Tag Archives: Medicine

Convoy rolls into Damascus suburbs with aid for 40,000

Smoke rises at a damaged site in Ain Tarma, eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Syria, September 14, 2017.

GENEVA (Reuters) – A convoy from the United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered towns in the besieged Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta on Monday, bringing aid to 40,000 people for the first time since June 2016, the United Nations said.

A tightening siege by government forces has pushed people to the verge of famine in the eastern suburbs, residents and aid workers said last week, bringing desperation to the only major rebel enclave near the Syrian capital.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Twitter they had entered the towns of Kafra Batna and Saqba.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent said in a separate tweet that the inter-agency convoy had 49 trucks.

They carried food, nutrition and health items for 40,000 people in need, OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke said. “The last time we reached these two locations were in June 2016,” he said.

A health worker in Saqba who was present when the convoy started to offload said that nine trucks of foodstuffs, including milk and peanut butter, and four trucks of medicines had arrived so far.

Technical specialists were on board to assess needs in the towns in order to plan a further humanitarian response, he said.

“More aid to complement today’s delivery is planned in the coming days,” Laerke added.

At least 1,200 children in eastern Ghouta suffer from malnutrition, with 1,500 others at risk, a spokeswoman for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said last week.

Bettina Luescher, spokeswoman of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), said the convoy carried nutrition supplies for 16,000 children.

Food, fuel and medicine once travelled across frontlines into the suburbs through a network of underground tunnels. But early this year, an army offensive nearby cut smuggling routes that provided a lifeline for around 300,000 people in the enclave east of the capital.

 

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Additional reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut; Editing by Alison Williams and Peter Graff)

 

In Puerto Rico, acute shortages plunge the masses into survival struggle

Local residents wait in line during a water distribution in Bayamon following damages caused by Hurricane Maria in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico, October 1, 2017

By Robin Respaut and Nick Brown

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico (Reuters) – Brian Jimenez had burned through dwindling supplies of scarce gasoline on a 45-minute drive in search of somewhere to fill his grandmother’s blood thinner prescription. He ended up in Fajardo, a scruffy town of strip malls on Puerto Rico’s northeastern tip, where a line of 400 waited outside a Walmart.

The store had drawn desperate crowds of storm victims who had heard it took credit or debit cards and offered customers $20 cash back – a lifeline in an increasingly cashless society. Store employees allowed customers in, one by one, for rationed shopping trips of 15 minutes each.

Then, at noon, the store closed after its generator croaked and before Jimenez could get inside to buy his grandmother’s medicine.

“Every day we say, ‘What’s the thing that we need the most today?’ and then we wait in a line for that,” said Jimenez, a 24-year-old medical student from Ponce, on the island’s southern coast.

By Saturday, 11 days after Hurricane Maria crippled this impoverished U.S. territory, residents scrambled for all the staples of modern society – food, water, fuel, medicine, currency – in a grinding survival struggle that has gripped Puerto Ricans across social classes.

For days now, residents have awoken each morning to decide which lifeline they should pursue: gasoline at the few open stations, food and bottled water at the few grocery stores with fuel for generators, or scarce cash at the few operating banks or ATMs. The pursuit of just one of these essentials can consume an entire day – if the mission succeeds at all – as hordes of increasingly desperate residents wait in 12-hour lines.

As criticism mounts about a slow disaster response by President Donald Trump’s administration, residents here in Fajardo said that had seen little if any presence from the federal government. Across the island, the sporadic presence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the U.S. military stood in sharp contrast to their comparatively ubiquitous presence after hurricanes Harvey and Irma recently hit Texas and Florida.

The severe shortages have thrown even relatively affluent Puerto Ricans into the same plight as the hundreds of thousands of poor residents here. The broad humanitarian crisis highlights the extreme difficulty of getting local or federal disaster relief to a remote U.S. island territory with an already fragile infrastructure and deeply indebted government.

Even those here with money to spend now cannot often access it or find places open and supplied to spend it as stores are shuttered for lack of electric power, diesel for generators, supplies or employees.

Jimenez’s failed trip to Walmart came after chasing groceries at a store near Yabucoa, near where his grandmother lived. He planned to spend the next day in one of the miles-long gas lines that snake from stations onto highways and up exit ramps.

At the beginning of many lines were stations already out of gas – but motorists still waited, hoping a fuel supply truck would eventually arrive.

