SUMMARY: Sunday marked World Tuberculosis Day. While T.B. doesn’t attract the same attention as influenza, malaria, or Ebola, it recently surpassed HIV/AIDS to become the globe's leading infectious killer. In 2018, there were more than 10 million new cases. There hadn’t been a treatment breakthrough for 40 years, but the tide is starting to turn. Hari Sreenivasan shares a story of hope from South Africa.
SUMMARY: Inside the search for new drugs and techniques to replace habit-forming opioids, science correspondent Miles O'Brien discovers future pain treatments may rely on virtual reality.
SUMMARY: In northeastern Ohio, employers say they see jobseekers all the time who look like "the walking dead," would-be workers struggling with opioid addiction. The problem is so great, reports economics correspondent Paul Solman, that it's had a noticeable effect on the nation's labor force.
SUMMARY: They visit overdose victims in the hospital. They hand out lifesaving drugs on the streets and educate their peers about their own relapses. In Rhode Island, former drug addicts are the most valuable fighters on the front lines of the war against opioids. William Brangham reports as part of our series, “America Addicted.”
SUMMARY: Keeping up appearances as a family hid the denial and shame Anita Devlin felt as her son struggled with an addiction to opioid painkillers. But when she finally shared their experience, it opened the door to healing and recovery. Devlin, author of "S.O.B.E.R." about her son Mike's addiction and road to recovery with Caron Treatment Centers, shares her humble opinion about banishing judgment and reaching out to others.
SUMMARY: Each year, superbugs -- viral bacterial infections resistant to common antibiotics -- infect more than two million Americans, killing at least 38,000. As the list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria grows, so have the extraordinary efforts to prevent the spread of infection from patient to patient. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien and economics correspondent Paul Solman team up for a report.
SUMMARY: As current antibiotics begin to lose their punch, there's an economic reality putting a damper on development. Since every use of an antibiotic drives resistance, and doctors are reluctant to use a drug until there's no alternative, why would a drug company spend a fortune? Economics correspondent Paul Solman and science correspondent Miles O'Brien continue their look at the hunt for new drugs.
SUMMARY: As drug-resistant infections proliferate, financial barriers are preventing the pharmaceutical industry from investing in new drugs to fight off superbugs. Economics correspondent Paul Solman, in a series of reports with science correspondent Miles O'Brien, explores how researchers could be incentivized to develop new antibiotics.
SUMMARY: On World AIDS Day, we take a look at efforts being made to improve prevention and treatment of the virus. While encouraging advancements have been achieved, AIDS is still the number one killer of women ages 18 to 55. William Brangham speaks with Jon Cohen of Science magazine about recent developments, why adolescents present a particular challenge and securing global funding to fight the disease.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Today is World AIDS Day. While the death toll from AIDS has dropped dramatically, the virus still claims over a million people every year, and nearly 40 million remain infected.
William Brangham has an update.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): With the growing use of medications to treat and prevent the spread of HIV, some say ending the AIDS epidemic is actually within reach. But AIDS is still the number one killer of reproductive-age women, and in many places, those lifesaving drugs are barely available.
Scientists are also seeking a vaccine. A new trial is under way right now in South Africa. But many remain skeptical.
I'm joined now by Science magazine's Jon Cohen, who's covered this epidemic for nearly 30 years and was a collaborator with us on our recent series about HIV and AIDS.
Jon Cohen, welcome back to the NewsHour.
Let's start off by talking about this vaccine trial in South Africa. As you well know, you wrote a book about the hunt for an HIV vaccine. What is happening in South Africa right now? Is this as promising as some think it is?
JON COHEN, “Science” magazine: Well, the AIDS vaccine is the Holy Grail.
People can come in, get a few shots, be protected for life. That's the dream. In Thailand in 2009, it was revealed that a vaccine being studied there protected people with about a 31 percent reduction in risk.
