More healthcare news snippets...

Researchers give Ritalin a clean bill of health

Parents who rely on the drug Ritalin to stabilise their hyperactive children can breathe a sigh of relief. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has confirmed that the drug, prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, does not increase the risk of a heart attack. Six years ago, concerns were raised about the safety of the amphetamine-based stimulant medication, which is mainly used to treat children who struggle to concentrate at school.

The US Food and Drug Administration's drug safety and risk management advisory committee initiated an investigation into the deaths of 25 people - including 19 children - who were taking the drug when they died. The Food and Drug Administration recommended that prominent notices be placed on the packaging of the drug warning patients of the possibility of an increased risk of a heart attack. But those safety concerns can now be laid to rest.

A team at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, found "no evidence that current use of the drug was associated with an increased risk of serious cardiovascular events. The study reviewed data from four medical insurance companies covering more than 1.2million people aged between two and 24. Using records supplied by medical aid schemes, the researchers found that the risks associated with the use of the drug were negligible.

A specialist child and adult psychiatrist, Dr Shabeer Ahmed Jeeva, said that, of the 10 000 patients he had seen over the past 25 years, "not one had suffered a heart attack from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medication'. He said the positive effects of the medicine far outweighed the negatives.

Harriet McLea
The Times, 3 November 2011

Scientists find big chink in malaria's armour

Researches have revealed that they have discovered a unique microscopic channel through which malaria parasites must pass to infect red blood cells - a finding that opens up a highly promising target for a vaccine. The doorway mechanism is common to all known strains of the deadliest mosquito-borne pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum, which means that a future vaccine could in theory work against all of them, according to the study published in the journal Nature. The death toll from malaria has declined by a fifth over the last decade, but the disease still claims some 800 000 lives every year, mostly children under five in sub-Saharan Africa.

Gavin Wright of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the study's senior co-author, said the findings were unexpected and have completely changed the way in which the invasion process is viewed. The breakthrough "seems to have revealed an Achilles' heel in the way the parasite invades our red blood cells". Up to now, scientists assumed that P. falciparum had several options for piercing the defences of blood cells. But in experiments, Wright and colleagues showed that intrusion depends on the interaction between a specific molecule on the parasite, called a ligand, and a specific receptor on the blood cell. Blocking this interaction repels the pathogen's attempt to breach the cell's protective wall, they found.

Co-author Julian Rayner, also from the Sanger Institute, said that by identifying a single receptor that appeared to be essential for parasites to invade human red blood cells, the research team also identified an obvious and very exciting focus for vaccine development. Early results from clinical trials in Africa showed that the world's first malaria vaccine, reported in a study last month, cut infection rates by roughly half.

The vaccine, made by the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, works by triggering the immune system. Adrian Hill, a researcher at Oxford's Jenner Institute, said these reports were encouraging, but in the future more effective vaccines would be needed if malaria was ever to be eradicated. Hill added that the discovery of a single receptor that could be targeted to stop the parasite infecting red blood cells offered the hope of a far more effective solution.

AFP via The Mail & Guardian
10 November 2011

Porcine bone-graft technology first for SA

Novel South African bone-grafting technology has been patented and could save patients money and reduce pain and theatre time. The technology - developed with R16.5m from SA's fledgling Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) - involves inserting demineralised pig bone into a bone void or fracture to provide a scaffold for bone growth. When bone grafts are needed, doctors usually harvest bone from patients' hips or use a matching bone tissue from deceased donors, which requires a second operative site or a matching donor.

While bone morphogenetic protein complexes have been used internationally for many years, Altis Biologics CEO Nicolaas Duneas said his company's product - Altis Osteogenic Bone Matrix - was unique as it was injectable. It is produced from pigs and can be stored at room temperature. The TIA's CEO, Simphiwe Duma, said it was one of those technologies that would not have been looked at by normal South African venture capitalist or banks, as it was not tried and tested. After the technology had been tested on a small sample of humans, private capital could come in because the TIA had taken it to this point and there was less risk involved he said.

The agency's GM for health and project leader, Carl Montague, said it was a very long time in development and the developers had a number of setbacks, but now they had launched their product. Duneas said the South African Medicines Control Council gave permission for Altis Osteogenic Bone Matrix to be marketed in SA as a medical device, and it had been patented internationally. Of the money received from the agency, about R500 000 was used to secure patents in the US, UK, Germany, France and Finland.

Sarah Wild
Business Day, 11 November 2011

Virus that causes cervical cancer increases risk of HIV

Women with human papillomavirus (HPV), a precursor to cervical cancer, face a higher risk of HIV infection. This is according to Professor Anan-Lise Williamson, a virologist at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town.

Williamson said recent studies found that the more types of HPV a woman had, the more susceptible she was to contracting HIV while women who did not have HPV were less likely to contract HIV.

Williamson said human papillomaviruses were a group of virus types - some of which were sexually transmitted and cause cervical cancer among other cancers. HPV could be prevented through a vaccine recommended for pre-adolescent girls before they reached their sexual debut.

The vaccine is available in South Africa, but it is expensive. Cervical cancer is the most common cancer found among women in sub-Saharan Africa, with a prevalence five times higher than that in Europe. It is estimated that about 90 percent of women will acquire an HPV infection before the age of 30. In 2008, 67 percent of women with cervical cancer died, compared with 2.4 percent in Europe. In South Africa, cervical cancer is more prevalent among black women and, according to the Human Papillomavirus Cervical Cancer Research Fund, causes the death of nearly 10 women a day. Experts are calling it an epidemic.

Professor Martin Hale, head of the Department of Anatomical Pathology at Wits University, said concern was growing as there appeared to be an increasing epidemic of papillomavirus-induced disease involving not only the cervix, but elsewhere in the female genital tract and anogenital region. HIV-positive women have a higher prevalence of HPV are more likely to be infected with multiple HPV types and develop cervical cancer at a younger age - on average 10 years younger than HIV-negative women.

Thandi Skade: The Star
 18 November 2011