3/18/2007 Washington, D.C. Reviewed by Bryan Burrough Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) Book Review of THE CIGARETTE CENTURY: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of The Product That Defined America written by Allan M. Brandt Recent years have seen a flurry of what might be called "inanimate" biographies -- that is, books devoted to the life of a thing rather than a person. Salt got one, cod, too, even some naughty words. While I admire the scholarship that goes into these studies, they tend to leave me a bit flat. I mean, it's the rare cod that battled the Boers alongside Winston Churchill or ate fried eggs off Ava Gardner's chest. And while I love a heaping spoon of Morton's as much as the next guy, no matter how you shake it, salt will simply never own up to losing its virginity to the upstairs maid. By their very nature, these books can come off as bloodless digests of minutiae. Given a choice between Kitty Kelley's latest and A Brief History of the Booger, I'd hold my nose and pick the Kelley. You'd have to. Next up: the cigarette. In The Cigarette Century, Allan M. Brandt, a Harvard Medical School professor with a very long and impressive job title, does a nice job of putting Kools and Salems on the couch. The tobacco industry has become well-worn territory for authors and journalists, but Brandt, an expert witness in a number of anti-tobacco lawsuits, enlivens a familiar story by scanning with the widest [...]

3/15/2007 press release from American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Newswise www.newswise.com Efforts to improve the quality of life in patients recovering from head and neck cancer would be vastly improved by participation in support group activities, according to a new study published in the March 2007 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. The study, which administered quality-of-life (QOL) surveys to 47 patients who had previously undergone treatment for head and neck cancer, determined that support group participants experienced scores significantly better in the areas of eating, emotion, and pain, compared with participants who did not attend support groups. As a result of these findings, the study’s authors suggest that support group therapy should be included in regular therapy for head and neck cancer patients. The study’s authors administered the University of Michigan Head and Neck Quality of Life survey, which covers four different categories: head and neck pain, eating and swallowing, communication, and emotional well being. Participants in the support group took part in hour-and-a-half long biweekly multidisciplinary sessions over the course of a year. Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery is the official scientific journal of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS). The study’s authors are Kalpesh T. Vakharia, MD; M. Jafer Ali, MD; and Steven J. Wang, MD. They are all part of the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California-San Francisco. About the AAO-HNS The American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck [...]

3/15/2007 Nome, Alaska Diana Hacker AFP It was the kind of victory that only comes true in fairy tales. A cancer survivor nobody thought could win beat the big guys in the grueling 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) Iditarod Sled Dog Race. And he did it on his sixth attempt wearing the same bib number -- lucky 13 -- that his father and brother wore when they won the Last Great Race on their sixth attempts. With a frostbitten finger wrapped in toilet paper and duct tape to dull the throbbing, Lance Mackey bounded behind his smartly trotting dog team as they passed under the burled-arch finish line in Nome, Alaska, with a winning time of nine days, five hours, eight minutes and 41 seconds at 8:08 pm Tuesday (0408 GMT Wednesday). "Unreal," he kept saying as he punched his fists into the sky, pounded the bib on his chest and hugged family members and well-wishers. "This is a dream I've been living since I was a little boy and my dad won the race," Mackey told a cheering crowd as the setting sun glistened on the Gold Rush City. "Mission accomplished." Mackey, 36, camped out for more than a week outside of Iditarod headquarters last summer so he would be first in line to pick his bib number. He was hoping that lucky number 13 would give him a bit of an edge against the gang of four past Iditarod champs who were initially considered the only real contenders. "I was ready, [...]

