Stories tagged drugs
The cure for what ails you: But only if you can get it in time.
Courtesy Destinys Agent
(With the Republican National Convention literally across the street, the Science Museum of Minnesota will be closed starting Friday, August 29. But Science Buzz marches on! To honor our convention guests, I’ll be posting entries focusing on issues where science and politics overlap. Hopefully this will spur some discussion. Or at least tick some people off. Previous entries here and here.)
Getting a new drug approved for use is a long and arduous process. As well it should be—we need to be sure not only that the drug works, but also that it doesn’t have any nasty, even fatal, side-effects.
Unfortunately, the process has gotten slower lately. The US Food and Drug Administration is approving only half as many drugs as it did a decade ago. Some observers believe the organization has grown gun-shy. After Vioxx and a few other high-profile drugs had to be pulled from the market over safety concerns, the agency has become a lot more cautious.
(The cynical among us might say the FDA is out to protect its own skin, regardless of how many lives are lost by withholding drug approvals. At the same time, one can argue that they agency has been forced into its current cautious approach by the media and Congress, who heap criticism and blame on the FDA for its few mistakes, but never offer any praise for its many successes.)
Another issue arises from the pre-approval trials. New drugs are tested on a small number of patients. Often there are more patients interested in taking part in the trial than there are slots available. This can be especially difficult for terminally ill patients who have exhausted all other treatment options – nothing has worked, and they are still dying. They would have nothing to lose, and potentially a lot to gain, from trying an experimental drug. The drug trial itself might benefit from having more subjects. It’s win-win.
But getting such patients added to trials has proven very difficult. In May, Sen. Sam Brownback (R., Kan.) and Rep. Diane Watson (D., Calif.) introduced a bill to open up access to trials for such patients. No action was taken before Congress recessed for the summer.
Tags : Researchers in London have found that oxytocin – a naturally-produced human hormone – can help combat shyness. They are also hoping to use it to address other conditions, including autism and depression.
Let's hear it for maggots!
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Scientific Inquiry, and Human Organism
Researchers at Swansea University, in the UK, are developing an antibiotic that can fight the MRSA superbug. And they're using superbugs to do it. OK, not superbugs. They're using the secretions from the maggots of the common green bottle fly.
A cage match I'm not sure I want to see: Maggots secrete a compound that can fight superbugs, including 12 strains of MRSA, E. coli, and C. difficile.
Courtesy National Institutes of Health
Super gross? Sure. And you won't see an ad for this antibiotic (Seraticin) on TV anytime soon. It takes some 20 maggots to make a single drop of the drug. So scientists have to fully identify it, figure out a way to synthesize it in the lab, test it on human cells, and put it through a clinical trial.
In the meantime, using live maggots on infected wounds is a time-tested way of beating infections. Dr. Alun Morgan, of ZooBiotic Ltd, told the BBC,
"Maggots are great little multitaskers. They produce enzymes that clean wounds, they make a wound more alkaline which may slow bacterial growth and finally they produce a range of antibacterial chemicals that stop the bacteria growing."
How effective are maggots? The University of Manchester has been doing research on diabetic patients with MRSA-contaminated foot ulcers. The patients treated with maggots were mostly cured within three weeks. Patients who got more conventional treatment needed 28 weeks.
So give maggots a big shout out. And then check these other stories:
"NHS 'needs to use more maggots'"
Prescription insects
Fun with beetles
Forget this cubicle, I’m becoming a drug dealer. Of babies.
Low-grade baby: but she seems to be enjoying it.
Courtesy ocadotonyI hope I don’t look like a chump. Because I’m no chump. I’m no chump, and I’m leaving this chump job. Goodbye, Chump Inc. Goodbye, Chumville. I’m starting an exciting new life, effective immediately, as a drug dealer.
And what poison will I peddle? What do I plan to sling on street corners and playgrounds? The worst and most deadly drug: pure, uncut baby.
Trust me; it’s the next big thing. I accept that my baby dealing operation will probably start out small (baby manufacturing is notoriously time-consuming), but before you know it gossip pages will be swimming in photos of starlets with babies peaking out of their handbags, or smeared on their upper lips. Why?
Because babies get you hiiigghhh!
Or at least they get mothers high, and that’s a market somewhat neglected by dealers. Cha-ching!
Research has shown that mothers, when shown pictures of their babies, experience strong brain activity in regions associated with reward and addiction—a natural high.
The strength of a mother’s reaction seems to depend partly on her baby’s expression. A crying baby, for instance, evokes a reaction little different from a mother seeing a stranger’s baby (ha!), whereas a smiling baby is like a spoonful of hot heroin. Relatively speaking.
That’s something I’ll have to factor into my operation—happy babies are the most potent, and I surely want to offer a high quality product. How do you make babies happy? It’s never really been my thing. Like…rattles, maybe? Cigarettes? I have the feeling that it’ll be a trial and error sort of thing.
Aside from inspiring a whole new career path for me, the research promises to be valuable in understanding some of the most basic elements of mother-child bonding, and why, in some cases, this bonding fails to occur. Neglect and abuse sometimes arises from such cases, and so, as a baby dealer, I think I would only be helping society by fixing up moms already jonesing for some baby, and encouraging the habit in others.
Don't do drugs!: This guy may have just seen Lucy in the sky with diamonds!
Courtesy Mark RyanDr. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) died yesterday at his home in Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.