That's not very good. That's extremely low, but it was something. It was the first glimmer of hope. The vaccine trial in South Africa is building off that Thai trial. The results from the Thai trial were extremely controversial. There are people who wonder why that vaccine strategy has moved forward in South Africa, and there are South Africans who argue very strongly that this is a great hope for them, and even if they get some protection, in addition to other protective measures, it could make a big difference.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: OK. Now let's talk a little bit more broadly
Where are the successes currently in the fight against HIV? And where are those happening?
JON COHEN: Well, clearly, preventing mother-to-child transmission has been a huge success all around the world. It's one of the easiest things to do in terms of prevention.
And some countries like South Africa have reduced it to below 2 percent of pregnant women who are infected passing on the virus. That's a great success. Treatment now has scaled up from basically being zero in poor countries around the world in the year 2000 to 18.2 million of the 36.7 million infected people. Phenomenal success story.
People who are treated and stay on treatment fully suppress the virus and they rarely transmit to others. So that is leading to hope that epidemics can stop petering out.
SUMMARY: A medical procedure used to diagnose damage from brain injuries may also help some autistic patients make connections and understand emotions they’ve never experienced. Author John Robison underwent that experimental therapy, detailed in a new memoir, “Switched On.” Hari Sreenivasan talks with Robison about his experience.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): In the latest NewsHour Bookshelf conversation, a look into a potential new treatment for autism.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, can be used to diagnose damage from brain injuries and disorders. But a new study investigates whether the therapy can help some autistic patients make connections and understand emotions they have never experienced.
I recently spoke with one such patient.
John Robison, thanks so much for joining us.
So, first, let’s start with, what is transcranial magnetic stimulation, and why did you decide to participate in this research?
JOHN ELDER ROBISON, Author, “Switched On”: It’s a therapy where they use focused bursts of electromagnetic energy to transmit tiny amounts of electricity through the scalp and through the skull, and into your brain.
Your brain’s an electrical organ, so if you want to change how it functions, you can change it most directly with targeted electricity. When I heard that there was a study that might help autistic people like me see emotional cues in other people, the idea of it just spoke to the heart of something that I felt had been a disability in me all my life, being unable to read body language and expressions and cues in other people.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, you describe this. I want to quote a paragraph.
It says: “Imagine that, all your life, you have seen the world in black and white. Meanwhile, everyone around you describes the beauty and richness of color. After a while, their talk of color frustrates you. Which do you believe, their words or the evidence before your eyes?”
So did you get a glimpse of color?
JOHN ELDER ROBISON: Absolutely.
That’s really the transformative thing about this. You can be an intelligent adult, and all your life, you hear about color, and yet eventually you start getting angry because the evidence in your eyes is gray.
And then imagine the doctor does something and they turn on color for half-an-hour. And even if color goes away, for the rest of your life, you’re going to know it’s real. And that’s kind of how it is for me. They stimulated me, and it was a temporary thing.
The effects lasted for some months, I would say. Some of them faded away quickly, some longer. And that built an ability that’s in me today based on that real experience. And it’s something words and teaching and talk could never have achieved.
SUMMARY: Sean Parker made his fortune as the co-founder of Napster and first president of Facebook. Now, the tech entrepreneur and billionaire hopes to change medicine by creating a new kind of research network. Parker gave out a $250 million grant Wednesday to six of the nation’s leading medical schools and cancer centers to fund collaborative immunotherapy research. Parker joins Judy Woodruff for more.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A young tech magnate places a big bet on a different approach to fighting cancer.
Sean Parker made a name for himself as the co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook. The billionaire is still actively involved in the start-up world, but he’s now dedicated a significant part of his fortune to medicine and fighting disease.
Today, he announced a major initiative, a $250 million grant to help fund research and collaboration in immunotherapy among six of the country’s leading medical schools and cancer centers. It’s the largest gift ever of its kind.
And he joins me now from Los Angeles.
Sean Parker, welcome.
So where does this passion, the drive to do something about cancer come from?
SEAN PARKER, Founder, Parker Inst. for Cancer Immunotherapy: Well, we have all had our own personal experience with cancer.