“We wasted gas getting here and going back,” Jimenez said as he watched police usher dejected customers away from Walmart’s entrance. “The gas lines are ridiculous. Fifty cars is wonderful. Most are 100-plus cars.”

Another customer turned away from the Walmart, Daniel Santiago, 51, said he had waited in a gas line for 12 hours one day and 14 hours the next. Neither attempt had been successful, so he, his wife and three daughters had walked three miles to the Fajardo shopping complex, where they waited in line for the Econo grocery.

“We have to do this every day,” Santiago said. “Yesterday, we came down walking. The day before that, we walked up a really big hill to try to get a signal to contact our family.”

That had not worked either.

 

UNFORTUNATE REALITY

Even before the storm hit and knocked out the island’s dilapidated electric grid – an outage expected to persist for months – Puerto Rico was suffering through a growing economic crisis that dates back to 2006. The island has an unemployment rate more than twice the U.S. national average and a 45 percent poverty rate.

The island had earlier this year filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. municipal history in the face of a $72 billion debt load and near-insolvent public health and pension systems.

In an interview with Reuters on Saturday, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello said relief efforts were still focused almost solely on saving lives; restoring basic necessities to the masses would come later.

“We’re not at the phase where we are focusing on comfort,” Rossello said. “Unfortunately, that’s the current reality that we’re dealing with.”

His team was still scrambling to open roads to communities blocked by landslides, and to deliver food, water, medicines and generators to remote homes and hospitals.

The island’s battered infrastructure left Manny De La Rosa, 31, to crisscross the island with his pregnant wife, Mayra Melendez, also 31. They were trying to find places to spend the $40 in coins they had extracted from the family piggybank.

“All of our money is held up in the bank,” De La Rosa said.

They live in Luquillo in the northeast, but found an ATM in Humacao on the southeastern coast. Their cell phones vibrated to life for the first time alongside a stretch of highway in Isla Verde, nearly an hour west of their home.

Now, they were in line in Fajardo, hoping to buy supplies with a credit card to conserve their cash.

“We see these lines, and we think, ‘We’re not even going to make it before the money runs out,’” Melendez said, standing in front of the Walmart.

A military helicopter flight over a residential area following damages caused by Hurricane Maria near Caguas, Puerto Rico, October 1, 2017

A military helicopter flight over a residential area following damages caused by Hurricane Maria near Caguas, Puerto Rico, October 1, 2017 REUTERS/Carlos Barria

DOWN TO $14

In the economically depressed agricultural town of Salinas, an hour-and-a-half drive from Fajardo on the island’s southern coast, 93-year-old Lucia Santiago sat outside in a lawn chair and rested her swollen legs.

Her son, Jose Melero, 67, brought her food that had been delivered by the town’s mayor on a golf cart.

“We have to be out here, because we’d die from the heat in there,” he said, gesturing toward the house.

The two had started eating less every day to conserve provisions. That day, they had split a can of ravioli and a piece of bread.

Melero was down to $14 of cash without the means to withdraw more.

“I have no idea how I’m going to get through the next few days,” he said. “We have money, but we just can’t get to it.”

Others in isolated areas struggled to find medicine. U.S. Army veteran Sandalio DeJesus Maldonado, 87, took a 7 a.m. ferry from his home on Culebra, an island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast, to Fajardo, to refill blood pressure and prostate medications.

The hurricane had shuttered Culebra’s only pharmacy, DeJesus said.

In Fajardo, DeJesus waited at an overcrowded Walgreens because he did not have enough gas to drive to the Veterans Affairs hospital where he normally filled his prescriptions.

As he waited in line late Saturday morning, DeJesus fretted that he would not be able to return to Culebra until after 5 p.m., when the only scheduled ferry was slated to depart.

“All I need is a few pills,” he said.

 

 

(Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Writing by Brian Thevenot; Editing by Mary Milliken)

 

Polio outbreak in Syria poses vaccination dilemma for WHO

A health worker administers polio vaccination to a child in Raqqa, eastern Syria November 18, 2013. REUTERS/Nour Fourat

GENEVA (Reuters) – Vaccinating too few children in Syria against polio because the six-year-old war there makes it difficult to reach them risks causing more cases in the future, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, posing a dilemma after a recent outbreak.

Two children have been paralyzed in the last few months in Islamic State-held Deir al-Zor in the first polio cases in Syria since 2014 and in the same eastern province bordering Iraq where a different strain caused 36 cases in 2013-2014.

