Breakthroughs Today

A lot of advancements in diagnostic technology have visited our century. These new means of diagnoses have brought hope particularly to poor communities where neglected tropical diseases run amok, ignored both by the health authorities tasked by the people to protect them and the profit-oriented pharmaceuticals whose manufacturing capabilities generation of effective drugs against these disease are highly dependent. Neurocystercosis is merely one of these many neglected diseases.   WHAT happened to Cebu City Traffic Operations Management chief Sylvan “Jack” Jakosalem can be one of those few things in our lives that is a choice away, and the impact changes its direction completely.   Neurocystercosis (NCC), an infection of the central nervous system (CNS), which arises from unwittingly ingesting uncooked food that is contaminated with the larvae of tapeworm Taenia solium, can cause irreparable damage to the CNS part involved. The CNS is composed of the brain, spinal cord, and

ON JANUARY 2006, France became sole user of BCG vaccine Statens Serum Institut (SSI) for tuberculosis vaccination. Not long after, rapid increase in cases of adverse reactions (ADRs) came up; such as abscesses (in 73 percent of patients treated), around 30 percent had local reactions (lymphadenopathy of above one cm in size), while 20 patients developed suppurative lymphadenopathy.   Christelle Chol, leader of those who followed the patients for two years, found that the ADRs became consistent a year after their appearance or detection. They published their findings at the Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety (Dec 5).   BCG vaccine—or Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (named after its discoverers)—contains weakened but alive strain of Mycobacterium bovis (a strain found in pigs). Because the bacteria can still stimulate reaction from a person’s immune system (without causing disease), it prepares the body to combat and destroy tuberculosis bacteria upon exposure. Studies in 1994 to 1

  We have come to know very well the drug Phenylpropanolamine as it is a popular medication that doctors give for decongested noses. But it has a history that most people do not know, a history that supposedly have been improved but never known publicly.   SCIENTIFIC studies in 1988, 1999 and 2000 agreed that there is a risk for hemorrhagic stroke among women who used phenylpropanolamine (PPA).   The 1999 study came from the Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut). And the one in 2000 was conducted by a team that WN Kernan led and published in the December 2000 issue of the North England Journal of Medicine, a publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society. The 1988 study was a psychiatric review of 37 cases published in North America and Europe since 1960. In this study that the Lake-Masson-Quirk team published in Pharmacopsychiatry (July 1988), it was noted that ingestion of phenylpropanolamine had resulted in diagnosed cases of acute mania, paranoid schizophrenia and