Pharma News

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is alerting consumers of a voluntary recall by Johnson & Johnson of Johnson’s Baby Powder after FDA testing has found that a sample from one lot of the product contains chrysotile fibers, a type of asbestos. Consumers who have Johnson’s Baby Powder lot #22318RB should stop using it immediately and contact Johnson & Johnson for a refund. The FDA stands by the quality of its testing and results and is not aware of any adverse events relating to exposure to the lot of affected products.

With support from the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, scientists are developing powerful new devices and technologies to monitor and regulate brain activity. To ensure NIH keeps pace with rapid technological development and help clinicians and researchers ethically fit these new tools into practice, a paper recently published in JAMA Neurology highlights potential issues around and offers recommendations about clinical research with both invasive and noninvasive neural devices.

EMA’s human medicines committee (CHMP) has recommended granting a conditional marketing authorisation in the European Union for Ervebo (rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP), the first vaccine for active immunisation of individuals aged 18 years and older at risk of infection with the Ebola virus.

Affordable access to medicines is a public health concern and more generic drug competition can help reduce prices, improve access and benefit the public health. Safe, effective and high-quality generic drugs play a vital role in our health care system. Generic drugs account for about 90% of all prescription drug purchases in the U.S. In 2018, competition from generic drugs saved the health care system about $293 billion.

National Institutes of Health scientists have developed an ultrasensitive new test to detect abnormal forms of the protein tau associated with uncommon types of neurodegenerative diseases called tauopathies. As they describe in Acta Neuropathologica, this advance gives them hope of using cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF-an accessible patient sample-to diagnose these and perhaps other, more common neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

A report published by EMA shows that European countries continue to reduce the use of antibiotics in animals. The overall sales of veterinary antibiotics across Europe dropped by more than 32% between 2011 and 2017.

More people received life-saving treatment for tuberculosis (TB) in 2018 than ever before, largely due to improved detection and diagnosis. Globally, 7 million people were diagnosed and treated for TB - up from 6.4 million in 2017 – enabling the world to meet one of the milestones towards the United Nations political declaration targets on TB.

There is no effective vaccine currently available to prevent Lyme disease in humans.

Experts from academia, government, and industry convened at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Banbury Center to tackle this public health challenge. Now, a new paper published in the October 17 2019 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases highlights the conference discussions, reiterates the need to stop the infection, and defines a strategy for developing effective vaccines.

Young adults who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be more likely to experience a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or major stroke event by middle age, raising the risk as much as other better-known risk factors, according to new research published in Stroke, a journal of the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association.

The more medications a patient takes, the greater the likelihood that interactions between those drugs could trigger negative side effects, including long-term organ damage and even death. Now, researchers at Penn State have developed a machine learning system that may be able to warn doctors and patients about possible negative side effects that might occur when drugs are mixed.