Health Headlines - May 4

Tamiflu Prevents Death in Mammals With Bird Flu

The antiviral drug Tamiflu prevented mammals infected with the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus from dying, says a U.S. study presented this week at a conference in Singapore.

The findings may offer clues about the drug's optimum dosage and the duration of treatment needed to protect humans in the event of a pandemic, the Associated Press reported.

Researcher Elena Govorkova of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., told the conference that ferrets were given Tamifu after being infected with the H5N1 virus circulating in Vietnam. All of the animals survived.

Ferrets that were infected with H5N1 but did not receive Tamiflu died.

An abstract of the study said the results show the benefits of early treatment with the drug, and are in line with the limited research that's been published about the use of Tamiflu to fight bird flu in humans, the AP reported.

Medicare Operators Often Give Wrong Info on Drug Benefit: Report

Medicare telephone operators routinely failed to provide callers with accurate and complete information about the new prescription drug benefit, say U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigators who posed as senior-citizen callers.

The investigators made 500 calls to the 1-800-Medicare line from Jan. 17 to Feb. 7 and asked five questions -- each question 100 times. About a third of the calls yielded incorrect responses or no response due to disconnected calls, the Associated Press reported.

The GAO found that 75 percent of calls were answered within five minutes. However, for more than 10 percent of calls, Medicare operators took more than 15 minutes to answer.

"In one case, we were placed on hold for 54 minutes before being disconnected," the GAO investigators noted.

The findings prompted Democratic critics of the Medicare drug benefit to again request an extension of the program's May 15 enrollment deadline, the AP reported.

Drug Cos. Use False Information in Marketing Campaigns: Study

Drug companies routinely exaggerate claims about their products, promote unproven uses, and play down drugs' risks in their marketing to customers and doctors, says a report by the U.S. national consumer advocacy organization Public Interest Research Group.

False and misleading information is used in television and print ads and in literature given to doctors by drugs sales representatives, said the report, which added that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is often ineffective at stopping such deception, the Associated Press reported.

About 62 percent of the misleading or deceptive information documented in the report was targeted at doctors. In more than one-third of those instances, doctors received information that misrepresented or minimized a drug's risk, the report said.

The report also said that drug companies used clinical trials as marketing tools by misreporting results or by suppressing unfavorable results, the AP reported.

The FDA did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment on the report, the AP said.

Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the report "grossly misleads the public about the safety of America's drug system and the goals, practices and results of prescription pharmaceutical marketing and advertising."

French Face Transplant Patient Able to Smile

The French woman who had the world's first face transplant in November is "already smiling," a member of her surgical team said Tuesday when he showed video clips of the patient to plastic surgeons attending a conference.

The video of 38-year-old Isabelle Dinoire was taken three weeks ago. It shows her speaking French and, at one point, chuckling and faintly smiling, the Associated Press reported.

"You see the smile is quite natural," said Dr. Benoit Lengele, the Belgian plastic surgeon who showed the video. "It's not perfectly symmetrical but it's improving a lot since the results we saw three months ago."

Dinoire lost much of her fact last May when she was mauled by her pet dog. The transplant gave her a new nose, mouth and chin.

In the video, she said she has feeling in the transplanted area and is exercising her face to regain motor function. She can't fully close her lips and her smile is concentrated on the left side, the AP reported.

FDA Approves Drug for Rare Bone-Marrow Diseases

Approval to use an injectable drug called Dacogen to treat a rare group of bone-marrow diseases was announced Wednesday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The drug, also known as decitabine, will offer another treatment option for patients with myelodysplastic syndromes, which are marked by insufficient production of mature blood cells by bone marrow, the Associated Press reported.

It's believed that Dacogen promotes normal development of blood cells. Three clinical trials of the drug found complete or partial responses to Dacogen in about 20 percent of patients who received it.

Low white blood cell counts, low platelets in blood, anemia, fatigue, nausea, fever, constipation, high blood sugar, and cough are among the most common side effects caused by Dacogen.

Each year, about 7,000 to 12,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndromes, which are most common in the elderly, the AP reported. Weakness, fatigue, bleeding, fever, easy bruising, and infections are among the symptoms.

Diabetes Increases Risk of Early Death: Report

People aged 35 to 54 with type 2 diabetes are three times more likely to die early than people in the same age group who don't have the disease, says a British study of 264,000 patients.

The findings appear in the journal Diabetic Medicine.

"We did expect that people with type 2 diabetes would have a higher risk of dying earlier rather than later," researcher Henrietta Mulnier of Surrey University told BBC News.

These findings could affect decisions about how to deal with the disease and provide appropriate health care, she said.

"With people being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes younger and younger, the figures are going to get worse," Mulnier said. "We really do need to focus on early detection and treatment."