Vaccinating even 50 percent of the estimated 90,000 children aged under 5 in the Mayadin area of Deir al-Zor would probably not be enough to stop the outbreak and might actually sow the seeds for the next outbreak, WHO’s Oliver Rosenbauer said.

Immunisation rates need to be closer to 80 percent to have maximum effect and protect a population, he told a briefing.

“Are we concerned that we’re in fact going to be seeding further future polio vaccine-derived outbreaks? … Absolutely, that is a concern. And that is why this vaccine must be used judiciously and to try to ensure the highest level of coverage,” Rosenbauer said.

“This is kind of what has become known as the OPV, the oral polio vaccine paradox,” he said.

The new cases are a vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, a rare type which can emerge in under-immunised communities after mutating from strains contained in the oral polio vaccine.

“Such vaccine-derived strains tend to be less dangerous than wild polio virus strains, they tend to cause less cases, they tend not to travel so easily geographically. That’s all kind of the silver lining and should play in our favor operationally,” he said.

All polio strains can paralyze within hours.

Syria is one of the last remaining pockets of the virus worldwide. The virus remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Injured Venezuela protesters face another woe: finding medicine

Volunteers get ready for help injured demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela April 22, 2017. REUTERS/Marco Bello

By Alexandra Ulmer

CARACAS (Reuters) – Demonstrators injured in Venezuela’s often violent street protests are facing additional hardship: how to get treatment in a crisis-hit country where basics like antibiotics and painkillers are running short.

Venezuela’s state prosecutor says 437 people were hurt in nearly a month of protests against leftist President Nicolas Maduro, whom the opposition accuses of morphing into a dictator and wrecking the oil-rich country’s economy.

Close-range rubber bullets, flying rocks, tear gas canisters and tear gas have caused the majority of wounds and health problems, according to over a dozen doctors and rights groups.

Most of those injured appear to be opposition protesters, but Maduro supporters, security forces and bystanders are also seeking treatment, these people said.

Families are hauling injured relatives to multiple health centers, scouring pharmacies for medicine, raising funds to buy pricier drugs on the black market, and posting messages on social media begging for medical donations.

But with around 85 percent of medical supplies unavailable, according to a leading pharmaceutical group, many Venezuelans are still unable to get optimal treatment – or any at all.

Luis Monsalve, 15, was hit in the face by a tear gas canister amid a major protest last week. Since then, his family and friends have been scrambling to collect supplies for surgery to allow him to see with his right eye again.

“If we had everything, they could have operated on Saturday,” said his father Jose Monsalve, 67.

Others tell similar stories.

Administrative assistant Raquel Mignoli, 44, caught a nasty stomach bug after jumping into Caracas’ sewage-filled Guaire river to avoid a volley of tear gas but was unable to find medicine despite visiting five pharmacies.

Teacher Yrma Bello, 57, lost consciousness and suffered facial bruising after being slammed to the ground by a water cannon in the jungle and savannah state of Bolivar. The local hospital did not have painkillers or anti-inflammatories, so her friends started a campaign on WhatsApp for donations.

The injuries are heaping more stress on Venezuela’s saturated hospitals and dwindling ranks of doctors, some of whom are volunteering to treat people at protests.

The shortages are also a cruel irony for some injured demonstrators, who were actually out protesting those chronic shortages that have cancer patients going untreated and millions of Venezuelans skipping meals.

Maduro’s government says protesters are to blame for the violence that has engulfed crime-ridden Venezuela. He says that beneath a semblance of peace, Washington-backed opposition leaders are actually riling demonstrators up in the hopes of staging a coup.

Authorities have arrested nearly 1,300 people this month. Some two dozen people have also been killed, many of them from gunshots.

Venezuela’s Information Ministry, Health Ministry and Social Security institute did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

DOCTORS IN THE STREETS

To combat shortages, Venezuelans abroad – the vast majority of whom left because of economic problems and crime – are donating medicines in cities from Miami to Madrid.

In the opposition hotbed of Tachira state, volunteer doctors work at demonstrations in civilian clothing and use pseudonyms to avoid being arrested or targeted by pro-government groups who see them as supporting Maduro’s foes.

“We still don’t have (gas) masks but in the midst of tear gas we’ve treated patients wounded by rubber bullets or asphyxiating,” said a doctor known as ‘gypsy.’

In Caracas, around 120 medicine students, doctors, and volunteers have revived a primary care response team first created during 2014’s bout of anti-government protests.

