Health Headlines - April 11

Jury Awards Punitive Damages in Vioxx Case

A New Jersey jury awarded $9 million in punitive damages on Tuesday to a man who blamed his heart attack on the once-popular painkiller Vioxx.

The jury decision found that manufacturer Merck & Co. failed to warn of the risks of its now-withdrawn arthritis drug and misrepresented the risks to physicians.

The damages are in addition to $4.5 million already awarded as compensatory damages to John McDarby, 77, of Park Ridge, who suffered a heart attack after four years on Vioxx, a painkiller taken by 20 million Americans before being pulled off the market, the Associated Press reported.

Tuesday's decision capped a five-week trial that combined two cases: that of McDarby, a retired insurance agent, and Thomas Cona, 60, of Cherry Hill, who said he took the drug for 22 months before his 2003 heart attack, but he couldn't prove it.

Cona's prescription records showed only enough for about seven months' use, and the six-woman, two-man jury rejected his claim that Vioxx was to blame and awarded him only the cost of his prescription.

This is the sixth trial involving Vioxx, and the first involving long-term use. Merck faces 9,650 other lawsuits.

FDA Proposes New Rules for Medical Gas Canisters

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing new rules for the labeling, color and designs of medical gas containers in order to prevent problems that can lead to patient death and injury.

In the past decade, medical gas container mix-ups have killed at least eight patients and injured 16 others, health officials said. But nursing homes and hospitals are not required to report such cases to the FDA, so the actual number of deaths and injuries could be higher, the Associated Press reported.

The FDA proposal includes a standard color-coding system for the canisters and wraparound labels. The tanks would be fitted with outlet connections that are not easy to remove. This is meant to discourage improper hookup of the wrong types of medical gases to patient breathing equipment.

The new rules would also ban the reuse of industrial gas canisters for medical use, which can result in contamination by cleaning solvent residues, the AP reported.

Public comments on the proposed rules are being accepted by the FDA until July 10.

Pharmaceutical Industry 'Disease Mongering' to Boost Drug Sales: Report

Drug companies are "disease mongering" in order to increase sales, says a report in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine.

Pharmaceutical firms are putting healthy people at risk by medicalizing health conditions such as menopause, said report authors David Henry and Ray Moynihan of Newcastle University in Australia.

They noted that risk factors such as osteoporosis and high cholesterol are being presented as diseases and that drug companies are exaggerating rare conditions such as restless legs syndrome and mild conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, BBC News reported.

The report authors also criticized drug industry efforts to convince the American public that 43 percent of women live with sexual dysfunction.

"Disease-mongering is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments," the report said.

"It is exemplified most explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease awareness campaigns -- more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health," the report also said.

Abortion Pill Cleared in 1 Death

The RU-486 abortion pill was not responsible for one woman's death out of the two cases now being investigated by U.S. federal regulators. The cause of the other death is still being examined, the Food and Drug Administration said Monday.

The FDA did not elaborate on which of the two deaths had been ruled out as being linked to RU-486. However, it was a death that took place several weeks after the abortion, Cindy Summers, a spokeswoman for RU-486 manufacturer Danco Laboratories, told the Baltimore Sun.

The death still under investigation occurred several days after RU-486 was administered to the woman. The FDA announced last month that it was examining the two deaths.

Since 2001, four women in California and one in Canada have died from septic shock after taking RU-486. About 575,000 women in the United States have taken the drug since the FDA approved it in 2000.

Supporters of the drug say the FDA's announcement Monday is further proof that RU-486 is safe, the Sun reported.

Electronic Health Information Technology Improves Care

Electronic health information technology, such as electronic records, can improve healthcare quality and efficiency, says a study released Tuesday by the RAND Corporation. However, the study also said that more needs to be done to show health workers how to adopt the technology.

Researchers reviewed 257 previous studies on health information technology.

"There is good evidence to show that health information technology can provide substantial benefits," study lead author Dr. Basit Chaudhry, a RAND researcher and University of California, Los Angeles physician, said in a prepared statement.

"What we don't have is evidence showing most health providers how to make the technology work in their hospital or in their office. They need better information aboiut how to move from paper records to electronic records," Chaudhry said.

The RAND study concluded that data from the previous studies showed that health information technology can improve compliance with medical treatment guidelines, reduce medication errors, and decrease the use of potentially unnecessary medical care.

The findings appear in the May issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.