RoguePundit

Tamiflow

Tamiflu is one of a number of medications which the average sewage treatment plant can't break down.  It tends to go through us as well. 

For their new study, Gopal Ghosh and his colleagues at Kyoto University sampled water discharged from three local sewage treatment plants and water at several points along two rivers into which the treated water flowed. Sampling started early in December 2008, as flu season got underway. The researchers sampled again at the height of the seasonal flu’s onslaught in early February and again as infection rates waned.

Tamiflu’s active form, oseltamivir carboxylate or OC, turned up in the treated sewage on every occasion, the researchers report online September 28 in Environmental Health Perspectives. Values were in the low nanograms per liter range during the first and last samplings, and reached a high of almost 300 ng/L at one outflow during the flu’s peak, a week when there were 1,738 recorded flu cases in Kyoto.

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Once ingested, virtually all Tamiflu will end up in the environment in the active form, notes environmental chemist Jerker Fick of Umeå University in Sweden. The reason: Tamiflu becomes active once the body converts it into a carboxylate form. Roughly 80 percent of an ingested dose becomes this OC, which the body eventually excretes. The body sheds the remaining 20 percent of Tamiflu in its original form, but this phosphate form is immediately turned into the active, carboxylate form when it reaches a water treatment plant, he says.

The worry is that waterfowl could be exposed to sufficient concentrations of the compound that some flu viruses could develop resistance to Tamiflu.

If Tamiflu resistance does develop in exposed birds, the affected flu strains will probably be conventional seasonal and avian flu strains, which claim thousands of lives each year, and not H1N1. That’s because H1N1 seems to bypass birds as it spreads among people, notes William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn.

The latest World Health Organization numbers (Sept 20) show that H1N1 has killed 3,917. 

Fallout Drug

This is certainly an interesting sounding drug. 

Until now, doctors have felt largely helpless when it comes to treating so-called radiation sickness. Ionizing radiation destroys the building blocks of cells, leading directly to cell death. It can also produce changes in genetic material, which are passed on during subsequent cell division, contributing to the development of cancers. Medicine has offered virtually no protection against nuclear radiation until now, except in the form of iodine tablets, which merely prevent radioactive iodine from accumulating in the thyroid gland.

The effects of CBLB502, discovered by the American molecular geneticist Andrei Gudkov, are believed to be far more comprehensive. The agent consists of a protein derived from salmonella bacteria. The bacterial protein attaches itself to the receptor on a radiation-damaged cell, which would normally activate the immune system.

This in turn inhibits the damaged cell's suicide program, known as apoptosis, which would normally be activated to prevent the damaged cell from harming the rest of the body. The inhibition of apoptosis gives the cell time to initiate repair mechanisms, the same trick a tumor cell uses to survive in the human body despite its pathological mutation.

Cleveland Biolabs was started by a former Israeli fighter pilot in 2003.  I love its motto..."Controlling Cell Death to Promote Human Life."  Here's what the company is working on.

CBLI’s pipeline includes products from two primary families of compounds: Protectans and Curaxins. Protectans are being developed as drug candidates that protect normal tissues from acute stresses such as radiation, chemotherapy and ischemias (pathologies developed as a result of blocking blood flow to a part of the body). Curaxins are being developed as anticancer agents that could act as mono-therapy drugs or in combination with other existing anticancer therapies.

The article said that the CBLB502 is only two years from approval in the U.S.  But considering that the results of an initial phase 1 safety trial were only recently announced, two years sounds rather optimistic. Returning to the original article...

Gudkov successfully tested the drug in mice and rhesus monkeys, and he has already published the results in the American scientific journal Science. The monkeys were exposed to doses of radiation comparable to the levels people were exposed to after the 1986 Chernobyl reactor disaster. In the experiment, 70 percent of the monkeys that were not given the drug died. But of those that were treated before radiation exposure, more than 60 percent survived. The drug was even successful when it was injected 72 hours after radiation exposure.

This would make it particularly well-suited for use after radioactive attacks and accidents. Western intelligence agencies have long warned of the dangers of a "dirty" bomb, that is, an explosive device containing radioactive material. To address the threat, the Pentagon and US health authorities have already invested $40 million (€28 million) in the development of the anti-radiation drug.

CBLB502 could also be used in cancer therapy, because it would enable tumor patients to cope more easily with radiation treatment. This, in turn, would increase the efficacy of treatment in severe cases.

The company figures this could be a $20 billion drug, with our military alone buying two million doses. 

The MMR Vaccine and Autism

It was disgusting to learn yesterday that a major piece of research that had linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism was the result of falsified data.  From the London Times:

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

This issue has been rumbling for awhile.  Switching links...

In 2004, 10 of the 13 original authors on the Lancet paper requested that the paper be withdrawn, concluding that "no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism because the data was insufficient." Wakefield has continued to stand by the paper's conclusions.

Wakefield and two other co-authors, Dr. John Walker-Smith and Dr. Simon Murch, are now defending themselves against allegations of professional misconduct brought by England's General Medical Council, which oversees physicians. Those charges are not related to the data in the newspaper, but to the researchers' ethics in using the children.

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In the fallout from Wakefield's original paper, vaccination rates in the country have fallen from 92% to below 80%. As a consequence, 1,348 cases of measles were reported in England and Wales in 2008, compared with only 56 in 1998. Two children died of the disease.

Unfortunately, Wakefield's research has been influential on this side of the Atlantic as well.  Nearby Ashland is one of the hotbeds of vaccine paranoia...which is why the CDC visited last month to explain vaccine safety and get some feedback.  Wonder if anyone brought up the Steinerian influence there (end of previous blog here).