TV News LIES

A near tripling of new HIV infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia over the past nine years is frightening, the U.N.'s top AIDS official said Wednesday.

The United Nations estimates that 1.4 million people were living with HIV in the region in 2009 - almost three times the number in 2000 - and that, combined, the Russian Federation and Ukraine account for nearly 90 percent of newly reported infections in the region.

Because children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to radiation, doctors three years ago mounted a national campaign to protect them by reducing diagnostic radiation to only those levels seen as absolutely necessary.

It is a message that has resonated in many clinics and hospitals. Yet there is one busy place where it has not: the dental office.

Johnson & Johnson, the world’s biggest health-products maker, recalled about 4 million packages of Children’s Benadryl allergy tablets and about 800,000 bottles of junior-strength Motrin caplets, citing manufacturing lapses.

“When the manufacturing process was developed, it was not done as thoroughly as it should have been,” Bonnie Jacobs, a J&J spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview today. “There is no indication that the product does not meet quality standards.”

For only the second time, the Food and Drug Administration approved a company's request to test an embryonic stem cell-based therapy on human patients. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), based in Marlborough, Mass., will begin testing its retinal cell treatment this year in a dozen patients with Stargardt's macular dystrophy, an inherited degenerative eye disease that leads to blindness in children. In July, the FDA released its hold on the first trial of an embryonic stem cell based treatment, for spinal cord injury.

ACT's trial will involve injecting retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells, which nurture the retina, into volunteers with the most advanced forms of Stargardt's, in an attempt to replace dying and no longer functioning photoreceptor cells. In animals, the infusion of healthy cells improved vision and rescued the function of some diseased cells.

Public health officials from around the world agreed this week on some new anti-smoking rules, but others that could have sharply reduced global tobacco consumption remained out of reach at an international conference Friday.

Host Uruguay got unanimous support from the 171 countries that have signed on to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control treaty, encouraging President Jose Mujica to promise a fierce defense of the country's tough anti-smoking policies against a legal challenge by Philip Morris International, the world's second-largest tobacco company.

The maker of Darvon and Darvocet announced Friday that it will stop marketing the widely used painkillers in the U.S. because of a new study linking the active ingredient in the drugs to serious and sometimes fatal heart rhythm abnormalities.

Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Newport, Ky., agreed to the ban at the request of the Food and Drug Administration, which also asked makers of generic versions of the drugs' core compound, known as propoxyphene, to stop selling it in the U.S.