Posted on behalf of Leigh Phillips.

Two years after the plight of hundreds of children in Nigerian villages suffering from acute lead poisoning as a result of illegal gold mining first emerged, the government has done little to tackle the problem, human-rights groups and development non-governmental organizations (NGOs) say.

The mysterious deaths of hundreds of children in the northern state of Zamfara were thought by villagers to be the result of malaria, although in some villages almost all of the children had died. It was only when medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also called Doctors Without Borders) in 2010 took blood tests from local people as part of an immunization programme that the reason for the deaths was identified.

More than 400 children have died and some 4,000 have been contaminated by exposure to lead in what the NGO calls one of the worst cases of mass lead poisoning in the modern era. The villages affected, in the dry Sahel region on the southern edge of the Sahara, are home to subsistence farmers that have taken to small-scale gold mining in recent years as the price of the metal has soared.

Miners break open rocks containing both gold and lead near their homes, sometimes crushing them in flour grinders; soil containing the heavy metal also contaminates water sources.

The lead in the dust is toxic to the bones, heart, intestines, kidneys, and nervous and reproductive systems, and adults are affected by swelling, dizziness, vomiting, organ failure and infertility.

Owing to their small size, children are more sensitive to the poisoning, which can cause permanent learning and behavioural disorders, with symptoms including seizures, anaemia, delirium and coma.

The village of Bagega has been particularly badly affected, with an estimated 1,500 children poisoned.

The MSF has treated 2,500 children with high levels of lead in their blood, but many more are unable to be treated as they continue to be exposed. In these areas, treatment could result in still worse medical conditions. Continue reading →

Cross posted from Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog on behalf of Elie Dolgin.

There’s bad news out today for ‘good cholesterol’ drugs. More than five years after New York’s Pfizer made waves for pulling the plug on torcetrapib—a drug designed to elevate blood levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or ‘good’ cholesterol—Roche is now making a similar move.

The Swiss pharma giant announced plans to halt development of its own HDL-raising compound, dalcetrapib, after an interim independent review of the company’s pivotal 15,000-person trial found no signs of clinically meaningful efficacy. Unlike torcetrapib, which was linked with an increased risk of heart attacks, no problematic safety signals were detected for dalcetrapib. “We are disappointed by the fact that this drug didn’t provide benefit to the patients in our study,” Hal Barron, Roche’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.

As we reported last July, studies of various drugs have cast doubt on the idea that raising HDL cholesterol levels will translate into robust clinical benefits for patients.

There are still some experts holding out hope, though. Robert Rosenson, director of cardiometabolic disorders at the Mount Sinai Heart Institute inNew York, thinks that other HDL modulators in clinical testing—including Merck’s anacetrapib and Eli Lilly’s evacetrapib—could hold therapeutic promise. “It would be a mistake to close the door on this class of compounds,” he says. “I don’t believe that the failure of dalcetrapib will mean that these agents are not going to be efficacious in the right populations.”

Cross posted from Scientific American’s Observations blog on behalf of Katherine Harmon.

A strange illness has been killing thousands of young people each year, and recently it has started claiming even more victims in Africa.

Called nodding disease, it usually strikes children at the age of 4 or 5 years and starts with occasional bouts of uncontrolled nodding. As the disease progresses through adolescence, the nodding often buds into full-blown epileptic seizures, and victims lose developmental ground, often becoming unable to care for themselves, communicate or even avoid simple accidental death by drowning or burning.

Since it was first described in 1962 in Tanzania, the frequently fatal disease has been blamed, variously, on viruses, pesticides, fungi, vitamin deficiency, monkey meat and parasites. A new special report, published online April 12 in Science, details the more recent outbreaks of the condition in South Sudan and northern Uganda and helps to refine the list of possible causes.

“We have a long list of things that are not causing nodding disease,” Scott Dowell, director of the division of global disease detection and emergency response at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters earlier this year.

Dowell and his team have made many trips to Uganda to further investigate this strange syndrome. They used EEGs and MRIs to study the brains of patients while they were going through a head-nodding bout. “Something is badly wrong with the brains of these kids, and it’s physiological,” he told Science. But these tools did not lead them to a definite answer, although most viruses, prion disease (from eating monkey meat), fungi and pesticides seem to be losing steam as likely explanations. Continue reading →