* The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) are asking manufacturers of the TNF-blocking drugs to increase warning on the label. The FDA have alerted doctors to the fact that the drug is potentially dangerous.

TNF-blockers were the “safer” option for arthritis sufferers than the COX-2 family, which included Vioxx which was consequently found to be responsible for at least 60,000 deaths. The FDA has been flooded with reports that this drug causes serious fungal infections, and TB (tuberculosis) sometimes resulting in death. In many cases, doctors have been slow to react, possibly not realizing that the drug was to blame, and the patient has died from the infection. In one outbreak involving 21 patients – 12 died.

(Source: Journal of the American Medical Association, 2008; 300: 1639).

* Up to 6 per cent of all patients who have an organ transplants will develop TB – and it’s usually from the donor. In most cases the surgery itself activates the TB cells that had lain dormant in the donor.
Journal of the American Medical Association, 2008; 299: 2018-9).

* Ultraviolet (UV) light can dramatically reduce the spread of tuberculosis (TB), and it could cut TB infections by 70 per cent if it were installed in hospital wards and waiting rooms, researchers believe.
(PLoS Medicine, 2009; 6(3): e43 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000043).

I remember seeing old films where TB sanatorium might be shown and patients were always wheeled outside into the day light for a few hours. They must have known about the UV affects even then.

* Annual chest x-rays to screen for tuberculosis (TB) should be stopped even though the disease is once again on the rise. Professor Lee Reichman at the New Jersey Medical School, says that there is no evidence that regular and expensive screening makes very
much difference in detecting the disease.
Even as far back as the early 1950s the practice was questioned because of the high incidence of incorrect readings. The WHO (world health organization) estimated that radiographs, which are extremely expensive, represent up to 10 per cent of a nation’s total expenditure on health care.

The lancet reported that a large trial back in 1963 found that bacteriological examinations were a better way of detecting TB than were x-rays (Lancet, 1999; 353: 319-20).

Tags: pharmaceutical medication, TB