Tag: Drugs

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Health

W.H.O. Testing three Medicine in Broad Seek for Covid Remedies

W.H.O. Testing 3 Drugs in Broad Search for Covid Treatments

The World Health Organization is testing three more drugs as part of a huge global study to find effective treatments for Covid-19, the agency said on Wednesday.

The study, which will involve researchers in more than 600 hospitals in 52 countries, will evaluate whether the drugs already approved for other uses – one for malaria, one for cancer and one for autoimmune diseases – can reduce the risk of death for patients with Covid to be hospitalized.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said Wednesday he hoped “one or more of the drugs” would prove effective in treating the virus.

Although there are already some treatments out there for people with Covid-19, including steroids and monoclonal antibodies, Dr. Tedros: “We need more for patients at all ends of the clinical spectrum.”

The first phase of the WHO’s trials of new drugs, which it called Solidarity, yielded disappointing results. The researchers found that four different drugs, including hydroxychloroquine and the antiviral drug remdesivir, had little or no benefit for hospitalized Covid patients.

The three drugs in the new study, named Solidarity Plus, were selected by an independent panel of experts and are donated by their manufacturers Ipca, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson. The drugs are artesunate, an antimalarial drug that may have anti-inflammatory effects; Imatinib, a cancer drug that could reverse damage to the lungs; and infliximab, an autoimmune disease drug that may help curb an overly aggressive immune response to the virus.

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Entertainment

Netflix’s Halston: What Medicine Does He Absorb Episode 2?

HALSTON (from left to right) EWAN MCGREGOR as HALSTON, DAVID PITTU as JOE EULA and REBECCA DAYAN as ELSA PERETTI in episode 104 of HALSTON Cr. ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA / NETFLIX 2021

Netflix Halston unpacks the colorful life story of the eponymous fashion designer during the high points of his illustrious career. The miniseries starring Ewan McGregor as an icon particularly highlights Halston’s drug habit, which many in his inner circle viewed as an addiction at its height in the 1970s. in the HalstonHe is careful with drug use at first and admonishes his assistant to be quick. But in the second episode, Halston’s connections (and later parties and offices) become drug-laced affairs. But which exactly did he take? While the men who offer Halston drugs never name the substance directly, it is very likely cocaine.

In addition to cigarettes, joints, and beverages, the real-life Halston also snorted cocaine on a regular basis after trying it during his summer months on Fire Island. He was known to attend a famous club called Studio 54, which was where drug-fueled parties broke up when the designer was dating big names like Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, and Bianca Jagger. Cocaine was apparently also a fixture when he appeared as a host. According to André Leon Talley’s memoir, the designer of the pillbox hat served cocaine from a silver bowl by Elsa Peretti for dessert at dinner parties.

Indeed, Halston often wore sunglasses for fear of looking stoned. Many of his colleagues were concerned about his drug use. Paul Wilmot, who helped market Halston’s fragrance, said Vanity Fair“If you speak to people who are aware of the problems faced by people deep into drug addiction, Halston’s behavior was a textbook.”

Halston Writer, director, and producer Daniel Minahan spends some time on the Netflix miniseries exploring the designer’s relationship with drugs and alcohol. Still, said Minahan diversity that he did not want to portray Halston’s alcohol and cocaine use as “the cause of his death”. “I think it added to his anger, paranoia, and isolation, but I always think drugs are more of a symptom than a cause of something,” Minahan explained.

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Health

Fred Figa, Who Helped Expose a Drug’s Risks, Is Useless at 65

Fred Figa, Who Helped Expose a Drug’s Dangers, Is Dead at 65

This obituary is part of a series about people who died from the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

In late 1983, a member of the Neonatal Department at Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia, had a question for Fred Figa, a young pharmacist who was part of the hospital department that researched the safety of new drugs.

A pharmaceutical company unveiled a new vitamin E injection that is marketed under the brand name E-Ferol as a nutritional supplement for premature babies. It seemed harmless enough. Should you buy it?

Mr. Figamade made a series of phone calls and found that the injection had indeed not been verified by the Food and Drug Administration. No, he replied. Wait a moment. Then he alerted federal investigators.

His diligence would save the lives of innumerable babies.

Mr Figa and investigators had encountered a deadly product safety crisis and scandal. Officials backed by Mr. Figa’s persistent research later found that the FDA had failed to take protective measures regarding the side effects of E-Ferol in light-weight newborns – side effects that resulted in the death of 38 infants from organ failure in hospitals in the area led the country.

Mr. Figa became a star witness in Congressional hearings that forced e-Ferol distributor O’Neal, Jones & Feldman Pharmaceuticals to withdraw him from the market in mid-1984.

“He wouldn’t let go of it. He was the kind of person who would follow something to the nth degree, ”said his wife Janice Russell Figa, who was pregnant when Mr. Figa started calling hospitals across the country to map the pattern of problems.

Mr. Figa, who served for decades as an internal legal advisor to the compliance departments of pharmaceutical companies, died on February 16 in a Morristown, New Jersey hospital near his home in Randolph. He was 65 years old. The cause was complications from the coronavirus, his family said.

