Campbells lowering sodium in kids soups
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:40:26 GMT
By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press Writer
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. - The
Campbell Soup Co.'s kid-oriented soups, which feature characters such as
Dora the Explorer and
Batman on the cans, are getting their second sodium reduction in three years, the company announced Monday.
This time, the 12 soups for kids will have 480 milligrams per serving, which means the company can legally label them as healthy foods for the first time.
"Your kids can enjoy Dora the Explorer even more," said Douglas R. Conant, Campbell's president and chief executive, said in an interview. "They'll be down to heart-healthy levels."
For
Camden-based Campbell's, high sodium levels have been a big health concern for decades for products that are otherwise generally healthy.
Two years ago, the company began using sea salt — where it comes from is kept secret — to reduce sodium in a number of its products. The sea salt is being used in a growing number of soups, as well as V8 vegetable juice and SpaghettiO's pasta.
As more people become health conscious, lower-salt soups have become a big business for the world's largest soupmaker. In 2003, it sold $100 million worth of reduced-sodium soups. Now, Campbell's says, the lower-salt soups are bringing in $650 million a year in retail sales.
Initially, sodium levels in the kids' soups were brought down an average of 25 percent. This year, they'll be brought down another 20 percent.
The company also announced Monday that it is reformulating 36 ready-to-serve soups and giving them a new brand name: "Campbell's Select Harvest."
All the soups sold in cans and microwavable bowls currently labeled "Campbell's Select" will be called "Campbell's Select Harvest." The more upscale soups sold in boxes under that label will not be part of the new line.
While they will be lower in sodium, the "Campbell's Select Harvest" soups cannot be labeled as healthy because they will not meet other federal government criteria for areas such as fat and cholesterol.
In all, 48 Campbell's soups are getting makeovers this year, bring to 85 the total number soup varieties that have had their sodium reduced since 2006.
Some of the soups being reformulated this year will ship as early as June. All of them are to be widely available by fall, Conant said.
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On the Net:
Campbell Soup Co.: http://www.campbellsoup.com
FDA looks at wrong plant in China
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:39:05 GMT
By NATASHA T. METZLER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - U.S. health officials evaluated the wrong factory when assessing the safety of a Chinese-made drug ingredient that may be a source of problems with a blood thinner, the
Food and Drug Administration said Monday.
Baxter International's heparin has been linked to four deaths and hundreds of reports of allergic reactions. An investigation will take
FDA inspectors to
China this week.
The Chinese manufacturer was not inspected because it was confused with another company in the agency's database with a similar name, said Joseph Famulare, deputy director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research's compliance department. The
FDA evaluated that firm, which had a history of positive inspections and was not re-inspected.
The agency discovered within the past month that the wrong factory was evaluated, Famulare said, adding that as far as the FDA knows, it is an isolated incident.
Investigators will travel to China this week to inspect the company that produces the drug's active ingredient, according to
Michael Rogers, director of the division of field investigations within the FDA's office of regulatory affairs. The team will include a chemist fluent in Chinese and an expert in drug manufacturing technology.
"We've given this team the flexibility to extend this inspection as long as it takes as well as investigate the appropriate leads within China," he said.
The agency doesn't know what is to blame for the deaths and allergic reactions associated with Baxter's heparin.
Inspections are under way at a Baxter facility in
Cherry Hill, N.J. facility and at company supplier Scientific Protein Laboratories of
Waunakee, Wis.
Last week, the FDA told physicians to stop using Baxter's heparin, citing 350 reports of side effects so far this year. In 2007, the agency received 100 reports of problems with the drug. Baxter said it would stop manufacturing multiple-dose vials while it and FDA attempts to locate the source of the problems.
Baxter last month recalled nine lots of the injectable drug after learning of allergic reactions among dialysis patients. The problems included dizziness, fainting and a racing heartbeat.
___
On the Net:
FDA: http://www.fda.gov/
Baxter International: http://www.baxter.com
Iraqi medical system wrecked by war
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:41:28 GMT
By LORI HINNANT, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD - Already a troubled system, Iraqi medical care has fallen to the brink of collapse since the U.S.-led invasion five years ago. Scores of doctors have been slain, cancer patients have to hunt down their own drugs — even IV fluid is in short supply. On Tuesday, a former deputy health minister and the head of the ministry's security force will stand trial, a year after they were accused of letting Shiite death squads use ambulances and government hospitals to carry out kidnappings and killings.
Specialists are hard to find. At one point, Baghdad — a city of more than 5 million — had no neurosurgeon, said Dr. Hussein al-Hilli, director of the Ibn Albitar Hospital in Baghdad.
"This was something that was horrible because we had many head injuries, many spinal injuries," al-Hilli said. He described "big shortages of drugs, big shortages of everything" — including IV fluid. "This simple thing, we don't have."
Like so many areas of life in
Iraq, the health care crisis is vast and complex, and there is no quick solution to improve conditions for doctors and patients.
According to figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry released earlier this year, 618 medical employees, including 132 doctors, as well as medics and other health care workers, have been killed nationwide since 2003, among the professionals from many fields caught up in Iraq's sectarian violence.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of other medical personnel are believed to have fled to Iraq's northern semiautonomous Kurdistan region and neighboring countries.
Even with the security gains of the past several months across Iraq, it is still dangerous for doctors and their families if they dare step out of heavily guarded hospital compounds.
