Saturday, December 2, 2006

Group Says Herpes Study Put Pregnant Women at Risk

Dozens of poor and minority pregnant women received placebos instead of a drug believed to prevent outbreaks of genital herpes, putting them and their fetuses at risk, consumer watchdogs charged yesterday.

The researchers defended their work, saying in part that the study was to assess the uncertain risks of the drug to the women's fetuses.

In the study, researchers at Parkland Hospital in Dallas gave 170 pregnant women the drug valacyclovir, sold as Valtrex by GlaxoSmithKline, to see if the drug would reduce herpes outbreaks at birth. The virus can be fatal to newborns if infected during delivery.

An additional 168 women from the largely indigent population that the hospital serves were given dummy pills. More of those women went on to have Caesarean sections than did those given valacyclovir, which the body breaks down to form acyclovir.

Since the researchers had published a study midway through the clinical trial that concluded giving women acyclovir could reduce the C-section rate, critics alleged that researchers needlessly put half the women at risk by not giving them the drug instead of dummy pills.

The criticism appeared in a letter to the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

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· TEMPE, Ariz. -- City leaders apologized for a program on Tempe's cable channel, which showed a white police officer telling two black men that they could get out of a littering ticket by performing a rap. Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman and Police Chief Tom Ryff suspended future production of the program "Tempe StreetBeat," which followed officers on patrol in the Phoenix suburb.

· ST. ALBANS, W.Va. -- The holiday display in this small town has a manger with shepherds, a guiding star, camels and a palm tree, but no baby Jesus, Mary or Joseph. Parks superintendent David Cunningham said that Jesus was left out because he was concerned about possible lawsuits over the separation of church and state. But Mayor Dick Callaway said the omission occurred for purely technical reasons: "It's not easy to put a light-up representation of a baby in a small manger scene, you know."

· CLEARWATER, Fla. -- The state's human services chief was ordered to pay $80,000 for keeping mentally ill inmates in jail, a week after she was charged with criminal contempt. Judge Crockett Farnell imposed the sanction against Department of Children and Families chief Lucy Hadi during a hearing on the status of seven Pinellas County jail inmates found incompetent months ago but only recently moved to mental health facilities.

· RIO GRANDE CITY, Tex. -- Authorities found nearly nine tons of marijuana, valued at about $8 million, hidden along with firearms in two underground bunkers, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. No arrests had been made.

· MINNEAPOLIS -- Officials at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport said that they will consider setting aside a private area for prayer and meditation. A group of Somali clerics, concerned about the removal of six Muslim clerics from a US Airways flight last week, requested the area of airport officials.

· LAS VEGAS -- Police said they will recommend that no criminal charges be filed against Nevada Gov.-elect Jim Gibbons (R), a congressman accused by a cocktail waitress of assaulting her in a parking garage three weeks before Election Day.

-- From News Services