FDA to look into claim of toxic lipstick
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:12:10 GMTWASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration said Friday it would look into claims from an advocacy group that certain lipsticks contain potentially dangerous levels of lead.
Similar claims in the past have not been confirmed, the agency said.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics said that a third of the 33 red lipsticks examined by an independent lab contained a level of lead exceeding 0.1 parts per million — which is the FDA's limit for lead in candy. The FDA does not set a limit for lead in lipstick.
The organization commissioning the lipstick study says its goal is to pressure companies to remove toxic chemicals from their products and replace them with safer alternatives. The lead tests were conducted by an independent laboratory last month on red lipsticks bought in Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Hartford, Conn., the organization said.
The FDA said concerns about lead in lipstick have been raised occasionally in the print media and on the Internet.
"These concerns have not generally been supported by FDA's own analysis of products on the market. In the present case, we are looking into the specific details of the issues raised," said Stephanie Kwisnek, a spokeswoman at the FDA. "We will need to confirm the factual basis of these reports independently in order to determine what action, if any, may be needed to protect public health."
The trade association representing the cosmetic industry acknowledged "negligible" levels of lead in some lipsticks, but said it is not intentionally added.
"Consumers are exposed daily to lead when they eat, drink water and breathe the air," said John Bailey, an executive vice president at the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association. "The average amount of lead a woman would be exposed to when using cosmetics is 1,000 times less than the amount she would get from eating, breathing, and drinking water that meets Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards."
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On the Net:
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics: http://www.safecosmetics.org/
Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association: http://www.ctfa.org
Surgeon scrutinized in patient deaths
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:52:13 GMTBy JIM SUHR and DENISE LAVOIE, Associated Press Writers
MARION, Ill. - Bob Shank was in good spirits as he awaited gallstone-removal surgery at a veterans hospital in August, laughing as he handed his wife his false teeth for safekeeping.
If the 50-year-old Air Force veteran had any worries, it was whether his wife would be able to understand the postoperative instructions from his surgeon, Dr. Jose Veizaga-Mendez, a Bolivian-trained physician with a thick accent.
"Pay close attention to what the doctor says, that you'll understand him," Shank pressed her as he was wheeled off to the operating room.
They were the last words Katrina Shank ever heard from him. Her husband never woke up from surgery, and by the next day he had bled to death.
Shank, it turns out, was far from the only surgical patient to die under Veizaga-Mendez's care. Nine veterans — all in some way linked to Veizaga-Mendez, officials say — died in a six-month period ending in March, during which the hospital would have expected only two deaths.
Even before Veizaga-Mendez was hired at the Veterans Administration hospital, he had made payouts in two malpractice suits in Massachusetts and was under investigation there on suspicion of botching seven cases, two of which ended in deaths.
How the surgeon came to practice on veterans has raised troubling questions about the VA's screening of its doctors — and about how much those who hired him in Illinois did to check his background in Massachusetts.
"I can't imagine how even the most rudimentary check of the last hospitals he was on staff at would not have revealed gigantic problems with this guy," Jim Harmon, an attorney for Katrina Shank, said this week. He has filed a claim on her behalf against the U.S. government, a precursor to a lawsuit.
Veizaga-Mendez, 69, resigned three days after Shank's death, and the VA hospital, which has 55 acute-care beds and is about 120 miles from St. Louis, suspended all surgery shortly after. The deaths involving Veizaga-Mendez are still under investigation, and details have not been released.
Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama wrote a letter Thursday to the VA, pressing acting Secretary Gordon Mansfield to detail the steps the agency took to check the surgeon's credentials. They said a cursory check of publicly available information by their staffs quickly raised red flags about the doctor.
"This is an extremely alarming revelation that calls into question the adequacy of the oversight exercised by the VA as it evaluates and monitors those who provide care to our veterans," the senators wrote.
Pete McBrady, acting director of the Marion VA Medical Center, said this week that the vetting process for job applicants typically includes checking licenses in other states and any records in the National Practitioner Data Bank, which includes malpractice claims. A panel of physicians also goes over personal references.
McBrady said that Veizaga-Mendez had a valid, unrestricted medical license in Massachusetts and Illinois when he was hired in January 2006 and that background checks did not reveal any prior or pending disciplinary action.
It turns out that at the time he was hired in Illinois, the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine was investigating allegations of substandard care made against Veizaga-Mendez in 2004 and 2005, said board spokesman Russell Aims. The allegations involved seven patients, two of whom died.
But the VA would not have had access to that information because complaints are confidential while they are being investigated, Aims said.
In July 2006, six months after Veizaga-Mendez was hired at Marion, he voluntarily surrendered his Massachusetts license under pressure from the board. The board's Web site listed the action as "non-disciplinary," the term sometimes used when a physician agrees to stop practicing in the state.
Once Veizaga-Mendez gave up his license, the board was free to make the allegations public, Aims said.
Veizaga-Mendez, whose Illinois license remains valid pending a December hearing, has no listed telephone number in Illinois and Massachusetts and has been unreachable for comment.
Veizaga-Mendez graduated from medical school in Bolivia in 1965 and got his medical license in Massachusetts in 1975. He practiced at Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro from 1976 to 2005.
The doctor's patients in Massachusetts included a 74-year-old man who developed low blood pressure and a rapid heartbeat and had a bloody chest tube after Veizaga-Mendez operated on him in 2002 to remove a lung tumor. In its report, the board said the doctor failed to diagnose the patient's postoperative bleeding and did not return him to the operating room until the next day. The man died two days later.