Drugs supplies are so low that Iraqis hospitalized for illnesses as serious as cancer are asked to track down their own medicine.
"When we need medicine, we go directly to private pharmacies," said Ahmed Khalil, the 38-year-old owner of an auto repair shop in Fallujah. "We know we're not going to get any from Fallujah hospital."
And when pharmacy shelves are bare, Iraqis turn to the black market.
"Before the invasion, we got our share of medicine through government-owned medicine depots," said a Baghdad pharmacist, who spoke about on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisal. He said hospitals and clinics get some drugs from the medical depots, but it's rarely enough for the number of people in need.
"Sometimes we get medicine stolen by employees who work at the depots or at hospitals," he said.
At worst, the black-market drugs are dubious knockoffs, according to patients, doctors and pharmacists alike.
The war has taken a special toll on hospitals.
Fallujah, site of one of the deadliest battles between U.S. troops and militants west of Baghdad, is slowly rebuilding as violence ebbs, but memories of the danger are acute at the city's main hospital.
"Doctors would concentrate most of the time on treating people wounded in U.S. bombings or clashes between insurgents and U.S. forces. Other patients got little attention," said one doctor at the hospital, who also declined to be identified because he also feared for his safety. "We were beaten by gunmen if we failed to save their wounded fellows."
Jassim Naseef, 52, took his pregnant wife to a private clinic three months ago, paying 20 times what the public hospital would have charged for the birth of their son: $247 compared with $12. The hospital wards, he complained, were dirty and lacked electricity.
"I chose the expensive private clinic in order to ensure that my wife and my son got the best medical care," he said.
The American military and non-governmental organizations such as the Iraqi Red Crescent do a great deal to help, al-Hilli and others said, by bringing in supplies and advisers and helping train medical staff still versed in 1970s-style medicine.
Al-Hilli also has been buoyed by the Iraqi government announcing a plan to build more hospitals. He said no new hospitals had been built since 1986, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, more than two decades ago.
Yet there are still major problems. Iraq's Health Ministry has been in almost constant flux since the war started. Each minister has stayed "eight months or seven months or 11 months," al-Hilli said.
Then, there are the arrests of former Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili and Brig. Gen. Hameed al-Shimmari, who was in charge of the ministry's security force. Soldiers stormed their offices last February in separate raids.
U.S. officials had been complaining that radical Shiite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr's followers were transforming hospitals into bases for his Mahdi militia and — were diverting medicine from state clinics to health care facilities run by the cleric's movement.
The clinics helped al-Sadr build a powerful nationwide political movement modeled in part on the Shiite
Hezbollah militia in
Lebanon.
There was another ominous development earlier this month, when the acting head of al-Rashad psychiatric hospital was arrested by the
U.S. military in connection with the possible exploitation of mentally impaired women by
al-Qaida in
Iraq, presumably the suicide bombers who destroyed two pet markets in Baghdad and killed nearly 100 people.
The U.S. military wouldn't speculate on a motive but noted at the time of the arrest that al-Qaida often uses threats or extortion to get what it wants, which could possibly put the death of the former director, Dr. Ibrahim Mohammed Ajil, in a slightly different light.
He was gunned down on his way home from work in December.
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Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report.
Obesity boosts cancer risk says health review
Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:12:27 GMT
PARIS -
Being obese boosts the risk of half a dozen types of cancer, and the odds strengthen as one's waistline thickens, according to a major review published on Saturday by The Lancet.
Doctors at the
University of Manchester, northwestern
England, trawled through 141 studies that monitored the health of 282,000 people who gained weight.
Their benchmark of fat was the body mass index , in which the individual's weight in kilos is divided by the square of the person's height in metres. Individuals with a BMI of 25-29.9 are considered overweight, while those with a BMI of 30 or more are obese.
The investigators found that every gain of five points in BMI among men raised the risk of gullet cancer by 52 percent, of thyroid cancer by 33 percent and of colon and kidney cancers by 24 percent.
Among women, a BMI increase of five points hiked the risk of cancer of the uterus lining by 59 percent, of the gallbladder by 59 percent, of the gullet by 51 percent and of the kidney by nine percent.
Smaller but still significant associations were seen between BMI increase and cancer of the rectum, colon and skin among men, and of the breast, pancreas, thyroid and colon among women. In both sexes, there was an increased risk of leukaemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma.
Obesity has long been linked to deaths from cardiovascular disease and to diabetes in industrialised countries, a phenomenon that is now extending to cities in developing economies.
According to some estimates, deaths from obesity in the United States outstripped those from smoking in 2005.
But only recently has strong evidence emerged of an association between excess body fat and cancer.
A ground-breaking report issued last year by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research found a link with cancers of the throat, colon, rectum, kidney and, among post-menopausal women, the breast.
In a commentary, also published by The Lancet, Swedish nutritionists Susanna Larsson and Alicja Wolk of the
Karolinska Institute in Stockholm speculated that excess body fat may cause changes in levels of insulin, sex steroids and other hormones.
This could have an impact on apoptosis, the mechanism by which a flawed cell commits suicide.
Cancerous cells are able to bypass apoptosis and proliferate unchecked.
Localised accumulation of fat cells could also contribute significantly to specific tumours, such as cancers of the liver and throat, suggested Larsson and Wolk.