While they wear white helmets with a green cross, none wear flak jackets and some resort to wearing goggles to protect themselves from tear gas. Their equipment has nearly all been donated or bought by the volunteers themselves, and they’ve had to create makeshift neck braces from shoes, belts, and hats.

Still, when the determined group walks through a protest in single file, demonstrators stop their shouts of “No more dictatorship!” and instead clap and cheer them on with yells of “Thank you!” and “Heroes!”

Amid a widespread feeling of abandonment in a country where the economy is thought to have contracted 19 percent last year and many basic services only function intermittently, the volunteer doctors are seen as a ray of hope.

“We’re ready to tend to 200 people, but at some point there will be 400,” said volunteer and medicine student Stephanie Plaza, 22, on the sidelines of a recent march under the sizzling tropical sun.

“There are more injuries than in 2014, because there are more people protesting,” she said, adding the injuries have been more serious, too.

The group, which describes itself as apolitical, also treats security officials. Still, it has come under fire from some government supporters who compare them to Syria’s White Helmets rescue workers.

“Amid the opposition’s desperation to create this idea of a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela… it has organized a group of doctors to hide its paramilitary actions in the streets,” said a tagline on pro-government TV show ‘Zurda Konducta.’

The medical group refuted the accusations.

(Additional reporting by Anggy Polanco in San Cristobal and Maria Ramirez in Puerto Ordaz; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Girish Gupta and Andrew Hay)

As drug supplies run short, Egyptians turn to herbal remedies

Herbal medicine worker taking spices to make medicine

By Mohamed Zaki and Mohamed Abd El-Ghany

In the Cairo working class neighborhood of Basateen, dozens can be seen lining up outside a decades-old herbal spice shop with pyramid-shaped stacks of jars on display, filled with everything from honey and ginger to camel’s hay.

Apothecaries say there is a roughly 70-80 percent increase in sales after a series of harsh economic reforms hit medicine supply in pharmacies across the country and increased the cost of some generic and even life-saving drugs.

Store owner Samy al-Attar – whose last name is Arabic for apothecary – says a knowledgeable apothecary can find substitutes for drugs treating almost all non-terminal illnesses.

Just like pharmacies, the walls inside al-Attar’s store are lined with drawers and containers. But rather than pharmaceutical drugs, they hold herbs, each said to have its own unique healing property.

Customers impatiently crowd outside the shop window, where employees can be seen dashing around the tiny interior, choosing from a variety of textures and colors, filling clear plastic bags with orders.

Al-Attar’s role is like many pharmacists. Customers explain their symptoms and he produces a concoction of spices and herbs along with a method of administration.

Egypt’s health ministry is in the middle of negotiations with pharmaceutical companies over a 15 percent increase in prices of locally-produced drugs, and a 20 percent increase in the prices of imported ones.

Local spices and herbs, meanwhile, cost between 5 and 10 Egyptian pounds ($0.27-0.54) per kilogram.

($1 = 18.5000 Egyptian pounds)

(Writing by Seham Eloraby; Editing by Ahmed Aboulenein and Mark Potter)

Artificial leaf copies nature to manufacture medicine

Artificial leaf to produce medicine

By Ben Hirschler

(Reuters) – Dutch scientists have developed an artificial leaf that can act as a mini-factory for producing drugs, an advance that could allow medicines to be produced anywhere there is sunlight.

The work taps into the ability of plants to use sunlight to feed themselves through photosynthesis, something industrial chemists have struggled to replicate because sunshine usually generates too little energy to fuel chemical reactions.

The leaf-inspired micro factory mimics nature’s efficiency at harvesting solar radiation by using new materials called luminescent solar concentrators with very thin channels through which liquid is pumped, exposing molecules to sunlight.

“Theoretically, you could use this device to make drug compounds with solar energy anywhere you want,” said lead researcher Timothy Noel at Eindhoven University of Technology.

By doing away with the need for a power grid, it may be possible one day to make malaria drugs in the jungle or even medicines on Mars in some future space colony, he believes.

The device, made from silicone rubber, can operate even when there is diffuse light, which means it will work under cloudy skies. However, there is still a way to go to scale up the process to make it commercially viable.

Noel and his colleagues, who published their research in the science journal Angewandte Chemie on Wednesday, are now trying to improve energy efficiency further and increase output.

Because the artificial leaf relies on micro-channels to bring chemicals into direct contact with sunlight, each unit needs to be small – but they could be easily linked together to increase production.

“You can make a whole tree with many, many different leaves placed in parallel,” Noel told Reuters. “These are very cheap things to make, so there is a lot of potential.”