Another patient, 58-year-old Jeronimo Coronado, was operated on by Veizaga-Mendez in 2000 to treat severe heartburn. The board said a surgical error by the doctor led to a pulled stitch and a post-operative leak he failed to diagnose "within a reasonable time," causing Coronado to develop infection, sepsis and respiratory failure. Additional surgery proved unsuccessful, and the man died.
Coronado's family settled a lawsuit against Veizaga-Mendez for a confidential sum, said the family's attorney, Bennett Bergman.
In three decades of handling medical malpractice cases, Bergman said, Veizaga-Mendez is "among the very worst I've ever run into."
In a case not detailed in the Massachusetts board report, a Massachusetts jury last March awarded Robert Whitney $652,000 on his claim that Veizaga-Mendez mistakenly put two stitches into his bladder during a 1997 hernia operation.
Whitney said he repeatedly went back to the surgeon to complain of intense abdominal pain, blood in his urine and other symptoms. "He kept handing me pain pills and antibiotics. He said, `Maybe you've got a kidney stone. Go see a urologist,'" recalled Whitney, 44.
The complications hounded Whitney for nearly four years until, after seeing numerous specialists and having multiple invasive tests done, two other doctors discovered the misplaced sutures. By then, Whitney said, the ordeal had cost him his marriage and left him addicted to painkillers.
"It ruined my whole life," he said.
But Marie Gallotello, a 78-year-old patient from Woonsocket, R.I., spoke in glowing terms of how Veizaga-Mendez cared for her four years ago after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Veizaga-Mendez performed surgery to remove her lymph nodes.
"He's very kind, very gentle, and he was very, very thorough," Gallotello said. "You will never find another doctor made like that."
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Associated Press writer Denise Lavoie reported from Boston.
British hospitals blamed in 90 deaths
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:43:42 GMTLONDON - Nurses who didn't wash their hands and left patients lying in soiled beds were cited in an official report blaming mismanagement for the deaths of 90 people who contracted a bacterial infection in hospitals in southern England.
"Significant failings" at all levels contributed to infections of more than 1,000 patients at three hospitals, the Healthcare Commission said Thursday.
The patients were infected with Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, which can cause diarrhea, colitis and other intestinal problems, officials said.
"The Healthcare Commission has passed the copy of the report to us and that is being reviewed," said a spokesman for Kent Police, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with force policy.
The report into the spread of the highly contagious bacterium said nurses at three hospitals run by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust were often too busy to wash their hands and left patients in their own excrement.
Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust acknowledged that it had not been prepared for "an outbreak of that size and complexity" but had learned from the mistakes.
The trust's Chief Executive Rose Gibb resigned last week.
Health Minister Ann Keen said the failures, which led to the deaths of patients over a 2 1/2-year period, must not be repeated.
"Trusts must deliver clean, safe treatment to every patient, every time and where senior management and trust boards fail to act, they must be held accountable," Keen said.
Investigations began after a series of complaints about cleanliness, and when the trust claimed there had been no deaths from the bug despite admitting there had been hundreds of cases.
The trust has also introduced extra cleaners and nurses on affected wards and asked family doctors not to send patients with diarrhea to hospital, measures that will continue until the outbreak ends.
In recent years, Britain's superbug infection rates of bacteria like Clostridium difficile and MRSA have skyrocketed. In the 1990s, only 5 percent of in-hospital blood infections were from MRSA, the deadly bacteria resistant to nearly every available antibiotic. In past years, that figure has jumped to more than 40 percent. Critics blame the rise on overstretched hospitals that do not have enough money or capacity to catch superbug infections early.
Scientists explain chocolate cravings
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:34:42 GMTBy SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON - If that craving for chocolate sometimes feels like it is coming from deep in your gut, that's because maybe it is.
A small study links the type of bacteria living in people's digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate's allure.
That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.
Kochhar is in charge of metabolism research at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The food conglomerate Nestle SA paid for the study. But this isn't part of an effort to convert a few to the dark side side of cocoa, Kocchar said.
In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don't eat chocolate.
Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called "weird" for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.
The researchers examined the byproducts of metabolism in their blood and urine and found that a dozen substances were significantly different between the two groups. For example, the amino acid glycine was higher in chocolate lovers, while taurine was higher in people who didn't eat chocolate. Also chocolate lovers had lower levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL.
The levels of several of the specific substances that were different in the two groups are known to be linked to different types of bacteria, Kochhar said.
Still to be determined is if the bacteria cause the craving, or if early in life people's diets changed the bacteria, which then reinforced food choices.
How gut bacteria affect people is a hot field of scientific research.
Past studies have shown that intestinal bacteria change when people lose weight, said Dr. Sam Klein, an obesity expert and professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
Since bacteria interact with what you eat, it is logical to think that there is a connection between those microbes and desires for certain foods, said Klein, who wasn't part of Kochhar's study.
Kochhar's research makes so much sense that people should have thought of it earlier, said J. Bruce German, professor of food chemistry at the University of California Davis. While five outside scientists thought the study was intriguing, Dr. Richard Bergman at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, had concerns about the accuracy of the initial division of the men into groups that wanted chocolate or were indifferent to it.
What matters to Kochhar is where the research could lead.
Kochhar said the relationship between food, people and what grows in their gut is important for the future: "If we understand the relationship, then we can find ways to nudge it in the right direction."
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On the Net:
The Journal of Proteome Research:
http://pubs.acs.org/journals/jprobs/index.html
