More Studies on Radiation and Full-Body Scans
February 8, 2010
Bloomberg.com
By Jonathan Tirone
Air passengers should be made aware of the health risks of airport body screenings and governments must explain any decision to expose the public to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, an inter-agency report said.
Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, even though the radiation dose from body scanners is “extremely small,” said the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety report, which is restricted to the agencies concerned and not meant for public circulation. The group includes the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.
A more accurate assessment about the health risks of the screening won’t be possible until governments decide whether all passengers will be systematically scanned or randomly selected, the report said. Governments must justify the additional risk posed to passengers, and should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”
President Barack Obama has pledged $734 million to deploy airport scanners that use x-rays and other technology to detect explosives, guns and other contraband. The U.S. and European countries including the U.K. have been deploying more scanners at airports after the attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound Northwest airline flight.
“There is little doubt that the doses from the backscatter x-ray systems being proposed for airport security purposes are very low,” Health Protection Agency doctor Michael Clark said by phone from Didcot, England. “The issue raised by the report is that even though doses from the systems are very low, they feel there is still a need for countries to justify exposures.”
3-D Imaging
A backscatter x-ray is a machine that can render a three- dimensional image of people by scanning them for as long as 8 seconds, the report says. The technology has also raised privacy issues in countries including Germany because it yields images of the naked body.
The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Most of the scanners deliver less radiation than a passenger is likely to receive from cosmic rays while airborne, the report said. Scanned passengers may absorb from 0.1 to 5 microsieverts of radiation compared with 5 microsieverts on a flight from Dublin to Paris and 30 microsieverts between Frankfurt and Bangkok, the report said. A sievert is a unit of measure for radiation.
European Union regulators plan to finish a study in April on the effects of scanning technology on travelers’ privacy and health. Amsterdam, Heathrow and Manchester are among European airports that have installed the devices or plan to do so.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has said that it ordered 150 scanners from OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan unit and will buy an additional 300 imaging devices this year. The agency currently uses 40 machines, which cost $130,000 to $170,000 each, produced by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. at 19 airports including San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington D.C.
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Merck Could Have Detected Vioxx Risks Earlier
November 23, 2009
Reuters
by Julie Steenhuysen
Heart risks from taking Merck & Co Inc’s painkiller Vioxx could have been detected more than three years before the company withdrew the drug from the market in September 2004, had the data been openly available, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said their analysis illustrates the need for quick, public disclosure of drug safety data.
“You could have known there were marked safety problems with Vioxx as early as 2000 and the signal only grew stronger,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale University School of Medicine, who worked on the study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Merck voluntarily withdrew Vioxx from the market in September 2004 after a clinical trial found the blockbuster drug increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes in long-term users of the medicine.
In November 2007, Merck signed a $4.85 billion deal to settle thousands of claims for heart attacks, strokes and deaths allegedly caused by the drug.
The study draws on company data from more than 30 clinical trials conducted by Merck between 1996 and 2004 comparing Vioxx, or rofecoxib, to a placebo or dummy pill.
Krumholz gained access to the data through his role as a paid witness for plaintiffs in lawsuits involving heart attacks or strokes that occurred after taking the drug.
“Most of the information we are using in this study was never published, or if it was published, they never included the key safety data,” he said.
Of the 30 studies, 18 were published before September 2004, when the drug was withdrawn, six were published after that, and six were never published.
“We’re suggesting this has to change,” Krumholz said.
The team pooled data from randomized clinical trials that compared Vioxx to a placebo.
They pooled the trials in the order the studies were done, and after each one, they analyzed the data to see if they could detect any signal that would suggest the drug was raising the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
They found a trend toward increased heart risks compared with placebo as early as December 2000, and a statistically significant signal by June 2001, nearly three and a half years before the company pulled the drug from the market.
Ritalin Side Effects can Include Sudden Death
November 20, 2009
Examiner
By Etta Brown
After years of speculation and rare case reports, a recent FDA-funded study by The National Institute of Mental Health claims that drugs such as Ritalin – widely used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder in children – increase the risk of sudden death by five hundred percent among children and teens.
“Drugs are not the answer,” said Etta Brown, a licensed educational psychologist, veteran social worker and author of Learning Disabilities, Understanding the Problem and Managing the Challenges from Langdon Street Press. “Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are quick to tell parents there is a pill that will fix their kids, but it’s a false bill of goods. In many cases, these drugs – like Ritalin – will serve only to dull their kids’ senses and create health risks the parents could never have imagined.”
The irony of Ritalin, Brown added, is that it actually damages the neural connections needed for learning. While it may calm a hyper-active child, so that he is less of a problem in the classroom, it does not create the ability to learn.
“Another well-documented side effect of Ritalin is that it may cause a permanent tic of the face, head and neck,” Brown said. “There is a long fifty-year history of false advertising by drug companies that sell drugs with known side effects that are more damaging to the developing nervous system of children than the condition they are designed to treat.”
Between two to18 percent of American children are thought to be affected by ADHD, and Ritalin remains one of the most prescribed drugs for the behavioral disorder. This suggests that the medical approach to poorly nourished children who aren’t getting enough exercise is to dose them with a drug that is known to interfere with the development of their brains, cause permanent tics of the face, head and neck, and increase the likelihood of sudden death by 500 percent. And the FDA is not looking.
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