Drugs Counter Mad Cow Agent in Cells.
Fueled only by promising studies of cells, a California research team has invited controversy by beginning to give a little-used malaria drug to patients who have the human version of mad cow disease. The drug, quinacrine, is one of two that the investigators report clear brain cells...

MAD COW CONTROL. (Policy & Practice).
Efforts to improve scientific understanding of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, are underway at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Food and Drug Administration plans to review and expand its import inspection programs to keep potentially infected food products out of the United States,...

MAD COW CONTROL.
Efforts to improve scientific understanding of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSB), or mad cow disease, are underway at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Food and Drug Administration plans to review and expand its import inspection programs to keep potentially infected food products out of the United States,...

BLOOD PRODUCTS.
The AMA will work to insure that "leukoreduced" and non-leukoreduced blood products continue to be available, the delegates said. The Food and Drug Administration's Blood Products Advisory Committee supports the use of universal leukoreduction, and the plan of the Red Cross is to make only leukoreduced blood products available...

Reimbursement for blood products 'inadequate'. (Medicare Payments).
WASHINGTON -- Medicare reimbursement for blood products is not adequate to encourage hospitals to use new technologies that ensure the safety of the blood supply, a fact that is especially troubling as new blood-borne diseases emerge, according to a new report. Details of the report, which was...

BLOOD PRODUCTS.
The AMA will work to insure that both leukoreduced and nonleukoreduced blood products continue to be available. The FDA's Blood Products Advisory Committee supports the use of universal leukoreduction and currently the plan of the Red Cross is to make only leukoreduced blood products available in the future. But...

Medicare dollars not flowing toward blood safety. (Hospitals Missing out on Technology).
WASHINGTON--Medicare reimbursement for blood products is not adequate to encourage hospitals to use new technologies that ensure the safety of the blood supply. That conclusion comes from a report conducted by The Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm, for the medical technology association AdvaMed. ...

Short-stature treatment reevaluated.
Since 1963, about 10,000 short-statured children in the United States have received extracts of human cadaver pituitaries, rich in growth hormone, to boost their growth. But within the last year three of them have died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare, infectious neurological condition; and the federal government in...

Prying into prions; a twisted tail of an ordinary protein causing extraordinary neurological disorders.
When Stanley B. Prusiner coined the word "prion" for a new kind of infectious agent (SN: 12/5/81, p.359; 2/27/82, p.135), he unwittingly borrowed a term from ornithology. Nevertheless, his prions have proved as elusive to scientists as the seabirds of the same name are to bird-watchers. In...

Cellular gene role in puzzling disease.
Cellular gene role in puzzling disease Despite the onslaught of molecular biology, the agent behind a set of slowly devastating nervous system diseases still guards its identity. A joint attempt by three teams of scientists to resolve controversies has produced a surprising result-- one that raises more new...