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Thursday, February 25, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
More money needed in AIDS fight Virus now spreading fastest among IV drug users, partners
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The chairman of a White House commission recommended yesterday that federal and local governments spend an additional $20 billion over the next decade to fight AIDS among drug abusers.
Retired Navy Adm. James D. Watkins, head of the AIDS commission appointed by President Reagan last summer, acknowledged that the call for such massive spending on addicts might prove controversial.
But he said that 200 hours of testimony from 350 witnesses had convinced the panel that the deadly disease was spreading most rapidly among the nation's estimated 1.3
million intravenous drug abusers and their sexual partners.
Watkins noted that some health leaders estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 infants could be infected with the AIDS virus three years from now as a result of sexual contact involving drug addicts. Addicts can also easily transmit disease among themselves by sharing contaminated needles.
Any realistic attempt to combat AIDS in general must focus on drug abusers, he said.
Health leaders have long thought that any significant outbreak of AIDS in the general population most likely would start with the sex partners of IV drug users, most of whom are
concentrated in 24 major cities.
The full 13-member AIDS commission is expected to adopt most or all of Watkins' recommendations at a day-long business meeting next Monday and then formally submit them to Reagan the following week in what will be the panel's first substantive report.
A final report is due at the White House June 24. Watkins promised that it would treat such controversial areas as widespread AIDS testing, discrimination against people with AIDS and other legal and social questions.
He said the commission members would be at loggerheads with each
other if the commission tried to agree on recommendations on those matters at this point. The commission will hear testimony on those topics next month.
Meanwhile, he said, the panel saw no reason to delay making recommendations in areas where there was consensus. There could be subsequent interim reports before the final one this summer, Watkins said.
Watkins' call for an additional $1 billion a year in federal spending on drug abuse intervention programs alone would nearly double the total $1.3 billion Public Health Service AIDS budget Reagan has proposed for fiscal 1989.
AIDS-tainted blood still a threat, study finds
The Associated Press
BOSTON — As many as 460 U.S. citizens may get AIDS infections each year from transfusions of tainted blood that slip through bloodbank screening programs, according to a new federal estimate.
A study by the U.C. Centers for Disease Control concludes that there is "a remote but real risk" of infection with the AIDS virus when people receive transfusions of blood that has been checked for the virus.
The researchers calculate that the odds are up to 1 in 40,000 that a blood transfusion will contain the AIDS virus.
Apparently the most common reason that tainted blood eludes detection, the researchers say, is that donors may give blood soon after they are infected and pass it on to recipients in their lives. The tests used by blood banks detect the antibodies, not the virus itself.
The researchers emphasized that the risk of infection was small and that people who needed transfusions still should get them.
“This doesn’t mean the blood supply is not being adequately protected, but it means we may be able to make a good system better,” said John W.
Ward, a physician who directed the study.
As the study was published, the American Association of Blood Banks announced in Washington yesterday that it is studying new, more sensitive screening techniques.
In their report in today's New England Journal of Medicine, Ward and colleagues described the cases of seven AIDS-infected donors whose blood was not spotted by the standard AIDS screening test.
Thirteen people became infected after receiving blood from these men and women. One subsequently developed acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Based on their latest study, the CDC researchers estimate that as many as 460 recipients of screened blood may become infected with the AIDS virus, or HIV, each year. By contrast, 7,200 people are thought to have gotten the virus from transfusions in 1984, the year before screening began.
The doctors said that about 60 percent of the people infected this way die of the diseases which created the need for the transfusion, not of AIDS.
Reye's syndrome hurts aspirin sales
The Associated Press
NEWARK, N.J. — St. Joseph's Aspirin for Children, once a leader in over-the-counter pain relief for youngsters, slowly is disappearing from medicine cabinets.
The manufacture of the chewable orange tablets ended in December 1986 as Shering Plough Corp. of Madison, N.J., focused on chewable low-dosage aspirin products for adults concerned about preventing heart disease.
Aspirin-free pain relievers and name-brand aspirin products competed with each other until the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a report in 1892, said that giving chicken pox and influenza increased the risk of contracting Reeve's syndrome.
