Safety

FDA Approves Human Hookworm Vaccine for Phase I Safety Trials

As any dedicated video game player knows, the first requireme...

Aloe vera coating may prolong freshness, safety of fruits and vegetables

gel is best known for its therapeutic effect on burned or irritated skin, but in the future you could be eating the gel as a healthful additive to your fruits and veggies. Researchers in Spain say they have developed a gel from the tropical plant that can be used as an edible coating to prolong the quality and safety of fresh produce. The gel, which does not appear to affect fo...

Feds give researchers ok for safety test of adult stem cells in patients with heart disease

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved plans to begin a study to evaluate the safety of using adult stem cells from bone marrow to treat chronic ischemia, a serious form of heart disease. The FDA has approved a Phase I study designed to test the safety of the...

Flesh-eating bacteria escape body's safety net

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered that so-called flesh-eating "Strep" bacteria use a specific enzyme to break free of the body's immune system, a finding which could potentially lead to new treatments for serious infections in human patients. The research, reported in the February 21, 2006 issue of the journal Current Biology,...

Magnetism and mimicry of nature hold hope for better medicine, environmental safety

Critical advances in medicine and environmental protection promise to emerge from a new method for biochemical analysis of fluids developed by an international science team led in part by Arizona State University researchers. Called "digital magnetofluidics," it promises more rapid, more accurate and less costly analyses of water and biological fluids ?blood, urine, saliva ?that require o...

How the US drug safety system should be changed

As Strom writes, "the net effect of [the current system] is that the public misunderstands drug safety, believing that a drug is safe at the time of marketing, while [adverse] events occurring as frequently as 1 in 1000 are predictably undetected." In the May 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Brian L. Strom, MD, MPH, Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medic...

Fake pesticides threaten food safety

More than one in 20 pesticides sold in the EU could be fake, potentially endangering food safety and human health, writes Cath O'Driscoll in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. These counterfeits range from sophisticated copies of patented products to low-quality fakes with little or no resemblance to the original. And it is a problem that is getting worse every year, accord...

Gene therapy study shows safety and statistically significant improvement in Parkinson's disease

The open label Phase 1 study, conducted in 12 patients with adv...