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For a small slice of San Francisco’s homeless population that struggles with severe alcohol addiction, nurses offer treatment not in a pill, but in a shot of vodka or a glass of beer.
It may sound counterintuitive, experts say, but it helps keep people off the streets and out of emergency rooms, jails — or the morgue. San Francisco set up a “managed alcohol program” four years ago as a way to care for vulnerable homeless people who drank excessive amounts of alcohol and were among the city’s highest users of emergency services. Since its creation, the program, which started out with 10 beds, has served 55 clients, according to officials from the Department of Public Health. The now 20-bed program, which costs about $5 million per year, operates out of a former hotel in the heart of the Tenderloin. Nurses dispense regimented doses of vodka and beer to participants at certain times of day based on care plans. Such programs don’t focus on sobriety, experts say, but rather on improving participants’ overall health while decreasing hospital stays and calls to police. But the city’s efforts came under scrutiny this week, after the chair of the board of a local non-profit that pushes abstinence shared posts on social media accusing the city of wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on a program that gives booze to homeless people struggling with alcohol addiction. Adam Nathan, the CEO of an AI company and chair of the Salvation Army San Francisco’s advisory board, said on X that “providing free drugs to drug addicts doesn’t solve their problems. It just stretches them out. Where’s the recovery in all of this?” The social media skirmish was the latest flare-up in an increasingly tense debate about San Francisco’s use of harm reduction, which focuses on cutting negative health effects of alcohol and drug use rather than requiring people to stop using. As homelessness and overdose deaths have continued to plague the city, critics have excoriated San Francisco’s attempts at harm reduction, saying they only enable addiction and despair. Abstinence groups such as the Salvation Army have ridiculed the city for spending public funds on initiatives that provide drug users with overdose-reversing drugs, clean needles and foil for methamphetamine and fentanyl consumption. Even Mayor London Breed in February said that harm reduction was “not reducing the harm” but “making things far worse.” That stance puts her at odds with her own public health department, which staunchly stands by harm reduction as an integral part of the agency’s system of care. Breed recently tried to open abstinence-only housing for formerly homeless people near Chinatown but scrapped the proposal amid neighbourhood backlash. “Are we just going to manage people’s addictions with our taxpayer dollars in perpetuity forever? It seems like that’s basically what we’re saying,” said Tom Wolf, who is in recovery for heroin addiction. “I think we should be spending that money on detox and recovery.” But Shannon Smith-Bernardin, a professor at the UCSF School of Nursing who helped create the managed alcohol programs in San Francisco and Alameda County, explained that the goal is to stabilize participants’ alcohol use “so they’re not binge drinking or stopping drinking and having seizures and then … start figuring out what’s next.” The program also offers participants medications and therapy to reduce alcohol cravings. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Cancer ‘is our new Covid’5/6/2024 American drug manufacturer Pfizer has its sights set on the cancer treatment market now that the Covid-19 pandemic is over and global demand for its vaccines and Covid-19 drugs is falling, CEO Albert Bourla told Fox Business on May 1.
The company expects to score big on “blockbuster” cancer drugs, Bourla said, as the pharma giant seeks to reverse its post-Covid business decline. The pandemic brought record revenue to the company. In 2022 alone, Pfizer’s total sales amounted to $157 billion, with its Covid vaccine accounting for $37.8 billion and its antiviral treatment pill, Paxlovid, bringing in another $18.9 billion. In 2023, sales were down by more than half and accounted for $71 billion. The company’s shares have also fallen by 42% since the end of 2022, amid the rapid decline in demand for its Covid-related products. This forced it to launch a major cost-cutting campaign, including hundreds of layoffs at its UK, US, and Irish facilities. In his interview with Fox Business, Bourla praised the measures as a “very good cost containment” campaign, crediting it for the “very good results” his company showed in early 2024. Pfizer is also on the verge of striking gold again with its new strategy, he said. “Oncology, it is our new Covid,” the Pfizer CEO said. “We did what we did with Covid. We are very proud to have saved the world but it is behind us now. We want to do [it] once more and I think oncology is our best chance to do it.” In late 2023, the US drug manufacturer completed a $43 billion acquisition of Seagen (formerly, Seattle Genetics, Inc.) – a biotechnology company specializing in monoclonal antibody-based drugs, also known as antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs. They are designed to kill tumor cells while leaving healthy tissues relatively unaffected. Seagen was previously known for its flagship product Adcetris, which is used to treat lymphoma and Hodgkin's lymphoma. According to drugs.com, the medicine costs around $11.910 for a 50-mg dose. Another drug in the company’s portfolio that demonstrated “phenomenal performance” in Pfizer’s hands was