Medical Digest
FDA told anti-depressant Serzone tied to deaths

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The advocacy group Public Citizen told the FDA that the drug has "no advantage" over other drugs used to treat depression and that it should no longer be prescribed.

Manufacturer Bristol-Myers Squibb is withdrawing the drug in Canada and has discontinued sales in Europe, amid concern by regulators over liver damage. Three years ago, the FDA required that a cautionary "black box" label be added to the drug indicating it could cause liver failure. The agency also sent a warning letter to physicians, said Thomas Laughren, an FDA official.

The agency views cases of liver failure among Serzone users as a "rare event," Laughren said, adding that not all patients being treated for depression respond to medication in the same way, and that they benefit from having a range of treatment methods available.

New blood thinner shown to be effective in testing

A new blood-thinner pill offers the first potential alternative in 50 years to warfarin, the standard treatment given to millions of people to prevent blood clots.

The new drug has been tested in 17,000 patients and has been shown to work as well as or, in some cases, better than warfarin at preventing dangerous blood clots. It also acts more quickly and does not require the frequent blood testing needed for use of warfarin, also known as Coumadin.

In today's New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report on two of the latest tests of the drug, Exanta. The studies showed it reduced the risk of blood clots by one-quarter after knee-replacement surgery and substantially cut the long-term risk of another clot developing in patients who had a blood clot in a leg or lung.

The drug maker, AstraZeneca, which paid for the studies, has filed for approval of Exanta in Europe and expects to apply for U.S. approval this year.

Cats, ferrets could be 'bridge' of SARS virus

Cats and ferrets can carry the SARS virus, raising the possibility that the pets could play a role in any new outbreaks of the deadly disease, researchers reported yesterday.

Scientists infected both species in laboratory experiments and showed that animals could pass the virus to others, researchers reported in today's issue of the journal Nature. The cats remained healthy, but some of the ferrets got sick.

While the findings suggest that the animals could play a role in spreading the virus, there is no evidence to date that the animals can pass the virus to people, the researchers stressed.

"You cannot completely exclude that possibility. If you have close contact, it theoretically could be transmitted," said Albert Osterhaus of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, who led the research.

But it is unlikely "from an epidemiological point of view" that cats would play a significant role in spreading the disease. Cats and ferrets appear to excrete the virus for only a relatively short period of time, he said.

"It's much more likely you would get infected from other people," Osterhaus said.

Nevertheless, because of the pets' large numbers and close contact with humans in many places, the findings indicate that cats and ferrets "could serve as an ideal bridge between the unknown reservoir for the virus in the wild," said Klaus Stohr, a SARS expert at the World Health Organization in Geneva. "That's concerning."

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which emerged in southern China in November 2002, is caused by a previously unknown member of the corona family of viruses.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company