Two popular anti-smoking drugs will now carry warnings about the risk of severe mental health problems, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.
The FDA said Chantix and Zyban will carry the warnings to alert consumers to the risks of depression and suicidal thoughts when using the drugs.
The drugs also have been reported to cause changes in behavior, hostility and agitation in users, whether users had a history of psychiatric illness or not. In many cases, side effects started shortly after use began and ended when the medication was stopped. The FDA does not know what is causing the changes and said people taking these products should be monitored by their doctor.
The number of deaths related to the U.S. outbreak of salmonella has risen to seven with the death of a Minnesota woman in her 80s.
The woman had been living in a long-term care facility, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health said on Saturday.
Her name and date of death were not released. It was the third death tied to salmonella in Minnesota.
The spokesman said he did not know if the woman had eaten peanut butter. Several products containing peanut butter have been recalled as the U.S. government investigates the outbreak of salmonella food poisoning.
The federal government is advising consumers to avoid cookies, cakes, ice cream and crackers made with peanut butter or peanut paste while it continues to investigate an outbreak of salmonella illness that is believed to have killed six people and sickened at least 485 others across the country.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked the salmonella outbreak to products made with peanut paste and peanut butter manufactured after July 1 in a Georgia factory owned by Peanut Corp. of America. The company, which is based in Virginia, supplies peanut butter and paste to long-term-care and other institutions, food service companies and private-label manufacturers that use the products in cookies, cakes, crackers and other foods. None of the company’s peanut products are sold directly to consumers. It has paused all production in its Georgia facility.
Using some mouthwash brands can increase the risk of getting mouth cancer, a new study claims.
Rinsing with mouthwash containing alcohol makes it easier for cancer-causing substances like nicotine to penetrate the lining of the mouth, says the report’s author, Professor Michael McCullough.
More than 3,000 people were examined for the research, giving ’sufficient evidence’ that using mouthwash is linked to the development of oral cancer.
The number of Americans newly infected with the sexually transmitted diseases chlamydia and syphilis continues to rise, federal health officials reported Tuesday, with chlamydia infections hitting a record million-plus new cases annually.
The numbers, from 2007, show that cases of chlamydia as well as syphilis rose for the third year in a row, according to a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The bad news from last year has continued,” said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr., director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention. “These infections remain at very high levels, and frankly, unacceptably high.”
The popular cold remedy Vicks VapoRub may cause airway inflammation that can restrict breathing in infants and toddlers, a new study says.
Doctors at Wake Forest University started their study after treating an 18-month-old girl who had developed severe respiratory distress after the salve had been put directly under her nose to relieve cold symptoms.
“The company is really clear that you don’t put it in the nose, and you never use it in kids under 2,” said lead researcher Dr. Bruce K. Rubin, professor and vice chair for research at Wake Forest’s Department of Pediatrics. “Sure enough, when we stopped all the medicine, the child got much better very quickly.”
COLUMBUS, Ohio – An Ohio distributor says it has recalled two brands of its peanut butter after an open container tested positive for salmonella bacteria.
Federal health officials said the company’s peanut butter had not been conclusively linked to a national salmonella outbreak.
King Nut Companies said in a statement that it asked customers to stop distributing all peanut butter under its King Nut and Parnell’s Pride brands with a lot code that begins with the numeral “8.”
CHICAGO (Reuters) – An Ohio-based food distributor has voluntarily recalled two brands of peanut butter after it was told salmonella found in an open five-pound tub sold under the King Nut label.
King Nut Cos, in a statement released Saturday, said it immediately contacted its customers and asked them to remove all King Nut peanut butter and Parnell’s Pride peanut butter from the market.
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday warned people to avoid nearly 30 weight-loss products that contain unlisted and possibly dangerous ingredients.
They may promise an easy fix to weight problems, but the FDA said they contain unlisted ingredients, including high doses of a powerful anti-obesity drug, as well as a suspected carcinogen.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that a flu strain spreading through the United States is resistant to the drug Tamiflu.
In a Dec. 19 health advisory, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a warning that a flu strain in the United States is resistant to the popular drug Tamiflu, WebMD reported.
According to Reuters, three strains of flu are common in a normal flu season: H1N1, H3N2 and influenza B. The H1N1 strain prompted the advisory.
Tests showed that 49 of 50 H1N1 samples were resistant to Tamiflu, but the flu strain can be treated with other medications. A drug known as Relenza, or zanamivir, can be used to treat H1N1, as can a combination of Tamiflu and another drug known as rimantadine. However, Dr. Tim Uyeki of the CDC said zanamivir is not approved for children younger than 7.
One reason Tamiflu is popular is that it can be given to children as young as 1.
But doctors said it’s still early in the flu season, and the H1N1 strain might not be problematic for long. “There is no crystal ball here,” CDC Director Julie Gerberding said in a WebMD article. “We can’t predict if this strain will end up being the most important one this year. It could fizzle out.”
Gerberding told WebMD that the current flu vaccine protects against all three flu viruses, including the H1N1 strain. There is still time to get the flu shot because flu season generally does not peak before February.
A Whole New Flu Shot
Normally, one or two of the three flu strains targeted by annual vaccines remain part of the vaccine for several years, the Associated Press reports: “Public-health officials make educated guesses on what strains to include, taking into account the strains then circulating in the southern hemisphere.”
This year, for the first time, the process has changed and three totally new strains—two type A viruses called Brisbane 10 and Brisbane 59 that were first isolated in Australia last year and a type B virus first seen in Florida in 2006—will be circulated in the vaccine.
Furthermore, major flu vaccine manufacturers are already shipping the vaccines and plan to have all their doses to health care providers by late October in hopes of alleviating concerns that have arisen with past flu vaccine debacles.
Manufacturers hope the steps will work to create a more successful, more available flu shot. One of the Brisbane strains in this year’s vaccine showed up in the United States after the 2007–08 flu season began, too late to be included in that year’s vaccine, which ended up being only 44 percent effective, compared with 50–90 percent in typical years.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worries that last year’s mismatch will discourage people from getting vaccinated this year, and plans to ramp up its flu vaccine campaign.
Background: The trouble with flu shots
In 2005, distribution and delivery problems left many doctors turning down patients who wanted vaccines until more flu shots came in.
An even more memorable event occurred in 2004, when vaccine manufacturer Chiron distributed 48 million tainted flu shots that had to be discarded, resulting in a major vaccine shortage. The incident raised “troubling questions about how close the tainted flu shots came to being used,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported that October. But more immediately, healthy adults were asked to forgo their flu shots that year, so that the vaccine could go to those most at risk, such as the very young, the elderly and those with certain medical conditions.
But even with improved delivery and potentially better-matched strains, perfecting the flu shot is a difficult matter. Scientists have to make an educated guess about which few flu strains to include in a vaccine every year, even though there are thousands of strains of influenza infecting people around the world at any given time.
Putting every single strain into the vaccine simply isn’t feasible, Slate reported in February: “very few are likely to make someone in the United States sick. Vaccinating people against a disease they’re never going to get is a risky proposition: We don’t know how the body would respond to a barrage of flu vaccinations.”
Flu Strain Spreading Through US Is Resistant to Popular Treatment
