EU must prepare now for flu pandemic - commissioner
Europe will almost certainly be hit by an influenza epidemic, possibly a mutation of bird flu which has already killed more than 50 people in Asia, the European Union’s health commissioner said on Friday.
Launching the EU’s European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in the Swedish capital, Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said EU states must make immediate preparations for tackling such an outbreak.
An “influenza pandemic seems inevitable,” he said.
Immunotherapy injections help treat warts
Injecting warts directly with any of a number of selected antigenic proteins appears to be a useful way of resolving the problem, researchers report. This form of immunotherapy seems to clear up not only the injected warts but also others not even in the same vicinity.
“Intralesional immunotherapy is a highly effective and safe method for treating any patient with a wart, but particularly for patients with large or numerous warts in any location,” lead investigator Dr. Thomas H. Horn told Reuters Health.
Dr. Horn, of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, and colleagues, studied 233 patients who had at least one wart that was injected with skin test antigens for either mumps, Candida or Trichophyton.
UK court rules against medicinal cannabis users
A group of Britons appealing against convictions for illegally using cannabis for pain relief suffered a blow on Friday when three of the country’s top judges ruled they were not exempt from the law.
The five people mounting the test case argued they were entitled to a defence of “necessity” because the drug was needed for pain relief, was more effective than some conventional medicines and did not have the associated side effects.
Irish court gives go-ahead to Roche acne drug case
An Irish judge ruled on Friday that a man who believes the acne drug Accutane caused his son’s suicide can pursue his case against Swiss drugs maker Roche Holdings despite rejecting an out-of-court settlement.
Roche had hoped to get the case dismissed after Liam Grant turned down a settlement that offered maximum damages under Irish law, plus related costs, but did not include an admission of liability.
Justice Joseph Finnegan accepted that continuing the case would be both costly and expensive, involving millions of documents and months of court time, but ruled that Grant had a constitutional right to pursue his case to establish liability.
