Month: July 2014

(Reuters) – Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the expanded use of its eye drug Eylea for the treatment of diabetic macular edema. Eylea is already approved in the United States to treat wet age-related macular edema — the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, and for treatment of macular edema following central retinal vein occlusion. The injectable drug has been steadily grabbing market share from Roche AG’s Lucentis since its launch in late 2011.

By Fiona Ortiz CHICAGO (Reuters) – The Minnesota wife of a Liberian-American man who died last week in Nigeria from the Ebola virus said on Tuesday she wants to use his memory to spur efforts to fight the disease, which has also infected two U.S. relief workers in Liberia. Decontee Sawyer, a 34-year-old counselor for sexual assault victims and mother of three small girls, said Minneapolis' large and tight-knit Liberian community has woken up to the problem of Ebola after her husband's death. Patrick Sawyer, 40, who died on Friday in Lagos, was the first recorded case of Ebola in Nigeria. "We want to encourage all Liberians and friends of Liberians to donate money or protective gear and send it to these groups that are already at the forefront in fighting Ebola," Sawyer told Reuters in a telephone interview.

By Courtney Sherwood PORTLAND Ore. (Reuters) – Tests of water off the U.S. West Coast have found no signs of radiation from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, although low levels of radiation are ultimately expected to reach the U.S. shore, scientists said on Tuesday. Results obtained this week in tests of water gathered by an Oregon conservation group and tested by East Coast scientists came in as expected with no Fukushima-linked radiation, and five more tests are planned at six-month intervals to see if radiation levels will climb. “We’ve seen radiation halfway across the Pacific, north of Hawaii, but in U.S. waters there has been none, yet,” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution senior scientist Ken Buesseler said. Tests of some fish species, which can race across the ocean more quickly than slow-moving currents, have shown higher levels of radiation, although radiation levels in sea life off the U.S. shore are still safe, Buesseler said.

An American doctor who has contracted the dangerous Ebola virus in Liberia is "weak and quite ill," a colleague of his told AFP on Tuesday. Kent Brantly, 33, became infected with Ebola while working with patients in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, as he helped treat victims of the worst Ebola outbreak in history. Brantly and another American healthcare worker are among the more than 1,200 people who have become infected with Ebola in West Africa since March. He is still in the early stages of the Ebola infection but having some daily struggles," David Mcray, a family medicine doctor in Fort Worth, Texas, told AFP by phone.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The price is sky-high, but so is demand. A new $1,000-per-pill drug has become the treatment of choice for Americans with hepatitis C, a liver-wasting disease that affects more than 3 million.

By Mary Wisniewski CHICAGO (Reuters) – The NCAA has agreed to settle a head injury lawsuit by providing $70 million for concussion testing and diagnosis of student athletes in a move to change the way colleges address sports safety, according to court documents filed on Tuesday. The class-action agreement, if approved by a federal judge and class members, would apply to student athletes in all sports who played at schools regulated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at any time in the past and up to 50 years into the future. The proposed NCAA settlement comes about three weeks after a federal judge’s preliminary approval of an open-ended settlement between the National Football League and thousands of former players. While the money in the NFL settlement was intended to resolve all of the personal injury claims for the plaintiffs’ out of pocket damages, Tuesday’s proposed NCAA settlement was designed to pay only for research and a medical monitoring program.