It's a point I've made often in these letters — South Africa is a small country. Little happens that is not nationally known. Any news is national news. No matter the field, few experts exist and they are incessantly quoted.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been in the news recently. (It used to be called just ADD, but the hyperactive H has moved in to stay.) The National Institute of Mental Health says that two million children in the United States have this condition. New Scientist reports that nearly 4 million Americans, most of them children and young adults, are being prescribed drugs to treat ADHD. And up to a million more may be taking the drugs illegally.

Just mention the word colonoscopy and people start to cringe. Anyone who has undergone the procedure can tell you that the colonoscopy itself is not difficult — most people don’t remember a thing — but the prep is another story. So, here are some suggestions to help you glide through it.

John Hoey, MD, former editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), and Anne Marie Todkill, former senior deputy editor, have won the National Press Club of Canada’s 8th annual World Press Freedom Award.

The following article is published on Red Flags courtesy of the Medical Veritas journal (see volume 2, issue 2, November 2005). For more information and to see the full contents of this issue, visit the Red Flags store.

Some Suspicions

The public library is always a good place to turn when you have a desperate need for information. Skimming the last few days of newspapers showed me that SARS was a new viral epidemic of severe pneumonia caused by a coronavirus. Or was it? Here’s Dr. Frank Plummer, a top virologist at Canada’s main virology laboratory in Winnipeg, saying that only a minority of people are testing positive for the virus, and the percentage is diminishing all the time, from 60% at first, to 50% [Walgate, 2003], and later down to 40% [Altman, 2003]. Some of the cases with the most distinct symptoms are negative. [Walgate, 2003] Plus, 20% of a sample of people not suspected of having SARS were positive. [Altman, 2003] But, here’s a May 3 paper in The Lancet that states that the coronavirus is at least an "important copathogen." But how can it be even be a contributing factor when it isn’t always there?

Last fall, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel gave its overwhelming endorsement to a diabetes drug made by Bristol-Myers Squibb. The FDA sent a letter calling muraglitazar “approvable” after some additional safety tests. A few weeks later, three prominent Cleveland Clinic cardiologists writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association used the same data to show the drug increased patients’ risk of heart attacks and strokes. The company soon withdrew its new drug application.

Disease mongering — defined by American and British researchers quoted in The Guardian newspaper on April 11 as “corporate-sponsored creation of disease” — is here to stay. Eleven papers in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine argue that “new diseases are being defined by specialists who are often funded by the drug industry.”

A recent research report published in the Journal of Pathology questions the prion-only hypothesis of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). TSE diseases include Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle (mad cow disease), scrapie in sheep, and Chronic Wasting Disease in elk and deer. Abnormally misfolded prion proteins are considered to be the transmissible agents in TSEs. A Nobel Prize was awarded for this idea. The Jeffrey et al. study points out flaws in the prion-only hypothesis. It concerns us that there was very little coverage by the lay press and that this very important paper was only described on a few medically related web sites.

A brief half century after the discovery of DNA, medical scientists are closing in on an understanding of the basic building blocks of human chemistry. They’ve mapped the human genome and spelled out the biochemical interactions of cells. There’s even a new science called systems biology. It harnesses computers to biology to produce complex models of body functions, the protein interactions that actually make us tick, which can provide clues to what might happen in living, breathing humans if medicines are used to adjust the levels of one of those proteins.

In December 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its Final Order on anthrax vaccine, declaring it to be 92.5 percent effective for preventing both inhalation and cutaneous anthrax infections.