Month: August 2014

A health insurer with 5.2 million members in three Eastern U.S. states said on Saturday it would stop providing coverage for a procedure called laparoscopic power morcellation that is used in gynecological surgery and may inadvertently spread cancer. Highmark Inc, which has customers in Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia, will stop covering the procedure on Sept. 1, company spokesman Aaron Billger said in an email. It is the first insurer to halt coverage of power morcellation after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised doctors in April against it and is now considering its risks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

NEW YORK (AP) — Two American aid workers seriously ill with Ebola will be brought from West Africa to Atlanta for treatment in one of the most tightly sealed isolation units in the country, officials said Friday.

West Africa’s Ebola-hit nations have agreed to impose a cross-border isolation zone at the epicentre of the world’s worst-ever outbreak, amid warnings that the deadly epidemic is spiralling out of control. The announcement came at an emergency summit in the Guinean capital on Friday to discuss the outbreak, which has killed more than 700 people, with the World Health Organization warning Ebola could cause “catastrophic” loss of life and severe economic disruption if it continued to spread. “We have agreed to take important and extraordinary actions at the inter-country level to focus on cross-border regions that have more than 70 percent of the epidemic,” said Hadja Saran Darab, the secretary-general of the Mano River Union bloc grouping the nations. Opening the summit, WHO chief Margaret Chan told leaders that the response of the three countries to the epidemic had been “woefully inadequate”, revealing that the outbreak was “moving faster than our efforts to control it”.

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) – The worst Ebola outbreak in history is heaping new pressure on U.S. regulators to speed the development of treatments for the deadly virus, which has killed more than 700 people since February. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday said in an emailed statement the agency “stands ready” to work with companies and investigators working with patients “in dire need of treatment.” A senior official within FDA told Reuters the agency would consider proposals for providing treatments under special emergency new drug applications, if the benefits of the treatment outweighed the potential safety risks. FDA’s statement follow calls by doctors fed up by the lack of progress on Ebola treatments, a market deemed too small to gain much attention by large pharmaceutical companies. Earlier this month, the agency put a hold on a Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp clinical trial of TKM-Ebola, one of the few Ebola treatments advanced enough to be tested in people.