Archive for the ‘Medicine’ Category

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The pandemic is over but 300 million vaccines were sold for a small fortune

August 11, 2010

The world is no longer in the middle of an H1N1 pandemic, the World Health Organisation has announced. We are now in the “post pandemic period”, Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO, has announced.

But as reported by the The  Star in Toronto,

Three members of the emergency committee that advised Director General Dr. Margaret Chan on the H1N1 pandemic work at public health agencies in the United States and United Kingdom that have received research funding from pharmaceutical companies or their industry associations, and a fourth member had previously worked as a paid consultant for five different vaccine manufacturers.

The international health authority came under fire in June when a prominent medical journal alleged scientists with undisclosed financial ties to drug manufacturers had helped develop its pandemic strategies.

The article noted that guidelines published in 2004 urged countries to stockpile antiviral medication in advance to avoid scrambling for supplies when an outbreak occurred, but the WHO failed to disclose that three of the committee members who contributed to the document had at one point received funding from companies that manufacture antiviral drugs.

The joint investigation by the BMJ (formerly called the British Medical Journal) and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism also spoke out against the WHO for keeping the lid on the names of its 15-member H1N1 emergency committee.

Over 300 Million vaccines were sold during this alarmist nonsense.

Sounds like fraud.

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Posted in Ethics, Medicine | 2 Comments »

American gets an Indian heart

August 7, 2010

I wish the recipient a long and useful life.

But the headlines in The Hindu newspaper and the , no doubt justified, pride in the accomplishments of the medical fraternity is a little disturbing.

Nearly 25 years ago, Prathap C. Reddy, a cardiologist set up a hospital in Chennai after he lost a patient who could not afford to go to the United States for surgery. At Apollo Hospitals, things have come full circle since, with a 65-year old American undergoing a heart transplant here.

In the process, two records were also created. The patient was not only the first U.S. citizen to undergo a heart transplant in India, but he was also the oldest person to undergo a heart transplant in the country, Paul Ramesh, primary consultant cardiac surgeon who performed the surgery said.

The recipients heart function was about 28 per cent and in January, doctors back home in Minneapolis told him that he required a heart transplant within a year, failing which he would die, T. Sunder, consultant cardiac surgeon, Apollo Hospitals, explained.

However, the American recounted in a press conference on Thursday, it could have taken him a year and a half to get a heart back home. He had meanwhile, read of the facilities for heart transplant in India, checked with some friends and decided to make the trip to India to get a new heart.

On the night of July 21, the American got really lucky. A brain dead donor’s 36-year old heart was available but there were no other takers. M.R. Girinath, chief cardio vascular surgeon, called up the State co-ordinator for the Cadaver Transplant Programme seeking a go-ahead to use the heart on the foreigner. Once the sanction came, the hospital performed the transplant, working eight hours to put an Indian heart into an American.

But there is a dark side to this kind of “medical tourism”. The transplant and organ donor business in India is already a growing and lucrative business for many medical institutions and practitioners. There is now a thriving “black market” in kidneys for transplantation preying on the poor on India’s slums .  ( After the Tsunami struck this was the only way out for many poor women in some villages in Southern India).

The grapevine tells me that the kidney “donor” is paid around 25,000 Indian Rupees (about $500) while the recipient is charged around 100,000 – 200,000 Indian Rupees (about $2,000 – 4,000) for the kidney and the paperwork to legitimise the organ. A foreign buyer is usually charged more (as much as $30,000) but kidney brokers are available to try and “minimise” the cost. The medical charges for transplantation are of course extra. The organ business is not caused by medical tourism but the money-flows are the key driving force and tourism adds hugely to the money flows.

If the organ trade now targets hearts ………..

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The Keepers of Memory

July 28, 2010

Yesterday I met someone after 35 years.

The memories that were triggered were sharp and clear but we each remembered different episodes with differing degrees of clarity. Many memories that surged to the surface were matters that I had not consciously thought of during the 35 year interval.

Why then are some memories stored in the brain with – apparently – no deterioration and a mass or surrounding detail and others are only vague recollections or even non-existent?

Perhaps the answer lies in the protein kinase PKMzeta. In The Beautiful Brain Podcast, Todd Sacktor, Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at SUNY talks about his research regarding the mechanisms of long-term memory storage—and deletion— in the brain.

image: http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n14/mente/chaos.html

Sacktor’s research investigates the activity of a class of proteins which are very active around synapses— the protein kinases –  and they come in several varieties in the brain. They catalyze chemical reactions at the synapse, allowing a neuron to become more or less responsive to the electrical firing of its neighbor by aiding reactions that reshuffle neurotransmitter receptors.

Sacktor has identified one kinase in particular—called PKMzeta—which seems to be directly responsible for the maintenance of memory in the brain. When PKMzeta is found at a synapse, the memory encoded there is OK—it’s being maintained. When PKMzeta stops working at a synapse, the memory floats into the abyss of the brain, disassembled into its consituent cellular parts and extinguished from our recollection. In this edition of the podcast, Sacktor discusses his research and its implications on the way we understand memory storage in the brain.

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Alarmist WHO for sure .. but why and for whom?

June 29, 2010

Handling of the H1N1 pandemic

The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) today endorsed the conclusions of its Health Committee regarding the Swine flu pandemic and the actions of the WHO.

According to the Assembly, the handling of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU health agencies and national governments led to a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”. The report finds that there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO”, resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.

The WHO has been “highly defensive”, the adopted text underlines, and unwilling to accept that a change in the definition of a pandemic was made, or to revise its prognosis of the Swine Flu outbreak. The WHO and European health institutions were not willing to publish the names and declarations of interest of the members of the WHO Emergency Committee and relevant European advisory bodies directly involved in recommendations concerning the pandemic.

The obvious beneficiaries are the pharmaceutical manufacturers of vaccines and Tamiflu and their supporters.

But is anybody at the WHO accountable to anybody?

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