Experimental Drugs Flourish In China/10 yr olds encouraged to remove body hair

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Experimental DrugsFlourish In ChinaFrom Patricia Doyle, PhD

http://www.rense.com/general79/flour.htm1-8-8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello Jeff - The boom in China's experimental drugs may sound promising to those of us with terminal illness however, one worries about safety issues. Are these drugs being rushed to market without proper preliminary safety protocols? As with the case of stem cell harvesting from umbilical cord and amniotic fluid, have the donors been screened for HIV/AIDS, HBV/HCV? Even worries of prion disease make me wonder about the safety risks. I think we all need to slow down and look very closely at the biotech boom in China. We know that many bogus drugs have entered the world pharmaceutical market from China. China is also expanding its vaccine research. Again, countries around the globe rely on vaccine to protect against disease. As we know, vaccine is NOT a silver bullet and hope of a Bird Flu vaccine for H5N1, in my opinion, is definitely NOT going to be a miracle preventative measure against bird flu. As with most things in life, if it looks to good to be true, it probably isn't. China Business

 

Experimental drugs flourish in China

 

1-9-8

BROOKLIN, Ontario, Canada -- China's booming medical biotechnology industry is producing controversial drugs and gene therapy treatment programs that are being sought out by critically ill foreigners seeking potential cures unavailable elsewhere. China's Beike Biotechnologies harvests stem cells from the umbilical cord or amniotic membrane and injects them into patient's spinal region. More than 1,000 patients, including 60 foreigners, have been treated for a variety of conditions including Alzheimer's disease, autism, brain trauma, cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology. "We met foreigners there who were happy with Beike's treatments," said Peter Singer of the McLaughlin-Rotman Center for Global Health at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study. However, China's regulatory agency, the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), did not require clinical trials, making it difficult to evaluate the efficacy of these therapies, Singer said. It is a controversial approach and Beike and others in China would be considered "rogue companies" in North America or Europe, he said. Although less than 10 years old, China's medical biotech industry has become both an innovator and a place where the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies contract out their very expensive clinical research and trials. One of China's largest firms, WuXi PharmaTech, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and recently acquired a US biologics firm. "The Chinese biotechnology industry is like a baby dragon, which will grow quickly and soon become hard to ignore," Singer said. In 2007, China had sales of US$3 billion in biopharmaceuticals, dwarfed by the $59 billion in sales by US biotechnology companies in 2006, according to the accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP. Singer and colleagues interviewed 22 Chinese companies to obtain the first detailed analysis of developments in the rapidly growing but largely unknown health biotech sector. Spurred by government investment, China developed the world's first commercialized gene therapy product called Gendicine. It is used in the treatment of head and neck cancers and more than 5,000 patients have been treated so far, about 400 of them from overseas. The drug is currently undergoing further clinical trials in China for several new indications, including liver, abdominal and pancreatic cancer. Chinese firms are also developing vaccines to address both local and global needs. They include Shanghai United Cell Biotech, which is manufacturing and marketing one of only two oral cholera vaccines available worldwide (and the only one available in tablet form). Other firms are working on an oral HIV vaccine and novel vaccines against Japanese Encephalitis, SARS and pandemic avian influenza (H5N1 strain). However, China's primary focus is on meeting the health needs of its 1.3 billion inhabitants. "China is not just a low-cost manufacturer. It is investing in drug research and development," said co-author Sarah Frew, a research associate at the McLaughlin Rotman Center for Global Health. "There are many innovative products either on the market or close to being marketed." Shanghai's Sunway Biotech Company has developed a gene therapy treatment for cancer called H101, which is licensed by Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc of California. Sunway did all of the clinical development and trials and brought the product to market far faster and less expensively than Onyx could have, she said. Experts note that China is the world leader in gene therapy simply because US and European companies have much tougher safety and efficacy requirements. Gene therapies use genetically engineered viruses to transport genetic material into the nucleus of cells that are malfunctioning. No such therapy has been approved by US regulators as safe and effective. Human testing has been temporarily stopped several times in the US and Europe because of patient deaths. "Regulations to protect patients in China are considerably weaker than in the US," said Peter Laurie, deputy director of Public Citizen's health research group, a Washington-based non-profit watchdog group. A few years ago, US researchers working in China deliberately infected Chinese AIDS patients with malaria in hopes the resulting malarial fever would destroy the AIDS virus. Such experiments are illegal in the US, and widely considered dangerous and unethical, Laurie said. "Any foreign company doing clinical trials or clinical research in China is ethically suspect unless it's doing so to improve the health of people there," he said. International standards for drug testing are rigorous, time-consuming and expensive, but they are crucial to protect patients, he added. Frew says China's drug safety regulator, the SFDA, is modeled on the US Food and Drug Administration. "The standards are quite high but enforcement has been tainted by corruption," she said. Last July, Zheng Xiaoyu, the head of the SFDA, was executed for taking bribes from companies to approve their products, including an antibiotic that killed several people. Since that scandal, the SFDA has been much stricter and more serious about rebuilding its credibility, said Frew. However, China's researchers do not always follow international standards and are unlikely to be able to export their products or therapies to the developed world in the near future. That's one reason why China's medical biotech hasn't grown faster. The study notes that international investors see enormous potential in the sector to become the world's pharmacy for generic drugs and the next generation of drug and treatment blockbusters. But there has been little outside investment thanks to poorly enforced regulations and China's uncertain financial system, rigid restrictions on the export of capital and continuing doubts about the Chinese government's protection of intellectual property rights. "China still has one foot in the closed society of the past," said Singer. "For the sake of both national and global health, we hope China will embrace the financial and regulatory reforms needed to attract the venture capital required for sustained innovation in the health biotech sector." (Inter Press Service) http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/JA09Cb02.html Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural Economics Univ of West Indies Please visit my "Emerging Diseases" message board at: http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php Also my new website: http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/ Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa Go with God and in Good Health

