Blood drug could save many lives in combat and trauma

  By Kate Kelland

LONDON | Wed Jan 19, 2011 3:34am EST

LONDON (Reuters) – A cheap generic drug used to stem bleeding from heavy menstrual periods could save the lives of tens of thousands of accident victims each year and help reduce the number of deaths in combat, scientists said Wednesday.

In a systematic review of studies on the effectiveness of tranexamic acid, or TXA, British researchers found that it reduces the risk of death in injured patients with severe bleeding by about 10 percent compared to giving no treatment.

This would equate to saving more than 70,000 lives a year if the blood clotting drug was used worldwide, they said in their study published in The Cochrane Library journal.

More than 90 percent of trauma deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries, where access to medicines is often restricted by poorer infrastructure and fewer resources.

“TXA reduces the risk of a patient bleeding to death following an injury and appears to have few side effects,” lead researcher Ian Roberts, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said in a statement. “It could save lives in both civilian and military settings.”

The findings were based on one large trial involving 20,211 patients and one small trial involving 240 patients.

Injuries are a major cause of death across the world. Every year, more than a million people die from road injuries, making traffic accidents the ninth leading cause of death worldwide.

On top of that, stabbings, shootings, land mines and other injuries kill thousands more, many of them young men.

Haemorrhage, or excessive bleeding, is responsible for about a third of trauma deaths in hospitals and can also contribute to deaths from multi-organ failure. Experts estimate that about 600,000 injured patients bleed to death worldwide every year.

A study published last year of 20,000 patients in 40 countries also found that TXA significantly cut death rates in bleeding patients. Based on those findings, researchers said TXA could save up to 100,000 lives a year, including around 13,000 in India, 12,000 in China, 2,000 in the U.S. and more in Europe.

They also said TXA, an off-patent generic medicine made by several companies and costing around $4.50 per gram, should be listed as “essential” by the World Health Organization (WHO).

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

Reference Link : http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70I00E20110119

Courtesy : Reuters

Sweep yields leads for new malaria drugs

Researchers hope the studies’ findings will lead to a new generation of antimarial drugs (Source: WEHI/Drew Berry)

A massive screening of chemicals has turned up thousands of compounds that could lead to new drugs in the fight against malaria, according to a pair of studies published today.

Malaria affects a quarter of a billion people worldwide, and claims upward of 850,000 lives every year, particularly children in the poorer nations of Africa and Asia.

Preventative measures such as the use of insecticide-treated bed nets has helped cut infection rates dramatically in some of the worst-hit countries, and treatments based on a class of drugs called artemisinin have sharply reduced mortality.

But the rise of new, drug-resistant strains of the disease could wipe out that progress unless alternative compounds are found, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

Multiple targets

An international team of researchers led by R Kiplin Guy of St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee combed through more than 300,000 candidate chemicals.

Their study, published in the journal Nature, identified 1100 agents out of more than 300,000 candidates that inhibited growth of the deadly Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease by at least 80%.

A more select subset of 172 compounds all had chemical structures unlike those in existing anti-malarial drugs, according to the study.

The fact that these novel agents acted on different targets in the mosquito-borne parasite could prove crucial in beating back the emerging threat of drug-resistant variants.

As a proof of principle, the researchers showed that one of the compounds was effective in treating malaria in a mouse model, albeit at a very high concentration.

Going public

In a second study, also appearing in Nature, Jose Garcia-Bustos of GlaxoSmithKline and colleagues screened around two million agents in the pharmaceutical giant’s in-house chemical library.

Setting a similar threshold for blocking the parasite’s growth, the researchers uncovered 13,500 promising active compounds.

Significantly, 8000 of them were equally effective against multi-drug resistant P. falciparum parasites.

More than 11,000 of the “hits” were proprietary compounds owned by the drug company, which has taken the unusual step of transferring them to the public domain, where they are available researchers anywhere in the world.

“These reports offer tremendous opportunities to develop the next generation of antimalarial drugs,” says David Fidock, a researcher at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Also writing in Nature, Fidock cautions that it is only a “starting point,” and that time was running short.

Reference Link
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/05/20/2904634.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Courtesy
ABC

WHO sees good progress on U.N. health goals for poor

(Reuters) – Far fewer children are dying and rates of malnutrition, HIV and tuberculosis are declining thanks to good progress on health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

In its annual health report for 2010, the U.N. body said some countries had made impressive gains, although others may struggle to meet some of the 2015 targets.

“With five years remaining to the MDG deadline in 2015 there are some striking improvements,” said the report, which is based on data collected from WHO’s 193 member states.

Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Rwanda had made progress on child mortality despite facing difficulties, WHO said.

However the group said global results mask inequalities between countries, and some nations’ progress had been slowed by conflict, poor governance or humanitarian and economic crises.

The Millennium Development Goals were set in 2000 by 189 heads of state seeking to drive global policy to tackle poverty, hunger, ill-health and lack of access to clean water, among other things.

The key findings of WHO’s report were that:

* Fewer children are dying, with annual global deaths of children under five falling to 8.8 million in 2008 – down by 30 percent since 1990;

* The estimated percentage of underweight children under five has dropped from 25 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2010;

* The proportion of births attended by a skilled health worker has increased globally, but in the Africa and southeast Asia fewer than 50 percent of all births were attended;

* New HIV infections have declined by 16 percent globally from 2001 to 2008. In 2008, 2.7 million people contracted the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS, and there were 2 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths;

* Existing cases of tuberculosis are declining, along with deaths among HIV-negative tuberculosis cases;

* The world is on track to achieve the MDG target on access to safe drinking water, but more needs to be done to achieve the sanitation target.

The water and sanitation goals call for the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation to be halved by 2015 from levels in 2000.

The WHO report found that the percentage of the world’s population with access to safe drinking water had increased from 77 percent to 87 percent, a rate of improvement it said would hit the MDG target if it keeps up.

“In low-income countries, however, the annual rate of increase needs to double in order to reach the target and a gap persists between urban and rural areas in many countries,” the report said.

On sanitation, the progress was less good: in 2008, 2.6 billion people had no access to a hygienic toilet and 1.1 billion were still defecating in the open, it said.

Poor sewerage can spread dangerous infections such as viral hepatitis and cholera.

The slowest improvement has been in Africa, where the percentage of the population using toilets or latrines increased from 30 percent in 1990 to 34 percent in 2008.

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6494TI20100511?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters.