Two popular anti-smoking drugs will now carry warnings about the risk of severe mental health problems, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.
The FDA said Chantix and Zyban will carry the warnings to alert consumers to the risks of depression and suicidal thoughts when using the drugs.
The drugs also have been reported to cause changes in behavior, hostility and agitation in users, whether users had a history of psychiatric illness or not. In many cases, side effects started shortly after use began and ended when the medication was stopped. The FDA does not know what is causing the changes and said people taking these products should be monitored by their doctor.
A 30-year-old male student enrolled in the United States has been confirmed as China’s second H1N1, or swine flu, case, and its first on the mainland, according to the information office of the Chinese Health Ministry.
“Bao” began his journey at St. Louis, Missouri, took a connecting flight at St. Paul, Minnesota, for Tokyo, Japan on May 7th, according to Xinhua state-run news agency.
Asian countries will increase stockpiles of medicine to fight the H1N1 flu virus and look at ways to share essential supplies in the event of an emergency, according to a statement drafted for a meeting Friday.
Health ministers from the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, Japan and South Korea will intensify cross-border cooperation and establish joint response teams to fight the spread of the virus, also known as swine flu.
According to the statement, the ministers were concerned that most of the production capacity for vaccines was located in North America and Europe and it was inadequate for a global pandemic.
The new H1N1 flu virus appears to be fairly widespread in the United States and seems to be hitting mostly younger people, with very few cases reported in people over 50, U.S. health officials said on Sunday.
“We think very few of the cases we have confirmed are in people over 50,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dr Anne Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing. “Whether this will pan out over the weeks ahead we don’t know.”
The CDC reported 226 cases of the new H1N1 swine flu virus and one death in 30 states. The CDC previously had confirmed 160 cases in 21 states.
Using a new tracking tool, search engine giant Google said on Wednesday it saw a spike in searches for information about flu among people in Mexico last week even before news of the outbreak became widely known.
Google said it has put together a flu trends tracking system for Mexico based on the U.S. Google Flu tool launched last fall that is used by U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out where influenza is heating up.
It is based on Google’s observation that people who are sick with flu tend to search for the same types of information on the Internet, and these searches can be used to predict where an outbreak may be occurring.
The first confirmed case of swine flu in Ohio has been found in a 9-year-old Ely Elementary School third-grader. The school will be closed all week, Superintendent Paul Rigda said late Sunday night.
The boy, whom officials did not identify, traveled to Mexico during spring break. While there, he spent time at a farm, a fair, a couple of different cities and in Mexico City, according to Elyria City Health District officials.
He got back from the trip last Monday and started having symptoms Wednesday. He went to EMH Regional Medical Center in Elyria on Friday with an elevated temperature and cold- and flu-like symptoms, Elyria City Health District Commissioner Kathryn Boylan said.
Mexican authorities sought to reassure citizens Saturday over a deadly new multi-strain swine flu, as the World Health Organization warned that the virus had “pandemic potential.”
The outbreak of the new virus transmitted from human to human that has killed up to 60 people and infected hundreds in Mexico and infected eight in the United States is a “serious situation” with a “pandemic potential”, the head of the World Health Organization said Saturday.