 

But men are waxing their chests. Someone has to bring back hairy in fashion by now surely? But the guys tweezed eyebrows are a bit hard to look at! N

 

Why 10 is too young for your first Brazilian

 

 

 

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/why-10-is-too-young-for-your-first-brazilian/2008/01/07/1199554567704.html

 

Larissa DubeckiJanuary 8, 2008

 

 

Small children are being encouraged to rip the hair from their bodies.

EVERY woman is painfully familiar with the phrase "bad-hair day"; that handy cover-all for the times that, despite the amount of expensive hair products used and incantations to the god of hairdressing made, you are forced to go about in public looking like a family of badgers has taken up residence on your head.

But in this peculiarly tonsorial context, the definition of concern relates to the word "woman". Last year Nair, makers of hair-removal products, released their Pretty range, aimed at 10 to 15-year-olds, or, as they call them, "first-time hair removers". Yes, you heard right. Ten-year-olds. Girls — children — in grades 5 and 6, encouraged to wax and chemically remove hair from their barely pubescent bodies. As online site Gawker put it, what's next: Baby Brazilians?

Well, it seems that someone heard that throwaway phrase and spied a business opportunity, because Australian website girl.com.au is now promoting a feature about Brazilian waxes, otherwise known as a torture device in which all the hair in a woman's nether regions is ripped off with a combination of hot wax and a high pain threshold. The website, which appears to be mostly read by girls in the nine to 14 age bracket, says of the Brazilian: "Nobody really likes hair in their private regions and it has a childlike appeal."

As a cosmetic pharmaceutical company, Nair is obliged to reinvent normal bodily functions as problems with handy product solutions. And the Australian arm of the company has claimed its target audience is slightly older, in an attempt to distance itself from the US campaign, which involves phrases such as "Pretty isn't a look. It's a feeling,Nair will leave your skin smooth and totally touchable!" and this pearler from Stacey Feldman, vice-president for marketing at Nair's parent company, Church & Dwight: "When a girl removes hair for the first time, it's a life-changing moment."

There are countless reasons to be angry about this piece of misogyny dressed up as big-sisterly advice. Let's start with the semiotics of the campaign. It's hard to be angry about "Pretty". It's like being incensed by High School Musical's tween hottie Zac Efron, Labrador puppies or the colour pink.

But "Pretty" here is a (hairless) wolf in disguise. It might come in a range of fruity fragrances, but it's also a non-threatening induction into a society that sets ridiculous standards for female appearance (among them, the notion that being hairy is ugly). "Pretty" ignores the fact that young people are progressing into adulthood at lightning speed, making the "tween" stage a mere formality as they rush from skipping ropes and jelly sandals to midriff tops and glitter make-up.

 

The line between childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred. And it cuts both ways, with the older generations keen to hold onto their youth and, in the case of the Brazilian, their pre-pubescence. But while 30 is touted as the new 20 and 50 as the new 40, is it really appropriate for 10 to be the new 20?

Possibly I am simply unaware of the brave new world of pre-teen girls. When I was a teenager, George Michael was heterosexual and bubble skirts were de rigueur, the first time around. Now, there are fashion magazines for five and six-year-olds that tell them how to look hot and find a boyfriend. There are pole-dancing classes for children.

In October, Channel Seven argued a pole-dancing scene in Home and Away didn't breach a G-rating because scantily clad women swinging around poles in front of baying crowds of men were now "standard dance-floor fare" (although the Australian Communication and Media Authority thought otherwise and decided the network breached classification guidelines).

The previous month a 12-year-old girl had been chosen as the "face" of Gold Coast Fashion Week. Young Maddison Gabriel turned the ripe old age of 13 shortly after the announcement and celebrated the occasion, as befitting a girl who states her life's ambition as "supermodel", at the beauty salon.

It sits oddly that parents, who note and celebrate each step of their child's development, are being encouraged to celebrate premature sexualisation as another rite of passage. So at age two, their little darlings can use simple, short sentences and sort by shape and colour; at four they're able to distinguish between themselves and other people; at five they can dress themselves; eight is a big whoop with the likes of Santa Claus filed under a newly found sense of "fantasy". At 10 they can start ripping hair from their bodies to be more attractive to the opposite sex? You'll need to try just a little harder to convince me that's a "milestone" worth celebrating.

Encourage them to be children, just for a little while longer. And don't worry. They'll have plenty of time to learn to hate themselves when they get older.

Larissa Dubecki is a staff writer.