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How drug firms woo the public
Drug companies use unscrupulous and unethical marketing tactics not only to influence doctors to prescribe their products but also subtly to persuade consumers that they need them, a report claimed recently.
Consumers should be concerned because time and again the companies violate their own industry’s ethical marketing codes. Patients’ health may suffer if a drug like Vioxx — a painkiller later withdrawn — is over-promoted.
Yet, says Consumers International, which has compiled the report, there is “a shocking lack of publicly available information about the $60bn spent annually by the industry on drug promotion”. The report examines the marketing practices of 20 of the world’s biggest drug companies. It alleges that:
— Drug companies are promoting their products through patients groups, students and internet chatrooms to bypass the ban on advertising except to doctors.
— They offer information to the public on “modern” lifestyle diseases, such as stress and poor eating habits, to encourage people to ask their doctors for medicines;
— They make inaccurate claims about the safety and efficacy of their drugs;
— Doctors are offered incentives to prescribe and promote drugs including kickbacks, gifts, free samples and consulting agreements, and;
— Many companies have been implicated in anti-competitive strategies, including cartels and price hikes.
Stem cells and brain damage
Scientists have found a way to make the brain reverse the damage it suffers after a stroke, raising hopes for treatment able to exploit the body’s ability to heal itself. Their experiments used rats whose brains had been starved of oxygen to simulate the effects of a stroke.
Strokes kill brain cells and affect the way the body works, with paralysis common. Ronald McKay, of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Maryland, in the US, studied the adult stem cells in the rats’ brains. He stimulated a receptor known as “notch”, on the stem cells, and found that it caused reactions that produced new brain cells. Compared with untreated rats, fewer of the rodents that had a stroke and the stem cell therapy were left paralysed.
“Notch is important in all tissues and the beneficial effects ... may involve responses in cells of the vascular, immune and nervous systems,” said the team in their paper published in Nature.
The technique has wide implications for stem cell research. Therapies in this field have been held up by the difficulties of getting lab experiments on cell cultures to work in living animals. Prof McKay’s work shows a way of using stem cells in the body to promote healing. The team said the findings might lead to strategies promoting “regenerative responses”.
100,000-year-old shells
They may not compare with today’s diamond-encrusted bling, but in their own way, they are of far greater value. Two tiny shells have been confirmed as the world’s oldest known items of jewellery, probably used on a necklace about 100,000 years ago.
It’s more than just a pretty trinket: the shells have forced scientists to rethink their ideas on when human culture and language first developed.
“This research shows that a long lasting and widespread bead-working tradition associated with early modern humans extended through Africa to the Middle East well before comparable evidence appears in Europe,” said Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum, who led the work.
“The research also supports the idea that modern human anatomy and behaviour have deep roots in Africa and were widespread by 75,000 years ago, even though they may not have appeared in Europe for another 35,000 years.”
The shells were excavated between 1931 and 1932 from the cave of Skhul in Israel. “Unfortunately, (the archaeologists) didn’t realise the significance of the material they were digging up. These shells were found incidentally and have been in the collection for the last 70 years,” said Dr Stringer.
Genetic and fossil evidence suggests that humans who were anatomically similar to modern people existed in Africa around 200,000 years ago. But evidence for modern cultural behaviour only appears in Europe around 40,000 years ago. This has led many researchers to pose the idea that modern human behaviour evolved long after modern human anatomy.
Robot to the rescue
In a breakthrough for the battle against mankind’s most diehard enemy — the cockroach — European scientists have hoodwinked a group of them into congregating in a place where they can be stamped on easily.
The kick in the mandibles comes from a Belgian-led team who spent three years developing a mini robot that can convince cockroaches to creep out of dark holes and gather in light places. The InsBot looks more like a pencil sharpener than a household pest, but it smells like a cockroach. Most importantly, the InsBot can pass for a Periplaneta Americana (American cockroach).
Jean-Louis Deneubourg, director of the social ecology laboratory at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, says the success of the EU-funded experiment has ramifications for more than just pest control: “We know very little about how decentralised communities of beings, like cockroaches or ants, reach collective decisions.”
The InsBot has a cocktail of pheromones and molecules painted on its body, allowing it to infiltrate the cockroach community. Experiments showed that cockroaches are highly sociable creatures. “If you’re out with a group of friends and you need to choose between two pubs that offer roughly the same advantages, you’re in the same position as a group of 20 cockroaches choosing between two identical holes,” said Deneubourg.
“Each cockroach has the same degree of influence. But we found that if the InsBot went to one hole and stayed there for 10 or 15 seconds, it would soon be joined by another roach. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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