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     holycow
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Username: holycow
Post Number: 740
Registered: 08-2004Rating: N/A
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| | Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - 09:56 am: |  
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THE DRUG THAT KILLS
Study Finds Heart Disease Among Thousands Taking Vioxx
By Ronald Kotulak and Judith Graham
Chicago Tribune
01/25/05 11:16 AM PT
The FDA finally granted approval for scientist David Graham to submit his analysis for publication Jan. 3 after coming under pressure from congressmen. The study was based on a review of 1.4 million patient records at the California HMO Kaiser
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Two months after federal drug officials sought to delay release of a study linking the painkiller Vioxx to heart attack, the results were published Monday by the British medical journal Lancet, suggesting the drug may be connected to tens of thousands of deaths.
Further fueling the controversy surrounding drug safety in the United States, the American journal Archives of Internal Medicine joined a growing chorus of experts calling for a major overhaul of the way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Latest News about Food and Drug Administration approves and monitors new drugs.
Vioxx Dangers
"The FDA has become a little bit too beholden to the drug companies and is either unwilling, afraid or unable to get them to do the safety studies that need to get done once there's a signal that there may be a problem," said Dr. Jerry Avorn of Harvard, who co-authored an editorial in Tuesday's issue of the Archives.
The Lancet study, conducted by FDA scientist David Graham, estimates that as many as 140,000 Americans may have developed serious heart disease as a result of taking Vioxx. The disease is fatal to about 44 percent of patients, he noted...
HC
"... if you've got a chart, I have an opinion!"
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holycow
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Username: holycow
Post Number: 789
Registered: 08-2004Rating: N/A
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| | Thursday, February 03, 2005 - 09:17 am: |
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This news is a bit of a concern...
Half of Bankruptcy Due to Medical Bills -- U.S. Study
Wed Feb 2, 4:29 AM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by soaring medical bills and most people sent into debt by illness are middle-class workers with health insurance, researchers said on Wednesday.
The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year, if both debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children, are counted.
"Our study is frightening. Unless you're Bill Gates (news - web sites) you're just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) who led the study.
"Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection."
The researchers got the permission of bankruptcy judges in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas to survey 931 people who filed for bankruptcy.
"About half cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9 to 2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy," they wrote.
"Among those whose illnesses led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs averaged $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7 percent had insurance at the onset of illness."
The average bankrupt person surveyed had spent $13,460 on co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services if they had private insurance. People with no insurance spent an average of $10,893 for such out-of-pocket expenses.
"Even middle-class insured families often fall prey to financial catastrophe when sick," the researchers wrote.
-- as "you" grow older, your health care need will naturally go up unless you are like me - keeping fit and be a "vegetarian", else, you'd have no choice but to keep an eye on the Howard govt because with the FTA kicking in, the Aussie system will eventually resemble that of the US'es. Already I am seeing the pattern in education, in govt subsidised drugs...
HC
"... if you've got a chart, I have an opinion!"
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holycow
Member
Username: holycow
Post Number: 1598
Registered: 08-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
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| | Friday, August 19, 2005 - 05:40 pm: |
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August 19, 2005
Girls who eat chips more likely to get breast cancer
By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
EATING chips as a young child may increase the risk of contracting breast cancer as an adult, research in America has claimed.
Researchers at the Harvard Medical School say that for every portion of chips eaten per week in the pre-school years, the risk of breast cancer is increased. The data comes from a long-running study into the health of 80,000 nurses who have been followed for decades by a team from the research institute. The Nurses’ Health Study has already produced many links between diet and disease, some disproved by further and better research.
The latest paper, in the International Journal of Cancer, used data from 582 women with breast cancer and 1,569 women without the disease in 1993.
The researchers looked at the diets of the women when they were aged between 3 and 5, using information from their mothers, who were asked how often their daughters ate or drank various products.
The risk of getting breast cancer by the age of 60 is about one in 25. Karin Michels and colleagues estimated that eating chips just once a week before the age of 5 would raise that to about one in 20 — an increase in risk of 27 per cent...
2-1740864%2C00.html,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1740864,00.html
HC
"... if you've got a chart, I have an opinion!"
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