3/14/2007 Park City, UT press release PR Inside (www.prinside.com) BSD Medical Corporation announced today that it is sponsoring a cancer therapy roundtable March 16-18 in Park City, Utah dedicated to advancement of the utilization of hyperthermia therapy in treating cancer. Attending the summit meetings will be physicians and physicists from U.S. cancer treatment centers, including leading institutions such as Northwestern University Medical School (represented by Northwestern Memorial Hospital, its primary teaching hospital), Duke University Medical Center, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mark Hurwitz of Harvard Medical School will act as chairman. The Park City roundtable is being conducted simultaneously with the annual conference of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) being held in Hollywood, Florida March 14-18. A report is scheduled to be presented at the NCCN conference regarding the inclusion of hyperthermia therapy and radiation as combination treatments in the NCCN 2007 Breast Cancer Guidelines for recurrent cancer of the chest wall (breast cancer), as well as other localized cancer recurrences. NCCN, a non-profit alliance of 20 of the world's top cancer centers, issues Clinical Guidelines in Oncology, the recognized standard for clinical policy in the oncology community. This announcement significantly supports the progressive emergence of hyperthermia as a mainline therapy in the treatment of cancer, and the institutions represented at the Park City summit played a major role in the inclusion of hyperthermia therapy in the new NCCN guidelines. This year attendees at the Park City Summit will focus primarily [...]

3/14/2007 web-based article staff ComputerWorld (www.computerworld.com) A project that allows the public to donate idle computer time to a grid computing system is helping scientists more quickly solve complex medical problems. For example, the World Community Grid has helped researchers dramatically speed efforts to develop new drugs to treat HIV and to identify new treatment paths for people with several different types of cancer. IBM launched the community grid in late 2004 to allow computer users worldwide to donate idle computer processing power to a grid tasked with performing medical research. Since then, its users have donated the equivalent of more than 78,000 years of research time, according to IBM. The grid today includes 265,000 members and 530,000 devices. It has helped researchers compile about 60 million research equations, officials said. The Help Defeat Cancer project has used the grid to help build a massive public database of tissue samples that eventually will be used like a national fingerprint registry to get more accurate diagnoses from biopsies. David Foran, professor of pathology and radiology and director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), said the effort has already created the "gold standard of databases" for breast, head and neck, and colon cancer. The project aims to eventually use the database to diagnose cancer and to plan the best course of treatment for patients, said Foran, who is leading the project. In addition to the tissue images, the database stores comprehensive [...]

3/14/2007 New York, NY Matthew Perrone Forbes.com Wall Street sees limited short-term potential for an innovative breast cancer treatment from GlaxoSmithKline PLC that gained U.S. regulatory approval Tuesday. Longer term, however, some analysts say the drug could reach blockbuster status. The Food and Drug Administration approved British drug maker's Tykerb, for use alongside Roche's chemotherapy Xeloda, in patients with advanced breast cancer who fail to respond to other treatments. The drug is part of an emerging group of therapies that target cancerous cells. The therapies differ from chemotherapy, which indiscriminately attacks both healthy and cancerous cells. A study published last year showed that once-a-day pill Tykerb, in combination with Xeloda, slowed tumor growth among patients who didn't respond to the premier targeted breast cancer drug now on the market, Genentech Inc.'s Herceptin. Because Glaxo's drug will initially be aimed at a relatively small population that includes just 28,000 patients annually, analysts are not expecting substantial revenues in 2007. Goldman Sachs analyst Mick Readey said in an interview that approval of the drug will offer more "positive sentiment than commercial opportunity" for Glaxo in the short term. Goldman Sachs did not include profits from the drug in a valuation of the company published last week, and downgraded the stock, telling investors it would be a good time to sell after any stock gains triggered by the approval of Tykerb. Goldman and other investment houses are leery of the large number of Glaxo patents expected to expire in the near future, including [...]

3/14/2007 Washington, DC Ronald Bailey ReasonOnLine (reason.com) University of Virginia student Abigail Burroughs died of head and neck cancer at age 21 on June 9, 2001. She died while fighting to gain access to promising experimental anti-cancer drugs recommended by her oncologist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Her father, Frank Burroughs, founded the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs and sued the Food and Drug Administration, arguing that terminal cancer patients have a constitutional right to try to gain access to developmental medicines that the agency has not yet approved. In May 2006, the Alliance won its case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia which ruled that "barring a terminally ill patient from the use of a potentially lifesaving treatment impinges on this right of self-preservation." The Appeals Court sent the case back to District Court to consider if the protected liberty interests of terminally patients outweigh the FDA's interest in insuring the provision of safe and effective drugs. Yesterday, March 1, the full Appeals Court reheard the case at the request of the FDA. Earlier this week, the Food and Drug Law Institute held a colloquium, "Whose Life Is It Anyway?," on the issue. Scott Ballenger, the lawyer who is representing the Abigail Alliance before the Appeals Court, noted that the legal question before the court is what standard should apply to the case. Is trying to gain access to potentially life-saving medicines unapproved by the FDA a fundamental right or merely [...]

