Johnson & Johnson’s migraine and epilepsy drug Topamax may help alcoholics cut back or quit drinking, according to a study published today in JAMA. But the drug, which has a history of being prescribed off label, hasn’t been approved for treating alcohol dependence. And its label carries a warning that combining the drug with alcohol [...]
If youÂ’ve recently returned to work after a heart attack, hereÂ’s something to think about in addition to your cholesterol, blood pressure and diet: Your job.Your workplace could be as hazardous to your heart health as smoking, high cholesterol and other more conventional risk factors for cardiovascular disease, a study in this weekÂ’s JAMA suggests. [...]
John Mekalanos, a Harvard scientist, came up with a way to make vaccines much more cheaply. But to get his idea moving toward real-world use, he had to fly to China. There he got the ear of Gerald Chan, a venture capitalist who was opening a vaccine factory on a tropical island called Hainan, one [...]
Doctors, regulators and health plans have been butting heads over how, and even whether, plans can rate some doctors as better than others. Now three three George Washington University public-health professors and attorneys have put together a legal analysis of the practice. Their conclusion: Get used to the rating game, docs. Nothing in the law [...]
The Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit copper mine in Butte, Mont., is a monument to the ravages of extractive industry. “In terms of contained volume of water and quantity of metal pollutants, the Berkeley Pit is unmatched by any acid-producing mine in the United States and possibly in the world,” says this EPA report. But [...]
China is already the world’s largest manufacturer of raw materials used in medicines. Now the country is jumping into the generic drugs business in a big way, the WSJ reports.A key milestone passed without fanfare this summer, when the Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Company (pictured) won FDA approval to sell the AIDS drug nevirapine in the [...]
TV programming and videos for babies are worth a billion dollars a year, the Washington Post reports this morning. You read that right: $1 billion, with a “b,” as in baby.Small wonder then that Walt Disney got worked up this summer over a study in the Journal of Pediatrics that suggested babies who watch Baby [...]
Nurses are beaten and abused, pinched and punched by deranged and demented patients. The rough treatment of nurses by some of the people they care for isn’t an issue that gets much attention, but it should, Illinois doc Ben Brewer writes this his WSJ.com column. “Nurses get assaulted all the time at work,” he writes. [...]
Researchers think they may have figured out one reason why patients who get blood transfusions sometimes seem to fare worse than those who don’t. A study suggests that nitric oxide, a naturally occurring molecule that improves blood flow, may decline quickly in stored blood. A second study suggests it may be possible to re-charge stored [...]
The seemingly mild-mannered Midwestern woman pictured below is an admitted adrenaline junkie. “There’s a surge of adrenaline that happens when a car drives up and they throw a gentleman out of the car [who’s] been riddled with bullets, and–Bam!–he’s there,” Elizabeth Bascom, an ER doc at St. John’s Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit told [...]
