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Their Acne Medications Set off a Rare Chain Reaction That Killed Them
Izzy McKinney was a healthy teenager who wrote poetry, played the mandolin and took pride in her flair with an eyeliner pencil. She also had acne.
She tried topical medications and then antibiotics. Two weeks after starting a doctor-prescribed antibiotic — trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole — Izzy came down with a mild fever.
Less than three months later, one month after her 16th birthday, Izzy’s heart failed, and she died.
An autopsy revealed the cause was DRESS — drug reaction with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms. It’s a rare but deadly condition triggered by medications often used to treat acne, seizures and gout.
Ever since Izzy’s death nine years ago, Izzy’s mother, Tasha Tolliver, has been on a mission to warn other parents and doctors about DRESS, which affects as many as 1 in 1,000 people exposed to several commonly prescribed antibiotics and anti-seizure medications, including vancomycin, minocycline, lamotrigine, phenytoin and carbamazepine, as well as allopurinol, used to treat gout.
DRESS is fatal in up to 1 in 10 cases.
Mental Health Problems Often Go Undetected in Youth Who Die by Suicide, Analysis Suggests
Three out of five youth who died by suicide in the U.S. did not have a prior mental health diagnosis, signaling missed opportunities to identify children and adolescents for suicide prevention strategies, including therapy or medications to treat depression.
This finding comes from an analysis of over 40,000 suicides by youth of 10–24 years of age from 2010 to 2021, recorded in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Violent Death Reporting System. Results were published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
“We discovered that certain youth who died by suicide were less likely to have a documented mental health diagnosis, including those who used firearms, were of minoritized race or ethnicity, males, and children younger than 14 years of age,” said co-author Jennifer Hoffmann, M.D., MS, emergency medicine physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“Our findings point to the critical need to increase equitable access to mental health screening, diagnosis, and treatment for all youth.”
New Initiative Launched by WHO to Develop mRNA Bird Flu Vaccines
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Monday that it has launched an initiative to help accelerate the development of a human bird flu vaccine using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.
The project, which will be led by Argentinian pharmaceutical company Sinergium Biotech, will aim to identify vaccine candidates for manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries, the WHO said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has previously said the risk of bird flu, also known as avian influenza, to the general public is low and there is currently no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Federal health officials have also prepared millions of vials of an available non-mRNA bird flu vaccine as a precautionary measure, just in case it becomes necessary.
Pfizer Tacks on $1B to 2024 Revenue Outlook Amid Cost-Cutting Drive
For more than a year after Pfizer’s COVID-19 product sales peaked at the end of 2022, the company’s quarterly revenues showed year-over-year declines. But now five quarters later, the drugmaker is back to growth for the first time in a boost that prompted a full-year guidance bump of $1 billion.
During the second quarter, Pfizer collected sales of $13.3 billion, a 2% uptick from last year’s second quarter and a 3% boost operationally. Taking COVID-19 products Comirnaty and Paxlovid out of the equation, operational revenue growth totaled 14%.
Considering the company’s total haul for the first half of this year is now up by 11% to $28 billion, Pfizer opted to crank up its full-year earnings outlook by $1 billion to reflect a “strong business performance,” chief financial officer David Denton said on the second-quarter earnings call.
That means Pfizer‘s 2024 revenues are now expected to fall somewhere between $59.5 billion and $62.5 billion, a 9% to 11% growth rate sans COVID-19 product sales.
Not a Booster: 4 Notes on Fall COVID Vaccines
Becker’s Hospital Review reported:
Epidemiologists and virologists are moving away from the term “booster” to describe COVID-19 vaccines, according to a July 26 ABC News report.
Experts are calling COVID-19 shots “updated vaccines” to embed the idea of at least two annual jabs: one for influenza, another for COVID-19. In comparison, boosters were created to strengthen resistance during infection spikes rather than an annual campaign.
It will be difficult to stamp out the use of “booster” because the term has become “pervasive,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory committee member Keipp Talbot, MD, told CBS News in September.
FDA Warns of Accidental Overdoses From Compounded Versions of Ozempic
People taking compounded versions of Ozempic have been overdosing on the drug, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warns.
These overdoses typically are due to miscommunications or miscalculations regarding dosage, the FDA added.
“Dosing errors have resulted from patients measuring and self-administering incorrect doses of the drug and health care providers miscalculating doses of the drug,” the FDA alert said.
Health problems caused by overdoses of compounded semaglutide — the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy — include severe nausea, vomiting and hypoglycemia, the FDA said.
Other side effects include fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, pancreatitis and gallstones. People who have a severe overdose might need to be kept for observation for an extended period, since the half-life of semaglutide is about a week, the FDA said.
Vaccine Doses for 600,000 Children and Pregnant Women Flown to North Korea
More than 4 million vaccine doses have been flown to Pyongyang, raising hopes that North Korea could open up again to United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, amid reports of a worsening health situation in the authoritarian state.
The vaccines include those against hepatitis B, polio, measles and tetanus, and were provided by Unicef, the World Health Organization and the vaccine alliance Gavi.
Organizers say they are intended for 600,000 children and pregnant women who have missed out on vaccines since the COVID-19 pandemic. They are to be administered as part of a catch-up campaign in September by North Korea’s public health ministry.
