FINDINGS

Ban on Mercury-Based Agent May Hurt Efforts Against Bird Flu

State laws forbidding the use of a mercury-based vaccine preservative could threaten efforts to protect the population against an avian flu pandemic, health officials said yesterday.

They said more than 20 U.S. states have laws pending that would limit or forbid the use of thimerosal. Six states have enacted legislation that takes effect as soon as January.

Several speakers at a meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee said the laws would be an impediment to efforts to speed delivery of vaccines should the H5N1 avian flu, or any other virus, mutate into a pandemic strain.

"The states that passed these laws have just introduced a huge barrier to influenza programs," said Mary Beth Koslap-Petraco, coordinator of child health for the Suffolk County Department of Health Services in New York.

Studies have shown there is no association between vaccines of any type and neurological diseases such as autism.

Abortion Pill Is Not Considered Risky Enough to Revoke Approval

The deaths of four women who used Danco Laboratories' RU-486 abortion pill were caused by toxic shock from severe bacterial infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in a study.

But the four deaths are too "rare" an event to lead regulators to revoke approval of the drug, sold as Mifeprex, according to an editorial in today's New England Journal of Medicine that accompanies the study.

Mifeprex has been used to induce at least 460,000 abortions since the Food and Drug Administration approved it five years ago, according to an estimate on Danco's Web site. The drug is approved to terminate pregnancies in the first 49 days.

"What these four cases show is that medical abortion has a potential risk of severe infection, which people already know about surgical abortion and have always known is a risk in childbirth," said Marc Fischer, a CDC researcher who was lead author of the study.

The CDC reviewed the cases at the FDA's request. The agency added warnings about the risk of infection to RU-486's label in November 2004, after the first two deaths were reported.

All Types of Antipsychotic Drugs May Boost Seniors' Risk of Death

Older antipsychotic drugs are no safer and might even be worse for the elderly than newer ones that the government warned about earlier this year -- both types raise the risk of death, a study suggests.

The Food and Drug Administration asked drugmakers in April to add warnings to the labels of newer antipsychotics because studies showed the drugs nearly doubled the risk of death for older patients with dementia.