Wednesday, Nov 26th
Last update07:57:04 AM GMT
Health Glance
The General Medical Council found Dr Andrew Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct over the way he carried out his controversial research. It follows a GMC ruling earlier this year that he had acted unethically.
Fragrances are designed to make you smell good, but is that all they are doing? In a recently released study of 17 name-brand fragrances co-authored by EWG and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, we found that they contain secret ingredients, chemicals not listed on the label, with troubling hazardous properties.
Each day in the U.S., two women die of problems related to pregnancy or childbirth. The numbers have been rising, for reasons that are not entirely clear. After plunging in the 1900s, maternal mortality rates in California tripled between 1996 and 2006, from 5.6 deaths per 100,000 births to 16.9.
Nationally, the rate, defined as deaths from obstetrical causes within one year of giving birth, rose from 7.6 per 100,000 to 13.3 per 100,000.
Reovirus, which lives in human respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts without causing any symptoms, can help magnify the effects of radiotherapy in treating even the most advanced cancers, laboratory tests have shown.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should make more information public, including its reasons for refusing to approve a drug or device, an agency task force recommended on Wednesday.
If adopted, the changes would shed considerable light on a review process that affects the entire drug and device industries. All of the proposals would offer the public more details on key agency decisions.
The Coalition for Vaccine Safety (CVS) calls for independent vaccine safety agency and Congressional hearings on government's lax record on safety issues.
A three-part investigative series on Merck's cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil®, highlights serious conflicts of interest across agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in the development, approval and safety surveillance of vaccines. The series, by Mark Blaxill, Editor-at-Large for the Internet newspaper Age of Autism and a Director of SafeMinds, was posted on the newspaper's site on May 12-13 (www.ageofautism.com/mark_blaxill). It preceded the announcement on May 14 that FDA, a DHHS agency, is allowing use of rotavirus vaccines despite their contamination with viral particles from pigs. (http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm212149.htm)
Relatively low-level exposure to common pesticides -- probably from residues on foods -- doubles kids' risk of ADHD, Harvard researchers find. The findings come from a nationally representative sample of 1,139 U.S. kids aged 8 to 15 who were tested for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and had urine samples tested for signs of exposure to various organophosphate pesticides such as malathion.
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