Virtually no one is untouched by cancer, whether they have had the disease themselves, one of their loved ones has had it, one of their friends. You know, half of all men and a third of all women will have cancer in their lifetime.
And what’s — what is especially frustrating is, despite all of these advances in genomics and understanding of the drivers behind cancer, progress over the last 20 years just hasn’t been fast enough. And, as somebody who has spent his life as an entrepreneur trying to pursue kind of rapid, disruptive changes, I’m impatient.
And I think — I think that patients and their families and doctors are impatient as well. And as I began to look at this problem more closely, it was clear that we needed both new technology platforms, like immunotherapy, but we also need to figure out how to collaborate and cooperate better within the world of academic science in order to really solve the problem.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You’re zeroing this money in on immunotherapy. Why?
SEAN PARKER: So, immunotherapy is an incredibly promising technology.
It has a very long history going back 100 years. In fact, it was believed at one point that cancer was caused by an insufficiency of the immune system. Turned out that wasn’t entirely false. Cancer is kept in check in the early stages by the immune system. The immune system is also an incredibly powerful weapon. It’s really good at recognizing cells that have mutations, our cells that are different, look different.
And so it makes perfect sense that we should be able to harness the power of the immune system, which works with your own body, in order to target cancer and destroy it.
SUMMARY: What looks like an ordinary greenhouse is actually an around-the-clock Ebola vaccine factory. At a facility in Kentucky, plants are being injected with a protein in order to spur them into producing one of the three antibodies used in the experimental drug ZMapp. Special correspondent Mary Jo Brooks reports on how bio-pharming is helping to ramp up the speed of drug production to fight the disease.
MARY JO BROOKS (NewsHour): It looks like an ordinary greenhouse filled with plants basking under light, but at this facility just outside Owensboro, Kentucky, the plants themselves have become a labor force, working around the clock to manufacture a cure for Ebola.
HUGH HAYDON, CEO, Kentucky Bioprocessing: These plants are 27 days old.
MARY JO BROOKS: Three days earlier, these plants were injected with a genetic blueprint for one of three antibodies used in the experimental drug ZMapp.
Hugh Haydon of Kentucky Bioprocessing explains how it works.
HUGH HAYDON: The plant recognizes that gene and its machinery turns on and it starts to manufacture that protein for us. And it’s really that simple. It becomes a little bitty factory.
MARY JO BROOKS: ZMapp was still in the developmental stage when Ebola first broke out in West Africa in March of 2014. The disease has since claimed more than 10,000 victims. But a handful of people were successfully tweeted with ZMapp, including Dr. Kent Brantly.
DR. KENT BRANTLY, Ebola Survivor: Today is a miraculous day. I am thrilled to be alive, to be well, and to be reunited with my family.
MARY JO BROOKS: Since then, the drug has being undergoing clinical trials in West Africa and the FDA has granted it fast-track approval status.
Larry Zeitlin and Kevin Whaley are the scientists from San Diego (1) who developed the ZMapp antibodies, which were designed to quickly attack the Ebola virus.
SUMMARY: A new study has found that women who received lumpectomies and mastectomies for very early stage breast cancer had similar survival rates to those who had less radical treatments. Dr. Steven Narod of the Women's College Research Institute and Dr. Monica Morrow of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center discuss the findings with Judy Woodruff.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): There was other big news today related to cancer.
A study published in “The Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology” found that women given lumpectomies and mastectomies as treatment for very early-stage breast cancer had similar survival rates to those patients who had less radical cancer treatments. Those findings may call into question some of the standard assumptions on how to treat the disease.
For a closer look at the study and its potential implications, we turn to two cancer specialists. Dr. Steven Narod is a researcher at the Women’s College Research Institute in Toronto. He was the study’s lead author. And Dr. Monica Morrow is chief breast cancer surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Dr. Morrow, Dr. Narod, welcome to you both.
I’m going to start with you, Dr. Narod.
