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News, Page 20

UK cost agency endorses Novartis heart drug for some patients

Novartis's big new drug hope Entresto has been recommended for use in some patients with heart failure by Britain's cost agency NICE, which said on Friday it believed the treatment was a cost-effective option. Entresto has a list price of 1,194 pounds ($1,809) a year in Britain, or less than half the price of $4,560 charged by Novartis in the United States. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said Entresto was suitable for a subset of heart failure patients whose hearts were particularly poor at pumping blood.

British school in Budapest evacuated after bomb threat

The British International School in Budapest evacuated all staff and students safely after receiving a bomb threat from an unidentified caller on Wednesday, a school statement said. The school, where over 700 pupils study according to information on its website, received a phone call at 0730 GMT (0230 ET) informing it of a bomb threat, it said.

British review calls for urgent cuts to antibiotic use in livestock

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) – Massive use of antibiotics in farming poses a critical threat to global public health and should be reduced dramatically to an internationally-agreed target, according to a British government-commissioned review. Agreeing and implementing a global target for agricultural antibiotic use won’t be easy, the review, led by former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, said, but is vital if life-saving medicines designed to fight bacterial infections are to be kept effective, both for animals and for people. The review suggested that following examples of Denmark and the Netherlands could make a swift, significant difference.

South African authorities deny issuing arrest warrant for Pistorius

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African authorities on Friday denied issuing a warrant of arrest for Oscar Pistorius, who was convicted on appeal of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, rejecting an earlier report by a local television station. “It is not the case,” Luvuyo Mfaku told Reuters. “No such warrant has been issued.” The Supreme Court on Thursday upgraded the 29-year-old athlete's sentence to murder from “culpable homicide”, South Africa's equivalent of manslaughter, for which he had received a five-year sentence. …

Outrage of the Month: Our Broken System for Protecting Human Research Subjects

Read more in Public Citizen's December Health LetterFrom 1946 to 1948, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) conducted highly unethical medical research in Guatemala (1). Some of the research involved deliberately infecting people with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), such as syphilis and gonorrhea, without their consent (2). In 2011,…

Obama prods world on climate change, faces pushback at home

PARIS (AP) — Facing pushback at home, President Barack Obama said Sunday that American leadership was helping make gains in the global fight against climate change as he tried to reassure world leaders assembling for a historic conference in Paris that the U.S. can deliver on its own commitments.

Police name suspect in Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting

By Keith Coffman COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) – Police on Saturday identified the suspect in a deadly shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs as 57-year-old Robert L. Dear, but released no further information about him. The gunman who stormed the clinic in central Colorado on Friday killed three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others before surrendering after a standoff at the facility lasting several hours, authorities said. Police in Colorado Springs identified Dear as the suspect in a Tweet on Saturday.

More than one million children need urgent aid in the conflict-torn Central African Republic: U.N.

More than a million children in the Central African Republic are in urgent need of humanitarian aid while almost half of those under five are malnourished, the United Nations said on Friday ahead of Pope Francis’ visit to the conflict-torn country. Sectarian violence has plagued the country since and fresh fighting broke out in Bangui two months ago, the worst violence in the capital this year, when the murder of a Muslim man triggered reprisal attacks on a largely Christian neighborhood. Some two million children have been affected by violence which first broke out in December 2012, and 1.2 million now need urgent aid, said the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF.