TV News LIES

For over a decade, taking a pill like Truvada every day has been the standard of care for HIV prevention efforts.

In clinical trials, this type of preventive drug, called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), can be 99% effective in stopping new HIV infections from sex. In the real world, however, that is not always the case.

People don’t always take their pills. In a study in South Africa, women said they felt there was a stigma to the pill —- a sexual partner might assume they’re taking it because they already have HIV or because they have other partners.

Now a new trial —- called PURPOSE 1 —- points the way to a new preventive strategy —- a twice yearly injection of a drug called lenacapavir. The trial was sponsored by Gilead Sciences, the California-based maker of the drug.

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The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved the experimental Alzheimer's drug donanemab, which slowed the early stages of the fatal mind-robbing disease in studies.

The approval comes less than a month after an FDA advisory committee endorsed Eli Lilly's drug, despite questions from advisory committee members about the potential side effects of the drug. The drug is an antibody that removes beta-amyloid that accumulates in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Eli Lilly said donanemab will be marketed under the brand name Kisunla as a monthly injection, which will be administered via IV infusion. The Alzheimer's treatment will be available for adults with early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, which includes mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia. Patients will be tested for amyloid before starting the medication.

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Taking a daily multivitamin does not help people to live any longer and may actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.

Researchers in the US analysed health records from nearly 400,000 adults with no major long-term diseases to see whether daily multivitamins reduced their risk of death over the next two decades.

Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period, prompting the government researchers to comment that “multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported”.

Nearly half of UK adults take multivitamins or dietary supplements once a week or more, part of a domestic market worth more than half a billion pounds annually. The global market for the supplements is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars each year. In the US, a third of adults use multivitamins in the hope of preventing disease.

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One evening in 2019, Janice Blanock was scrolling through Facebook when she heard a stranger mention her son in a video on her feed. Luke, an outgoing high school athlete, had died three years earlier at age 19 from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.

Between 2009 and 2019, five other students in Blanock’s school district were also diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. (The region saw about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time.) In the video, health experts and residents were talking about whether the uptick in illnesses was related to fracking. Blanock was riveted.

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Antibiotics cannot cure COVID. They don’t help a bit. And yet, new data shows that, during the pandemic, COVID patients were given antibiotics – a lot of antibiotics.

That’s bad because the overuse of antibiotics can breed superbugs that are resistant to medications. The impact of this pandemic overuse has lingered even as the pandemic has faded.

So how did this unfortunate turn of events come to be? A series of new reports and papers shed light.

Globally, about 75% of patients hospitalized with COVID were given antibiotics, despite only 8% having a bacterial coinfection where antibiotics would be medically useful. This comes from new data published in late April that was collected through the World Health Organization’s Global Clinical Platform in 65 countries between January 2020 and March 2023.

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When dermatologist Adewole "Ade" Adamson sees people spritzing sunscreen as if it's cologne at the pool where he lives in Austin, Texas, he wants to intervene. "My wife says I shouldn't," he said, "even though most people rarely use enough sunscreen."

At issue is not just whether people are using enough sunscreen, but what ingredients are in it.

In countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France, sunscreens include newer chemical filters, some of which have been shown to provide broader protection against UV rays than those used in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration's ability to approve such ingredients is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that has required sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world.

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