On this study, we did read that it’s the most extensive collection of data ever analyzed on this particular type of cancer. Boil down the findings for us.
DR. STEVEN NAROD, Women’s College Research Institute: We focused on 100,000 women with the earliest form of cancer. Some say it’s not even cancer. It’s a precursor lesion. We call it DCIS, or ductal carcinoma in situ.
So, this, because it’s a very good prognosis, we followed the 100,000 women for up to 20 years and we found that, at 20 years, about 3 percent of them had died of breast cancer. Roughly a third of the patients were treated with lumpectomy alone, which is removing the DCIS, the focus of cancer. One-third of the patients, probably, had a lumpectomy plus radiotherapy, and one-third of the patients approximately had the entire breast removed through mastectomy.
And what we found, that there was no difference in the survival at 20 years between women treated with any of the three ways.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What is the — you said one-third, one-third, one-third. What do these findings tell you that the treatment should be?
DR. STEVEN NAROD: Well, it tells us about — something about the early stages of breast cancer.
The reason I say that is because, of those 3 percent of the women who died of breast cancer, most of them, 54 percent of them, between the time they had DCIS and the time they had a distant recurrence or a metastatic disease, never experienced another breast — cancer in the breast.
SUMMARY: Dr. Kent Brantly contracted Ebola while treating patients during last year's epidemic in West Africa. He was airlifted from Liberia back to the U.S. and received an experimental drug and other treatment at Emory University Hospital. Brantly joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his experience, faith and new book, "Called for Life.”
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, the medical doctor who was airlifted from Liberia to the U.S. one year ago this month after he contracted Ebola while treating patients in West Africa.
Kent Brantly and a medical missionary colleague, Nancy Writebol, who was also infected, were treated with the experimental drug ZMapp at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Both eventually recovered.
Now Dr. Brantly and his wife, Amber, have written a book about the experience. He recently sat down with Hari Sreenivasan in our New York studio.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): So, it’s almost exactly a year ago, after you quarantined yourself. You have got all the symptoms. You have got the vomiting, the diarrhea, the bloodshot eyes, things that you have been seeing in patients and treating. And, for the most part, those patients have been dying. What’s going through your head?
DR. KENT BRANTLY, Author, “Called for Life”: Before I received my diagnosis, the main symptoms I had were fever, fatigue, body aches and diarrhea.
When the diarrhea started, that was more mounting evidence that this really is probably Ebola. But I held on to that hope that it was something else until we had the definitive test result.
HARI SREENIVASAN: You were the first human to get ZMapp. Before that, I think it’s been a dozen, maybe 18 monkeys had got it. What went through your mind in making that decision to say either yourself or your colleague at the time Nancy should take this?
DR. KENT BRANTLY: Nancy and I actually talked on the phone. I remember she called me and said, after we had the kind of informed consent discussion with the doctor that was in charge of our care, she said, “Kent, what are you going to do? Because I’ll probably do whatever you do.”
And I said, “I think I would be willing to receive it.”
But it was — you know, I thought, otherwise, I’m probably going to otherwise, and this may or may not help, but at least I could be a guinea pig and let the world know whether there is any benefit to it or not.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Once you get this special air ambulance that is arranged, the State Department, lots of people working to try to make this happen, it’s a bit cloak and dagger. You’re literally taken to the airport at night. There’s — before this, there are countries that don’t even want you flying over their airspace.
DR. KENT BRANTLY: It did seem like something from a movie.
Duke University scientists have potentially discovered new avenues for Alzheimer's and dementia treatments.
They observed that in Alzheimer’s, immune cells that normally protect the brain instead begin to consume a vital nutrient called arginine.
By blocking this process with a drug, they were able to prevent the formation of ‘plaques’ in the brain that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, and also halted memory loss in the mice.
What's more is that they were researching with a drug that has already begun human trials for cancer treatments—possibly paving the way for clinical trials in the near future.