3/13/2007 Great Britain staff www.pinknews.co.uk The UK's leading dental charity is appealing to the government to include males in a planned vaccination programme to guard against the sexually transmitted HPV virus. The British Dental Health Foundation's appeal was in response to a new large scale US study of 46,000 mouth cancer cases. It found that the number of deaths caused by the sexually transmitted HPV virus has increased by a third over the last 30 years and is now the highest it has ever been. The Department of Health has already agreed to introduce the HPV vaccine for all 12 and 13-year-old girls from September 2008 to guard against cervical cancer in the future. Dr Nigel Carter, chief executive of the Foundation, said: "It is admirable that the government is taking such positive steps to reduce the number of cervical cancer cases for the women of the future but, with mouth cancer killing more people than cervical cancer and testicular cancer combined, it is clear that this little known condition also needs to be addressed. "By expanding its HPV vaccination programme to include boys as well as girls, the government would be able to address the problem of rising HPV-related mouth cancer deaths in a simple, fair and effective manner. "With young people becoming progressively more sexually active this problem is not going to go away. "It needs to be addressed and sooner rather than later." Mouth cancer kills one person every five hours in the UK and affecting more [...]

3/12/2007 Folsom, CA Corol L. Kornmehl, M.D., FARCO News Blaze (newsblaze.com) Many people believe that Vitamin E is beneficial, and therefore take Vitamin E supplements. Despite the absence of proven advantages, antioxidant vitamins are widely used for prolonged periods of time and at high doses by healthy people, those at risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer, and by individuals with cancer. Intuitively, one would think that Vitamin E protects the body from the toxic effects of radiation. Thus, many people take Vitamin E during radiation therapy, hoping it will reduce potential side effects, but do not report it to their physicians. Study Design To test whether or not Vitamin E administration during radiation therapy could prevent second cancers from developing in the future, a clinical trial was conducted in Canada. Its results were published recently in The International Journal of Cancer. Five hundred forty patients with early stage cancer of the head and neck who were to undergo radiation therapy were the subjects of the study. Head and neck cancer originates in the area of the head and neck and includes malignant tumors of the mouth, throat, voice box, sinuses and lymph glands in the neck The most common type of head and neck cancer is squamous (pronounced SKWAY-miss) cell cancer, which describes the type of cell from which the cancer originated. The standard of care for squamous cell cancer of the head and neck often includes radiation therapy, as well as surgery and chemotherapy. Nearly half of the patients [...]

3/12/2007 Washington, DC news release US Food & Drug Administration (www.fda.gov) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today issued a public health advisory outlining new safety information, including revised product labeling about erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs), widely-used drugs for the treatment of anemia. The drugs affected by the safety update are darbepoetin alfa (Aranesp) and epoetin alfa (Epogen and Procrit). (ESAs are genetically engineered forms of the naturally occurring human protein, erythropoietin. Natural erythropoietin is made by the kidney and increases the number of red blood cells). FDA and the manufacturer of these products have agreed on revised product labeling that includes updated warnings, a new boxed warning, and modifications to the dosing instructions. The new boxed warning advises physicians to monitor red blood cell levels (hemoglobin) and to adjust the ESA dose to maintain the lowest hemoglobin level needed to avoid the need for blood transfusions. Physicians and patients should carefully weigh the risks of ESAs against transfusion risks. Recently completed studies describe an increased risk of death, blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks in patients with chronic kidney failure when ESAs were given at higher than recommended doses. In other studies, more rapid tumor growth occurred in patients with head and neck cancer who received these higher doses. In studies where ESAs were given at recommended doses, an increased risk of death was reported in patients with cancer who were not receiving chemotherapy and an increased risk of blood clots was observed in patients following orthopedic surgery. "The [...]