$1,000 Pill For Hepatitis C Spurs Debate Over Drug Prices : Shots - Health News. Timothy Webb and other advocates protest the cost of HIV drugs manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Gilead outside an AIDS conference in Atlanta in March. Gilead is making a new hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi. John Amis/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation hide caption toggle caption John Amis/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation Timothy Webb and other advocates protest the cost of HIV drugs manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Gilead outside an AIDS conference in Atlanta in March.
Gilead is making a new hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi. John Amis/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation Federal regulators this month opened a new era in the treatment of a deadly liver virus that infects three to five times more people than HIV. The drug Sovaldi will cost $1,000 per pill. Hepatitis researchers call the drug a landmark in the treatment of this deadly infection. More than 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, and perhaps 170 million people have the disease worldwide.
Pills made from poop cure serious gut infections. Hold your nose and don't spit out your coffee: Doctors have found a way to put healthy people's poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections — a less yucky way to do "fecal transplants. " Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help. It's a gross topic but a serious problem. Half a million Americans get Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, infections each year, and about 14,000 die.
The germ causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea so bad it is often disabling. A very potent and pricey antibiotic can kill C-diff but also destroys good bacteria that live in the gut, leaving it more susceptible to future infections. Recently, studies have shown that fecal transplants — giving infected people stool from a healthy donor — can restore that balance. There even are YouTube videos on how to do a similar treatment at home via an enema. Dr. View gallery Dr. "There's no stool left — just stool bugs. Dr. "It lasted for two years. Dr. Dr.
AIDS / HIV. Vaccines. Flu drug 'shows promise' in overcoming resistance. 21 February 2013Last updated at 20:40 ET Resistance to the existing flu drugs is becoming an increasing problem A new type of flu drug that can stop resistant strains in their tracks shows promise, say US researchers. It permanently blocks a key enzyme on the surface of the flu virus, stopping it from spreading to other cells. In mice it was found to effective against strains which were resistant to the two flu antivirals currently on the market, the journal Science reported. The World Health Organization estimates that influenza affects three to five million people every year. Resistance to the existing flu drugs Relenza and Tamiflu is becoming an increasing problem, largely due to their overuse.
The more exposure the flu virus has to the drugs - and in some countries it is available as a preventive treatment before people even catch the infection - the more chance it has of working out how to evade their effects. 'Broken key' Synthetic molecule chokes TB growth. Coloured Scanning Electron Micrograph/EYE OF SCIENCE/SPL Some strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes TB, have become resistant to most antibiotics — but researchers hope that a new synthetic molecule will be a more formidable weapon to fight them. A new drug candidate has shown promising signs in treating tuberculosis. The synthetic molecule is effective in mice and bears no similarity to existing TB drugs, many of which have become inadequate as drug-resistant bacterial strains have developed.
If it is shown to be safe and effective in humans, it could help to combat a disease that killed 1.4 million people in 2011. A team led by Kevin Pethe, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute Korea near Seoul, investigated more than 120,000 compounds over 5 years, infecting mouse immune cells called macrophages with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the bacterium that causes TB — and observing whether candidate compounds inhibited bacterial growth.