While no technique that is tested in an animal can be guaranteed to work the same way in humans, the findings are particularly encouraging because, until now, the exact role of the immune system and arginine in Alzheimer’s was completely unknown.
The drug that was used to block the body’s immune response to arginine – known as difluoromethylornithine (DFMO) – is already being investigated in drug trials for certain types of cancer and may be suitable for testing as a potential Alzheimer’s therapy.
This follows on the heels of other recent breakthroughs in possible "plaque fighting" techniques for Alzheimer's patients.
SUMMARY: At the University of Pennsylvania, a research team has been working on an experimental treatment to kill leukemia with a patient's own immune system cells. So far, the results have shown startling success. Special correspondent Jackie Judd reports on the growing research on immunotherapy in fighting cancer.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to a promising medical story in the continuing fight against cancer. It’s about a big change in the world of oncology.
These days, there’s growing interest, better results and more pharmaceutical dollars to develop immunotherapy, or using one’s immune system to attack cancer cells. It’s been a long road to get to this point. For decades, researchers have tried to find a way to make this kind of treatment work for patients. And now oncologists believe they are turning a corner.
Special correspondent Jackie Judd has our report about one intriguing approach in Philadelphia.
JACKIE JUDD (NewsHour): This is your first look?
DR. CARL JUNE, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania: Yes, it is.
JACKIE JUDD: If buildings tell a story, the story here is one of progress. Dr. Carl June leads the team responsible for a promising trial in which the body’s immune system is turned into a cancer-fighting weapon.
He and a once-small group of researchers began work in a closet-sized space, but soon will have two floors of what will be a state-of-the-art building at the University of Pennsylvania.
And this will be the largest group of people working on immunotherapy in an institution?
DR. CARL JUNE: Oh, yes, we think by far it’s the largest group in the world.
JACKIE JUDD: Here is why. Since 2010, a group of children and adults suffering from leukemia and running out of treatment options have been in an experimental trial in which their immune system cells were genetically modified to kill cancer. It is an approach other institutions are pursuing as well. The first results at Penn startled even Dr. June.
SUMMARY: A combination of luck, hereditary and lifestyle choices have all been linked to cause cancer. But a new study finds that luck, or random DNA mutation during cell division, is the primary factor behind more cancers than previously thought. Jeffrey Brown speaks with Cristian Tomasetti of Johns Hopkins University about why this news supports healthy lifestyle choices more than ever, and how doctors and patients can use the study to protect against cancer.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): According to a new study from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published today in the journal “Science,” more cases of cancer than have commonly been thought can be primarily explained by random DNA mutations that occur during cell division, rather than by heredity, lifestyle choices, or environmental influences.
The study looked at 31 types of cancer, including leukemia, bone, testicular, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers. Breast and prostate cancers were not included in the study.
Cristian Tomasetti is one of the authors of the report and a biomathematician at Johns Hopkins. He joins me now from Baltimore.
Well, thank you for joining us.
It seems important, first, perhaps, to explain what you were looking at. What does bad luck or chance mean when it comes to getting cancer?
CRISTIAN TOMASETTI, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: Yes, what it means is that every time a cell, in particular a stem cell, the lonely stem cells, every time it divides, a random mutation can occur and can hit the DNA of this cell.
And if that mutation happens to be in a gene that is the key regulator and known to be associated with cancer, so let’s say a bad mutation, that may lead us to cancer. So that’s what we meant for bad luck.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Tonight, the “NewsHour” begins a new series on invention and innovation called Breakthroughs.
Over the coming months, we will explore the economic and social change invention generates both here and abroad, highlighting the passion of the inventors and the people who benefit from their creations.
The "NewsHour‘s" Cat Wise has our first report, which looks at a new device to stop uncontrolled bleeding on the battlefield and that may one day save the lives of civilians.
A warning: Some of the images may be disturbing to some viewers.
NARRATOR: The fight for terrain is up forward. Back here is the fight to save life.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): Throughout the history of war, from battles long ago to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, medics on the front lines have had one main goal, keep the injured alive until they can be safely evacuated to a treatment center.
