Food and Drug Administration
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has for the first time cleared the commercial marketing of leeches for medicinal purposes.
Leeches can help heal skin grafts by removing blood pooled under the graft and restore blood circulation in blocked veins by removing pooled blood.
The Food and Drug Administration today announced that a qualified health claim will soon appear on product labels for walnuts and the reduced risk of coronary heart disease. This qualified health claim is part of the FDA's initiative to provide Americans with better information to help them make healthier dietary choices.
The next-generation anthrax vaccine, based on a decade of work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, is now moving into not one, but four clinical trials. The group at the institute did the legwork for the current vaccine candidates by singling out which protein in Bacillus anthracis - the bacterium that causes anthrax - signals the body to produce immunity to the disease.
Mayo Clinic yesterday received broad patent coverage for a new treatment of chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS), commonly called "sinus infection," a disease that annually affects 32 million adults in the United States and currently has no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment. Studies at Mayo Clinic have found the cause of CRS -- a reaction to certain fungi -- and demonstrated that the delivery of antifungal drugs directly into the nose and sinuses is safe and significantly reduces patients? symptoms. Improvements in asthma symptoms were noted in the same patient group. Past medical treatments for chronic sinus infections have been unsuccessful or produced severe side effects.
Men who test positive for elevated prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels sometimes freak out because they think it means they have cancer. To find out, a surgeon will often perform a biopsy. But researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration report that a new test using a single drop of blood could help distinguish between prostate cancer and benign conditions. The trick is identifying patterns of proteins found in patients' blood serum.
THOMPSON SAYS FOOD SUPPLY VULNERABLE TO ATTACK
The number of U.S. food inspectors has risen over the last year, but Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said the nation is still vulnerable to an attack on its food supply. It was clear even before Sept. 11 that the Food and Drug Administration's inspection system had big holes, the Associated Press reports, with 150 inspectors together examining less than one percent of the nation's food. After last fall, Congress opened the purse strings enough to hire 750 additional inspectors, and new technology has made some inspections faster. But Thompson said danger remains. "I still believe that is the area we are subject to a terrorist attack in the future and one that could cause problems." In perhaps the most shocking part of Thompson's coments, he blamed the previously low number of inspectors on a vindictive Congress that punished the agency for former FDA Commissioner David Kessler's efforts to regulate the tobacco industry.
Meanwhile...
DUST-SIZED CHIPS TO COMBAT BIOTERRORISM
Silicon chips the size of dust particles that can quickly detect biological and chemical agents have been developed by University of California, San Diego scientists. As reported by HealthScoutNews, the versatile chips can identify substances that can be dissolved in drinking water or sprayed into the air during a bioterrorist attack. "The idea is that you can have something that's as small as a piece of dust with some intelligence built into it, so that it could be inconspicuously stuck to paint on a wall or to the side of a truck or dispersed into a cloud of gas," UCSD researcher Michael Sailor said. Each chip is barcoded, and can be read using a laser detector to see what if any reaction has occurred. "When the dust recognizes what kinds of chemicals or biological agents are present, that information can be read ... to tell us if the cloud that's coming toward us is filled with anthrax bacteria or if the tank of drinking water into which we've sprinkled the dust is toxic," Sailor said.