Together with his wife, two daughters, Elise and Stefanie, survive; a son, Paul; three sisters, Perla Kimball, Felicia Pehrson and Heidi Wolf; and a brother, Romek.

Updated

March 12, 2021, 11:55 a.m. ET

Solomon Fred Figa was born on October 20, 1955 in Portland, Maine, to Jewish refugees who fled the Holocaust: Paul Figa, who started a leather shoe store specializing in moccasins, and Karola (Holzman) Figa, a seamstress. Fred was one of six children.

He graduated from Northeastern University in Boston in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacy.

Uncovering the problems with E-Ferol, he attended night classes at the law school at George Mason University in Washington and worked part-time for the FDA, which helped him with his investigation. (He graduated from law school in 1986.)

Mr Figa never sought the limelight. At first he refused to testify or speak to reporters, confused that just paying attention to the details of his work – an emphasis learned from tooling and sewing leather in his father’s business – would attract attention.

He was always on the lookout for lurking dangers. His daughter Elise said in a telephone interview that as a teenager she appeared in a community production of “Peter Pan” as Liza, the maid. This role required that she simulate the flight with the wires suspended.

Her father asked to inspect the machine. The director obliges, then Mr. Figa said they were a couple of pirates in the choir for a short time.

“He went to the costume place and got a fake earring and a removable tattoo with a large scar on his cheek and he just had the best time,” Ms. Figa said.

“So he’d be a pirate for about a month every weekend, then he’d go to work as a pharmaceutical lawyer on Monday.”

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Business

Tony Hsieh’s Final Evening: An Argument, Medication, a Locked Door and Sudden Hearth

Tony Hsieh’s Last Night: An Argument, Drugs, a Locked Door and Sudden Fire

Tony Hsieh, who developed Zappos into a billion dollar internet shoe store and formulated an influential theory about corporate happiness, purposely locked himself in a shed before it was consumed by the fire that would kill him.

Last November, Mr. Hsieh visited his girlfriend, Rachael Brown, at their new riverside home in New London, Connecticut. After the couple argued over the clutter of the house, Mr. Hsieh set up camp in the attached pool on storage shed, which was full of foam noodles and lounge chairs.

These details were made public in reports released Tuesday by New London Fire Department and police investigators, the first law enforcement reports on the incident. They said Mr. Hsieh was seen on a security video from November 18 that was peeping out the shed door at around 3 a.m. when no one was around. Light smoke rose behind him.

When Mr. Hsieh closed the door, the door lock could be heard and a bolt was pulled.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur was traveling with a nurse. According to police reports, he was planning to go to Hawaii with Ms. Brown, his brother Andrew, and several friends and employees before dawn. While in the shed, he asked to be checked every 10 minutes. His hotel nurse said this was standard practice with Mr. Hsieh.

Investigators said they were unsure of exactly what started the fire, partly because there were too many options. Mr. Hsieh had partially disassembled a portable propane heater. Discarded cigarettes were found. Or maybe the fire broke out from candles. Investigators said his friends told them that Mr. Hsieh liked candles because they reminded him of “an easier time” in his life.

A fourth possibility is that Mr. Hsieh did it on purpose.

“It is possible that negligence or even deliberate act on the part of Hsieh could have started this fire,” the fire report said. The report added that Mr Hsieh may also have been drunk and noted the presence of several Whip-It brand nitrous oxide chargers, a marijuana pipe, and Fernet Branca liquor bottles.

The exact role of drugs or alcohol that night is likely to remain unclear. Dr. Connecticut chief medical officer James Gill said in an email that “autopsy toxicology tests don’t make sense” if the victim survives for an extended period of time. A final report is still pending.

Firefighters who broke open the door found Mr. Hsieh lying on a blanket. He was taken to a nearby hospital and then flown to the Connecticut Burn Center, where he died on November 27 of complications from smoke inhalation.

Mr. Hsieh’s death shocked the tech and entrepreneurial worlds due to his relative youth and his writing about corporate happiness. Zappos was a star of the early consumer Internet, caution persuading that there are few dangers to buying online. Mr. Hsieh became CEO in 2001 and made everyone aware that companies should try to make their customers and employees happy. He moved Zappos from the Bay Area to Las Vegas.

Business & Economy

Updated

Jan. 26, 2021, 2:54 p.m. ET

Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $ 1.2 billion. The next year, Mr. Hsieh published the bestseller “Delivering Happiness”. “Our goal at Zappos is that our employees see their work not as a job or a career, but as a calling,” he wrote.

Mr. Hsieh stayed in Zappos but turned to a citizen project to revitalize downtown Las Vegas. Lots of investments and many years later, the project was an incomplete success at best. For the past year, Mr. Hsieh has focused on Park City, Utah, where he spent tens of millions of dollars buying real estate and got so manic that friends said they talked about an intervention. Few outsiders knew that he had quietly left Zappos.