While those killed in action since the beginning of the Iraq war are almost 90 percent fewer than during the Vietnam War, due in part to better medic training and faster evacuations, one of the biggest challenges medics still face is uncontrolled bleeding. It is the leading cause of preventable battlefield deaths.
And while tourniquets can be applied to certain extremity wounds, some areas of the body, like the armpit and pelvis, are difficult to compress. For those wounds, military medics have had to rely on a very simple tool.
JOHN STEINBAUGH, RevMedx: For centuries, everybody’s used gauze to stop bleeding. Back to the earliest times, you pack material into a wound, and attempt to put pressure on it.
CAT WISE: John Steinbaugh is a former Special Forces medic who served for more than twenty years in the Army. He was on the front lines in Iraq when calls for better equipment started going up the chain of command.
JOHN STEINBAUGH: Back in 2006-2007, at the height of the war, medics were getting fed up with the standard gauze. And we started seeing wounds that were much worse than what we were seeing at the beginning of the war. Medics were having more difficulties stopping the bleeding.
And the way the medics described the device they wanted was fix-a- flat. So if you think of your tire, you inject the fix-a-flat into your tire, it finds the escaping air, it plugs it, and done.
CAT WISE: So, Steinbaugh and a team of experts from the military and private sector got to work. Early ideas like inserting foam or gel into the wounds didn’t sufficiently stop the bleeding, but soon they stumbled on something that did work.
JOHN STEINBAUGH: We literally went to Williams-Sonoma, brought compressed sponges out of a kitchen store, loaded them in homemade syringes that we made, and put them in a model, and they expanded and worked.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Next, trying to better understand what’s happening in the brain of a fruit fly, a dragonfly, or a zebra fish, all part of a larger puzzle to learn more about how our own brains work.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien has the first in our three-part series on the science of the brain.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the Basic Research Facility scientist consider nirvana. You might see a Nobel Prize in the making or you might be subjected to this, the fruit fly version of a scary movie, the rapidly growing shadow of a predator homing in for the kill.
GWYNETH CARD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Janelia Farm Research Campus: My lab is really interested in how flies make decisions.
MILES O’BRIEN: Neuroscientist Gwyneth Card runs a laboratory at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Janelia Farm Research Campus near Washington, D.C. She films fruit flies at 6,000 frames per second to better see what they do and eventually she hopes understand how their brains issue commands and their bodies turn that into lifesaving action.
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| Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Janelia Farm Research Campus |
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It was in March of last year that doctors thought they might have made a breakthrough in the goal of finding a cure for AIDS, treating a baby girl in Mississippi with early and unusually aggressive drug therapy.
The mother had HIV and had not been treated during pregnancy. But the girl was treated within 30 hours of her birth and was free of the virus for two years. Doctors allowed her to stay off therapy and, still, there were no signs of HIV returning.
But, yesterday, officials announced that the girl, now almost 4, had tested positive for HIV during a follow-up visit last week.
Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases joins me now.
And welcome back to you.
This is something that you and I talked about when the news came out last year. So, remind us first why this seemed so hopeful, how this early and aggressive treatment promised such a difference.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): People have been warned for years about the dangers of eating too many saturated fats and the risks they pose for heart disease.
But a new analysis of more than 70 studies finds that saturated fats do not necessarily lead to greater problems with heart health. The research, published in “The Annals of Internal Medicine,” also found no real benefit from taking omega-3 fatty acid supplements, like fish oil.
Cathal Armstrong is a chef and co-owner of the restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s long been focused on these issues in his work and in cooking, and he joins me now.
Welcome to the program.
CATHAL ARMSTRONG, Chef/Restauranteur: Thanks for having me. Alright.
JUDY WOODRUFF: This was a medical study. And, you know, we might normally talk to a scientist, but we want to talk to somebody who works with food, thinks about food issues every day.
