(This story has been posted on The Wall Street Journal Online's
Health Blog at http://blogs.wsj.com/health.)
By Katherine Hobson
Planning Access: Federal officials are working on a draft plan
that would allow the public to access limited versions of two
studies on a deadly strain of H5N1, or bird flu, while permitting
qualified scientists to access the full data, the WSJ reports.
Still, it's not clear who would determine access levels, the paper
says. The government earlier this week asked researchers and
scientific journals to hold back some information on the
experiments with lab-created mutations to the virus on fears the
data could be used to perpetrate bioterrorism.
Bird Slaughter: In other avian flu news, more than 19,000 birds,
mostly chickens, were slaughtered by the government in Hong Kong
after the H5N1 virus was detected in a dead chicken in a wholesale
market, Bloomberg News reports. Workers and others are being tested
for the virus, but so far there is no sign of human infection, BN
says.
Agreement Reached: Ranbaxy Laboratories, a unit of Japan's
Daiichi Sankyo, said it has settled its manufacturing issues with
the FDA via a consent decree, the WSJ reports. The company was
banned in 2008 from importing more than 30 generic drugs because of
problems at two of its plants in India, the WSJ says. Ranbaxy will
also put aside $500 million to address potential criminal and civil
liability from a Justice Department probe, the company said.
Implant Anxiety: Women in France, the U.K. and other countries
who received breast implants made by France's Poly Implant Proth
(PIP) are anxious now that the implants containing "substandard
silicone" have been rupturing at "unusually high rates," the New
York Times reports. The French government will soon decide whether
women in that country with the implants should have them removed.
The implants don't seem to have been used in the U.S., the NYT
says.
Image: iStockphoto
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