Hofmann was working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals (now Novartis) when he first synthesized LSD-25 in 1938. However, he set it aside and didn’t stumble upon its hallucinogenic powers until 5 years later, when, while synthesizing a new batch for study, he accidentally ingested some of it from his fingertips.
Once that genie was let out of the bottle, Hofmann went whole-hog investigating the drug’s possibilities, doing many experiments on himself and his colleagues.
He later became director of Sandoz’s natural products department studying other natural mind-altering substances, such as those found in Mexican mushrooms (psilocybin) and in the seeds of the morning glory species Rivea corymbosa (lysergic acid amide).
Hofmann referred to LSD as “medicine for the soul” and spent much of his life trying to convince others of its medicinal and therapeutic value, although he admitted it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. The drug was made illegal after a rise in popularity by counterculture youth during the 1960s.
"I produced the substance as a medicine,” he once said. “It's not my fault if people abused it.”
LINKS
Associated Press story
Albert Hofmann link on Wikipedia
More on LSD
March 29 - April 4 are Nano Days at The Science Museum and other museums areound the country. To celebrate, here's a selection of recent nanotechnology stories in the news:
Japanese doctors are trying to build nano-scale robots to build custom-designed medicines,one molecule at a time.
Pharmaceutical companies are using nanotechnology to deliver more effective anti-cancer drugs.
Researchers at MIT are trying to develop an electric car with a battery using nanowires.
Engineers in California are looking for ways to use nanomaterials to store hydrogen, which may someday power pollution-free cars.
Scientists are using nanotechnology to develop more efficient solar panels.
Medical researchers are developing nanorobots to deliver drugs directly where they are needed in the body.
Meanwhile, researchers in California are using bacteria to grow electronic circuits out of nanotubes.
Just chocolate milk: Delicious chocolate milk. (image courtesy of goatopolis on flickr.com)What’s that? You aren’t up on “jenkem” yet? It’s only the next big thing in chemical abuse, my friends. What exactly is it? Oh, we’ll get to that.
A little background first – “jenkem,” as far as one can tell, originated in Zambia, where it was used as a substitute for other inhalant drugs, like gasoline or glue (“Genkem” is an African glue brand, and “Jenkem” is thought to have derived from that as a generalized term for inhalants). Jenkem seems to have first surfaced in the mid-nineties, with several periodicals at the time reporting its abuse among street children in Lusaka, Zambia.
But, again, what is it? Well… uh… basically, jenkem is the collected gas of fermented human excrement and urine.
…
The gas supposedly acts as a powerful hallucinogen. The exact active components of jenkem aren’t known because, surprise surprise, no organization has yet put much research into the psychoactive effects of poop gas. It is likely, however, that the inhaled methane and hydrogen sulfide gas may play a role in jenkem’s physiological effects.
As you might already have guessed, a drug like jenkem is a symptom of utter poverty and social desperation. That jenkem caught on in a place like Lusaka, where AIDS and poverty have created tens of thousands of street children, is, sadly, perhaps not entirely surprising. It does not seem very probable, however, that a drug like jenkem would find much of a foothold in the United States, which is why its appearance in the news of the last couple weeks has been particularly interesting.
Last week, multiple local news crews across the country, um, got wind of a leaked sheriff’s bulletin from Collier County, Florida, warning of the use of jenkem among American teens. Stations began running stories warning parents of this “dirty new drug,” and urging them, in at least one story, to “wait up for them (their children) at night and not let their kids go to bed until they have seen them and smelled their breath.” A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Agency even made the statement that “there are people in America trying [Jenkem].”
This storm of reaction is remarkable in that, despite the news stories and the DEA warning, no one has actually seen any direct evidence of the use of jenkem in America.
The original Collier County bulletin, it turns out, was based on one Florida teenager’s “trip report” posted on a website, with pictures of himself doing jenkem and a description of its effects. The kid, however, recently admitted that it was a hoax, and that the “jenkem” pictured was made using “flour, water, beer, and Nutella.” Probably not delicious, but not jenkem either.
Organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, as well as websites that specialize in documenting psychedelic experiences, admit that it’s possible that a few individuals in the U.S. may have experimented with something like jenkem, but are extremely skeptical of the claim that it has become anything more than that. The Partnership for a Drug Free America stated that they had not even heard of jenkem.
Pretty much everything about jenkem reeks of an urban legend.
Hallucinogenic drugs can be extremely dangerous, it’s never a good idea to get sewage close to your mouth, and while hydrogen sulfide (sewer gas) can be tolerated at low levels, higher concentrations (like, say, from huffing it) can be deadly poisonous. So, as bizarre as something like jenkem sounds, one shouldn’t forget how dangerous it is.
Even so, it seems like this reaction to the supposed appearance of jenkem in the U.S. had less to do with the actual danger of the substance than it did with the media’s love of scare stories, and a strange sort of “moral panic” over a vaguely perceived drug threat.
Fermented sewage. Weird.
Salon.com has a pretty good article on the whole thing here.
Researchers were able to take a single teaspoon of water from a city's sewage plant, and test it to see what drugs, legal and illegal, people were using. The tests cannot identify individual people -- it merely measures the level of certain drugs in the city's waste water.
CocaineThe Economist has an interesting graph of cocaine prices around the world. It hits a high of nearly $715/gram in New Zealand, $110/gram in the USA, and only $2/gram in Columbia where most of the world's cocaine is grown.
But in case you're tempted by the high market value of this illegal drug, Gene pointed out another revealing economics/statistics story a couple months ago about, the worst job in America. Drug dealing makes Alaskan crab fishing seems safe.
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