He thinks the process could start to become broadly available to chemical engineers within five to 10 years.

It is not the first time that scientists have drawn inspiration from plants when considering novel ways to manufacture pharmaceuticals.

In 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug called Elelyso from Pfizer and Protalix Biotherapeutics for Gaucher disease, a rare genetic condition, made with genetically modified carrot cells.

Other researchers are also cultivating crops that have been specially bred to produce useful medicines and vaccines in their leaves.

French drug trial disaster leaves one brain dead, five injured

PARIS (Reuters) – One person has been left brain dead and five others have been hospitalized after taking part in a clinical trial in France of an experimental drug made by Portuguese drug company Bial, French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said on Friday.

In total, 90 people have taken part in the trial, taking some dosage of the drug aimed at tackling mood and anxiety issues, as well as movement coordination disorders linked to neurological issues, Touraine said.

The six men aged 28 to 49 had been in good health until taking the oral medication at the Biotrial private facility that specializes in clinical trials, she said.

“This is unprecedented,” Touraine told a news conference after meeting volunteers and their families in Rennes, western France. “We’ll do everything to understand what happened.”

Prosecutors have opened an investigation into the case.

The six men started taking the drug on Jan. 7. The brain-dead volunteer was admitted to hospital on Monday, the minister said.

For three of the five others – who went in on Wednesday and Thursday – there are fears of irreversible handicap, doctor Gilles Edan said, though he still hoped that would not be the case. One of the six had no symptoms but was being carefully monitored, he said.

Testing had already been carried out on animals, including chimpanzees, starting in July, Touraine said.

All trials on the drug have now been suspended and all volunteers who have taken part in the trial are being called back, the health ministry added.

The medicine involved is a so-called FAAH inhibitor that works by targeting the body’s endocannabinoid system, which is also responsible for the human response to cannabis.

Bial said in a statement it was committed to ensuring the wellbeing of test participants and was working with authorities to discover the cause of the injuries, adding that the clinical trial have been approved by French regulators.

The company said five people, rather than six, had been hospitalized, including one left brain dead, without explaining the discrepancy with the official French figures.

Cases of early-stage clinical trials going badly wrong are rare but not unheard of. In 2006, six healthy volunteers given an experimental drug in London ended up in intensive care. One was described as looking like “the elephant man” after his head ballooned. Another lost his fingertips and toes.

“INHERENT RISK”

In the initial Phase I stage of clinical testing, a drug is given to healthy volunteers to see how it is handled by the body and what is the right dose to give to patients.

“Undertaking Phase 1 studies is highly specialist work,” said Daniel Hawcutt, a lecturer in clinical pharmacology at Britain’s University of Liverpool.

Medicines then go into larger Phase II and Phase III trials to assess their effectiveness and safety before they are finally approved for sale.

Europe has strict regulations governing the conduct of clinical trials, with Phase I tests subject to particular scrutiny. But Ben Whalley, a professor of neuropharmacology at the University of Reading, said these could only minimize risks, not abolish them.

“There is an inherent risk in exposing people to any new compound,” he said.

The 2006 London trial led to the collapse of Germany’s TeGenero, the company developing a medicine known as TGN1412. The drug has since gone back into tests for rheumatoid arthritis and is showing promise when given at a fraction of the original dose.

(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler, John Irish, Noelle Mennella; Writing by Ben Hirschler and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Michel Rose and Andrew Heavens)

Turn It Around!

Most of you know that Jim and I are very health conscious and we do our best to take care of ourselves. That’s because we have had health issues that would probably have taken us out if we hadn’t! That’s the reason so many people like Frank Davis and Montel Williams take care of themselves too – they both have serious health issues that could have been a lot worse but they made a choice to fight back against those things! They turned it around – we turned it around – and so can you! Continue reading →

FDA Issues Laxative Warning

The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning Friday that over the counter laxatives could be a threat to health.

The release from the FDA said that laxatives are potentially dangerous if consumers don’t follow dosing instructions.

At least 13 deaths have been reported to the FDA because of laxative use.

The FDA said that adults over 55 or anyone with kidney disease should be very careful to use laxatives without a doctor’s approval.

“The bottom line is that these products are safe for otherwise healthy adults and older children for whom dosing instructions are provided on the Drug Facts label as long as they follow these dosing instructions and don’t take the product more often, or in greater amounts, than the label instructs,” Dr. Mona Khurana of the FDA said.