So, first of all, were you surprised that the result was that saturated fats may not necessarily be bad for your heart?
CATHAL ARMSTRONG: No, I wasn’t surprised at all.
I mean, we have known for years that animal fats are actually good for you. And, you know, being involved in the food industry and what we do, it always boggles my mind when you hear these people come up with this idea that this area of food is bad for you or this area of food is bad for you, you shouldn’t be eating carbs, you shouldn’t be eating fats, you shouldn’t be eating this.
And to brush things with broad strokes like that generally is not going to be accurate. Food is a much more complicated, much more complex thing than that. And a perfect example of it is orange juice. For years, everybody was telling you that they should drink orange juice. And then, all of a sudden, it turns out that orange juice is nothing but sugar.
Because the complexity of the orange, we’re missing out on the benefits.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): Earlier this week, 10 big drug companies that rarely share their secrets agreed to work together with the National Institutes of Health. Their goal: finding cures for a number of major diseases including diabetes and Alzheimer’s. The project will last five years, cost $230 million and at the end, all the findings will be free for anyone to use.
Here to help us understand it all is Monica Langley from The Wall Street Journal. So has anything ever been tried on this scale before? I mean these are arch rivals?
MONICA LANGLEY, The Wall Street Journal: Nothing has been tried on this scale, with this many diseases and with this amount of collaboration. And the biggest revelation of all is that they are going to put all their discoveries out to the public so that the biggest pharmaceutical companies or the littlest startup will have access to any discovery. It can go compete to try to find a cure for any of these diseases.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The battle against AIDS, which began in the early 1980s and has succeeded in finding treatments to control the disease, is increasingly turning to a different phase: the hunt for a real and complete cure.
Special correspondent Spencer Michels has our story.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): Fifty-seven-year-old Matt Sharp, who has had AIDS for 25 years, takes a mix of antiretroviral drugs each day to reduce his HIV levels and keep him alive.
Sharp, a former ballet dancer, says the medication has shortened his life, and makes him more susceptible to other ailments, like heart disease earlier than normal.
MATT SHARP: I’m faced with issues around growing older earlier because of having HIV for so long. I have been taking pills for over 25 years. I’m ready for a point where I can do something that my body can control the virus on its own.
SPENCER MICHELS: Sharp has volunteered for studies now under way that, if successful, could eliminate the need for a lifetime of powerful pills.
Scientists and medical doctors are working both in the lab and in clinical settings to find out more about HIV, especially where it lurks, and to find out how patients will respond to experimental treatments. The idea, of course, is to completely eradicate the HIV.
Executives at the British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline were warned nearly two years ago about critical problems with the way the company conducted research at its drug development center in China, exposing it to potential financial risk and regulatory action, an internal audit found.
The confidential document from November 2011, obtained by The New York Times, suggests that Glaxo’s problems may go beyond the sales practices that are currently at the center of a bribery and corruption scandal in China. They may extend to its Shanghai research and development center, which develops neurology drugs for Glaxo.
The failings, some experts said, underscore the problems that can arise when major drug companies export their scientific development to emerging markets like China.
Since 2006, 13 of the top 20 global drug makers have set up research and development centers in China, according to a report by McKinsey & Company. “It’s cheaper to do research there,” said Eric G. Campbell, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. However, “I have absolutely no doubt that with cheaper research comes greater risk.”
Auditors found that researchers did not report the results of animal studies in a drug that was already being tested in humans, a breach that one medical ethicist described as a “mortal sin” in the world of drug research. They also concluded that workers at the research center did not properly monitor clinical trials and paid hospitals in ways that could be seen as bribery.
Last year, Glaxo said, a more favorable audit found the concerns had been addressed. But several outside experts said the problems outlined in the initial audit were grave and painted a picture of an organization that failed to keep tabs on a crucial research center as it expanded both in size and scope. And it indicates that the problems there were more extensive than were reported in June, when the company fired the head of research and development in China after discovering that an article he helped write in the journal Nature Medicine contained misrepresented data.
