Merck’s cervical cancer vaccine wins US approval
The first vaccine to prevent cervical cancer won U.S. approval on Thursday when health officials cleared a Merck & Co. Inc. vaccine to block a sexually transmitted infection that causes the deadly disease.
Public health experts called the Gardasil vaccine a major advance against a disease that kills about 300,000 women worldwide annually. Industry analysts said the product also should help revive the fortunes of struggling Merck with annual sales that could top $2 billion.
The vaccine blocks infection with certain types of the human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes genital warts and most cervical cancer.
Wendy’s cuts most trans fats from fries, chicken
Wendy’s International Inc. on Thursday said it would significantly cut trans fats from its menu, beating market leader McDonald’s Corp., which still has not made good on its promise to remove the artery-clogging fats from french fries in the United States.
Wendy’s, the No. 3 U.S. burger chain, said its restaurants in the United States and Canada will switch to a new blend of corn and soy oil for french fries and breaded chicken items starting in August.
The move will reduce trans fats in french fries to just zero to 0.5 grams, depending on serving sizes, while all of the breaded chicken products will have zero grams of trans fats.
Monkey trial may show possible way to AIDS vaccine
A shot that helps keep AIDS-infected monkeys alive may offer the best clues yet about how to make an effective HIV vaccine, researchers reported on Thursday.
The experiment provided important clues about how the AIDS virus destroys the immune system, and how to track the health of infected people, the researchers said.
“A vaccine of this type does not appear to prevent infection,” Dr. Norman Letvin of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview. What the vaccine may do, he said, is help infected people live longer without becoming ill.
Young adult blacks in US hit hard by HIV infection
Non-Hispanic blacks between 19 and 24 years of age are 20 times more likely to be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, than young adults in any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, according to new estimates.
The overall HIV infection rate for young adults is 1 case per 1,000 people. However, the infection rate in this age group among blacks is 4.9 per 1,000, compared to a rate of 0.22 per 1,000 for all other races of similar age, researchers have shown.
The findings, reported in the American Journal of Public Health, are based on a random sample of more than 13,000 19- to 24-year-olds who agreed to be screened for HIV infection as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, or Add Health Study.
High rate of self-harm seen among college students
One in six young adults have injured themselves intentionally at least once, according to the largest US survey to investigate the practice among college students.
Self-injurious behavior can include scratching and pinching oneself, cutting, swallowing poison and even breaking bones. People who injure themselves say it helps relieve distress.
“It’s a harbinger of distress, in all likelihood, and inability to cope positively,” Dr. Janis Whitlock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health.
More doctors can use computers, gaps remain
U.S. doctors increasingly have access to computers to look up information on their patients, but more than half still don’t have digital health records or the ability to write electronic prescriptions, a study released on Wednesday found.
Twenty-two percent of doctors surveyed by the Center for Studying Health System Change last year had access to electronic prescription tools compared with 11 percent in 2001.
About half can use computers to access notes on their patients or exchange data with other doctors, up from about 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, four years earlier.
Black women twice as likely to get aggressive breast cancer
New research has found that African-American women who contract breast cancer before reaching menopause are more than twice as likely as white women to have an aggressive, deadlier form of the disease.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill believe the higher rates of basal-like cancer among younger black women partly explains why blacks are at greater risk of dying from breast cancer than white women, despite having a lower overall risk of the disease.
Popular hypertension drugs triple the risk of birth defects
A study by American researchers has found that certain widely used hypertension drugs, once considered safe in the early stages of pregnancy, can almost triple the risk of birth defects.
It was always considered that drugs, known as ACE inhibitors only caused problems when taken after the third month of pregnancy but this latest study demonstrates that this is not the case at all.
The drugs already carry a warning that they may cause injury and even death to the developing fetus when used during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