On the night of the fire, Mr. Hsieh was desperate about his dog’s death during a trip to Puerto Rico last week, according to police interviews. He and Mrs. Brown had a difference of opinion that escalated. At this point, Mr. Hsieh retired to the shed. An assistant spoke to him frequently and recorded the visits with sticky notes on the door. Mr. Hsieh would generally signal that he is fine.

As the group was preparing to leave for the airport in the middle of the night, Ms. Hsieh asked for a check-in every five minutes. But it was only four minutes before the fire became fatal. Attempts by the residents to break open the locked door were unsuccessful. At about the same time as firefighters arrived, three Mercedes-Benz passenger cars arrived to take the group to the airport.

Ms. Brown, an early employee of Zappos, did not return any comments. A family spokesman also did not respond to a message for comment.

Firefighters regularly visited the house in mid-November. At 1am on November 16, they were called by a smoke alarm connected to a security company. A man who opened the door said the alarm was triggered by cooking, according to department records.

The firefighters left, but returned minutes later, prompted by another smoke alarm. “On arrival found nothing to be seen and a man said again that there was no problem,” wrote Lt. Timothy O’Reilly in a summary of the call. Firefighters said they came in to look around.

Lieutenant O’Reilly and his colleagues found smoke in the finished basement, along with “melted plastic items on the stove along with cardboard that felt hot,” which appeared to be plastic utensils and plates. They also found a burning candle in an “unsafe place” and extinguished it. While the smoke in the basement was dissipating, the firefighters gave fire protection tips.

The investigators’ report also covered an episode in the early evening of November 18. Mr. Hsieh’s assistant checked him out in the shed and saw that a candle had fallen over and burned a ceiling. The assistant asked Mr. Hsieh to put out the flame, and the entrepreneur did.

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Health

What to Know of Covid-19 Antibody Medication: Price, Availability and Extra

What to Know of Covid-19 Antibody Drugs: Cost, Availability and More

Two new antibody treatments have shown promise in keeping high-risk Covid-19 patients out of the hospital.

Although President Trump, who received Regeneron treatment in October and lauded it as a “cure,” received a boost in advertising, the drugs have not been widely distributed since they were approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration last month.

Now federal and state health authorities are calling on patients and doctors to seek treatments.

Here’s what you need to know.

The two treatments by Eli Lilly and Regeneron are the first drugs specifically designed for Covid-19 and approved by the FDA. They are made from artificially synthesized copies of the antibodies that humans naturally produce when their immune systems fight off an infection. Eli Lilly’s drug consists of an antibody. Regeneron’s is a cocktail of two.

Early data showed that it can prevent hospitalization in people at high risk of serious complications from the disease. Clinical studies continue. The treatments are believed to help turn the virus off shortly after infection.

Treatments can be given to anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus, is at high risk of developing a severe form of the disease, and occurs within 10 days of symptoms first appearing.

This includes people who are at least 65 years old and those who are obese or have diseases such as diabetes.

The treatments are not approved for people who have already been hospitalized or need oxygen, as studies in these groups have not shown the drugs to work well.

Under agreements each company has made with the federal government, the doses are free, although some patients may have to pay for the administration of the drug, which must be infused by a healthcare provider, depending on insurance coverage.

Monoclonal antibody treatments are difficult and time consuming to manufacture, which has limited the number of doses made by drug manufacturers.

The federal government has bought 950,000 cans from Eli Lilly and 300,000 cans from Regeneron. Pharmaceutical companies have already dispensed hundreds of thousands of these doses, with the rest expected in late January.

Nobody knows, but many of the cans that have been distributed so far have remained unused and are sitting in hospital refrigerators.

While the federal government has nearly 532,000 doses of the two drugs available and nearly 291,000 doses have been shipped, neither the government nor the drug companies have complete data on how many of these doses have been given to patients.

The subset of hospitals that report data to the government on the number of doses administered has, on average, used only 20 percent of their supply, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The drugs are used unevenly across the country. Some hospitals cannot get enough doses. Others haven’t even used much of what they got so far.

Several factors have contributed to the underutilization: Hospitals are overwhelmed by the virus flood and are focusing on the first vaccines. And they need to be housed in their crowded facilities where the treatments can be infused over a period of hours without spreading the virus to others.

Some patients have been reluctant to engage in treatments, be it because they are unwilling to go to a clinic while feeling sick, lack of transportation, or because they perceive the drugs as connected people only for patients who are felt to be good. And the scarcity of treatments adds to their underuse as some hospitals withhold supplies for fear of leakage.

There is no single hotline or website that patients can use to find a provider who offers the treatments.

Many health systems have put in place ways to identify and contact eligible patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus at test sites or in doctor’s offices. However, these referral systems vary from municipality to municipality.

Eli Lilly’s support line for treatment is 1-855-545-5921. A Regeneron spokeswoman recommended that patients or doctors contact the state health department.

Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lilly’s chief scientist, said he advises friends and family members to call the company’s hotline. “If you are persistent and you qualify, you will get it,” he said.