentially a set of instructions from the Justice Ministry to the police — means that licensed coffee shop operators are not prosecuted as long as they deal in limited quantities and keep hard drugs and minors out. The Dutch are also allowed to cultivate up to five marijuana plants each for their personal use.

In some respects, tolerance appears to have been successful: despite the easy availability, the Dutch are far less likely than Americans or many other Europeans to use marijuana. About 14 percent of Americans use marijuana, versus about 5 percent of the Dutch, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Alex Stevens, a drug policy expert at the University of Kent, argues that the tolerance policy has reduced the harm caused by prohibition, in part by separating the markets for hard drugs like heroin from the market for marijuana, and by getting cannabis dealers off the street and into a regulated environment.

The impetus for changing the policy originated with, of all things, a parking shortage. In the southern city of Maastricht, sandwiched between the German and Belgian borders, hundreds of drug tourists drive in daily from elsewhere in Europe to purchase marijuana, creating an infuriating traffic nuisance.

Spotting an opportunity, clandestine dealers have begun offering foreign drivers the option of buying their cannabis without ever leaving their cars. Even local residents who support the coffee shops are unhappy that drugs are back on the streets.

White House and the F.D.A. Often at Odds

The Food and Drug Administration was proposing as part of the new health care law to require that movie theaters post calorie counts for popcorn. In the F.D.A.’s view, the law called for moviegoers to know that many a buttery bucket of popcorn had more calories than two Big Macs, but Ms. DeParle, President Obama’s chief health adviser, thought the requirement was unnecessary and would probably be lampooned on Fox News as an especially silly example of the government intrusions that conservatives often mocked as the nanny state.Within days, the F.D.A., an agency charged with protecting public health, backed down and dropped the notion of calorie counts for foods served in movie theaters and on airplanes.

Similar tussles have erupted between top administration officials and the F.D.A. over issues from the regulation of sunscreens and asthma inhalers to the enforcement of an agency decision on a drug to prevent premature births.