The illness is fatal in about 20 percent to 30 percent of the cases, and some survivors suffer permanent brain damage. The government in 1986 ordered warning labels on all aspirin bottles about the risk to children and teen-agers of contracting Reve's syndrome.
The market "dropped considerably from 1980 with the Reye's syndrome business," said Terry Kelly, a spokesman for Sterling Drug Inc. of New York, which still manufactures Bayer's Aspirin for Children.
"We feel there are certain patients for whom children's aspirin is appropriate." Kelly said. St. Joseph's Aspirin for Children, first marketed in 1948, was replaced with aspirin-free tablets called St. Joseph's Aspirin-Free Fever Reducer.
Jim Saberton, a consultant with Kline & Co. Inc. in Fairfield, N.J., said yesterday that the children's aspirin market has become relatively small with sales of about $15 million in 1986 compared with sales of about $115 million for the non-aspirin pain reliever acetaminophen that same year.
"The risk and work involved in making aspirin is unattractive, especially since there's acetaminophen," he said.
St. Joseph's Aspirin for Children and Bayer Children's Aspirin each had about $5 million in sales in 1966, with the balance of sales taken up by generic brands, he said.
He also said Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol products, which use acetaminophen, cut heavily into sales of St. Joseph's, which once held 50 percent of the children's pain-reliever market while Bayer had the other half.
Lewis Nolan, a Schering Plough spokesman, said, however, that his company disputes the link of aspirin to Reye's syndrome.
Injection may have killed woman whose head was frozen
"It's been our position that there's been no scientific, valid evidence to link aspirin and Reye's syndrome," he said.
The Associated Press
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Injected sedatives hastened the death of an 83-year-old woman whose severed head was frozen in hopes she some-day could be restored to life with a new body, officials said yesterday. The case is being classified as a homicide.
The Riverside County coroner's office, after reviewing the results of extensive toxological tests on the tissues of Dora Kent's lethal body, said she was given a lethal dose of a barbiturate shortly before her death in early December.
"The coroner has classified the
death as the result of a homicide due to the administration of medicinal drugs, which assisted Kent's death," Supervising Deputy Coroner Dan Cupido said yesterday.
of death pending further tests
Those involved in the attempt to preserve Kent's head for eventual resurrection denied the coroner's office charge, saying the drug was administered after she died as part of their effort to preserve the brain.
The coroner's office amended its death certificate Tuesday, referring the case to the Riverside County District Attorney's Office, where it is now under investigation. The original death certificate did not state a cause
Deputy District Attorney Curt Hinn said the tests indicated Kent was alive when the drugs were administered. The sedatives pentobarbital and secobarbital were found throughout the woman's system, including her brain, heart, liver, and investigators concluded her body had metabolized the drugs.
"We think they gave it (the drug) to her before she was dead. "Hilman said."
But Kent's son, Saul, 48, said yesterday that the allegations of homicide were "smear tactics" to discredit the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation. a crvonics lab here.
Saul Kent is a strong supporter of the cryonics movement, which believes bodies or heads may be stored at subfreezing temperatures and then brought back to life in the future through advances in science.
Kent had been living in a Riverside nursing home, but on Dec. 9 her physician, Steve Harris, determined that she was gravely ill. Based on that information, Kent moved her from the home to Alcor.
Kent said his mother was maintained there briefly on a respirator before dying Dee. 11. Her head was surgically removed soon afterward.
Alcor spokesman Carlos Mondraghon said the drug Nembutol was given to Kent after the death. Her son said barbiturates were given immediately after death to slow damage to the brain from lack of oxygen. And another Alcor official, Michael Darwin, said cardiopulmonary resuscitation was also given after death to distribute the drugs throughout her system.
Kent said the foundation previously had explained those methods and the use of drugs in its notes regarding his mother's preservation.
"Now suddenly to come up and say that they think it's homicide is kind of
absurd, 'he said. "I was there, and she gave me natural causes, and then she groped me."
But Cupio said the drugs "expedited Dora Kent's death."
The death certificate amendment says Kent died between Dec. 9 and Dec. 11. Cupido said.
Her death has been under investigation since the coroner's office learned of it. She died at Alcor's lab in Riverside, where a body and six other heads are frozen in liquid nitrogen.
No doctor was present when she died, which prompted the coroner's office to review her case.
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