Padcev, according to Bourla. Padcev is used to treat bladder cancer, and its sales “had a growth of 164%” since the US pharma giant got its hands on the drug, he said. The average price for Padcev is $4,446 per 30-mg dose, according to drugs.com. “That demonstrates how well we’ve invested the money,” Bourla said, commenting on Padcev’s performance. He also promised blockbuster drugs in the future that “will have a significant impact on cancer patients.” Pfizer announced its shift toward cancer treatment in late 2023. “Nothing scares people all over the world more than cancer, because it affects everyone,” Bourla said at the time. “I hope we will be successful in our mission. I am optimistic that in the next 10 years, we will see significant advancement,” he added. In January 2024, the company said it plans to have at least eight blockbuster cancer treatment drugs by 2030 and double the number of patients treated with its innovative medicines, up from 2.3 million in 2023. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has for the first time admitted that its Covid-19 vaccine could cause a rare side effect that could lead to blood clots and death, according to court documents.
The company is fighting a class action lawsuit alleging that its inoculation, which was developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford, can result in death and serious injury. The legal battle was initiated by Jamie Scott, a father of two, who suffered a blood clot that left him with brain damage after he was inoculated in April 2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. He is seeking compensation over claims that the AstraZeneca vaccine is “defective” and less safe than expected, an allegation the company denies. In May 2023, AstraZeneca also insisted that “we do not accept that TTS [Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome] is caused by the vaccine at a generic level,” as quoted by The Daily Telegraph. TTS is a rare condition, in which a person has blood clots, which could reduce the blood flow, combined with a low platelet count, which could prompt difficulties in stopping the bleeding. TTS symptoms include severe headaches and abdominal pain. Despite previous denials, AstraZeneca said in court documents, which were submitted to the UK High Court in February but received media attention only recently, that “it is admitted that the AZ vaccine can, in very rare cases, cause TTS. The causal mechanism is not known.” “Further, TTS can also occur in the absence of the AZ vaccine (or any vaccine),” the company added, as quoted by the Telegraph. At the same time, AstraZeneca insists the available data shows the drug has “an acceptable safety profile,” and that “regulators around the world consistently state that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks of extremely rare potential side effects.” Dozens of Western countries suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in the spring of 2021 over fears it may have caused some patients to develop blood clots. At the time, the head of the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) vaccines strategy, Marco Cavaleri, said that there was an evident link between AZ vaccine intake and blood clots in the brain, but maintained that the benefits still outweighed the risks. According to World Health Organization data, the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine has an efficacy of 72%. As of April 2021, over 17 million people had received the jab in the EU and the UK, with just under 40 cases of thrombosis, according to the company. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Particles of bird flu have been found in samples of consumer milk in the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a report on Tuesday, revealing the extent of the outbreak of the H5N1 strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI).
The virus has previously been detected in raw milk, the agency wrote, adding that while “pasteurization is likely to inactivate the virus,” the process is not expected to fully remove the presence of viral particles. The FDA national survey further discovered traces of bird flu in “milk from affected animals, in the processing system, and on the shelves.” “To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the agency claimed, insisting that if the testing process finds “genetic material” from the virus, this “does not mean that the sample contains an intact, infectious pathogen.” While the FDA insists there is no real concern about the safety of pasteurized dairy products, other agencies said the produce from sick cows shouldn’t be on the shelves. “Only milk from healthy animals is authorized for distribution into interstate commerce for human consumption,” the National Milk Producers Federation wrote on its website. Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has revealed that bird flu has been found in 33 herds of dairy cows in eight states as of Monday. Although Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza has been going around for more than 20 years, its spread to bovine livestock is of substantial concern, the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday. The concern “is that it’s showing up in a lot more samples, meaning the infection is more widespread in dairy herds than we thought,” a US public health official told the paper on the condition of anonymity. Both the USDA and the FDA have urged consumers to avoid drinking raw milk as the situation evolves. Further results are expected in the coming days and weeks, authorities said. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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