- Email: [email protected]
Merck settles Vioxx lawsuits
News in perspective
REUTERS
Upfront– OIL BLUES IN BLACK SEA The Black Sea just got a lot blacker. Thousands of tonnes of oil and sulphur have been spilled as a result of storms last weekend that sank at least 10 ships in the Strait of Kerch, a channel linking the Black Sea with the smaller Sea of Azov to the north. The oil tanker Volganeft-139 ran aground and split open, releasing half of its 4800-tonne load of heavy fuel oil. Two other freighters sank and between them released 6500 tonnes of sulphur. Greenpeace Russia fears the heaviest oil could sink and contaminate the environment for years to come. “Bottom pollution destroys spawning grounds and hinders fish spawning and reproduction,” it said in a statement issued on 12 November. Jim Readman of the Plymouth Marine
Laboratory in the UK monitored pollution in the Black Sea in 1995. Because the Black Sea is uniquely bereft of oxygen below about 150 metres, no one knows how oil will behave in such conditions, he says. For the same reason, it is difficult to predict the impact of the sulphur spill. “There are no precedents for this type of incident,” he says. Meanwhile in the US, a South Korean container ship, the Cosco Busan, crashed into San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in thick fog. Some 180 tonnes of oil escaped, and a criminal investigation is under way to establish how the collision occurred. The US Coast Guard has been criticised for failing to grasp the serious nature of the spill – the worst in the area for 20 years.
Bird flu stand-off
Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN) are being turned into patented diagnostic tests and vaccines that they can’t afford. “There has been a huge spike in H5N1-related patents recently,” says Ed Hammond of pressure group the Sunshine Project. In August, Indonesia argued that countries that supply virus should be guaranteed access to vaccines. It is unclear whether the Geneva meeting will make enough progress towards setting up such a system to get Indonesia sending samples again. But “we need to know what is happening to the Indonesian virus,” says Dave Heymann, head of flu at the WHO.
–There’ll be more to come–
WANT people to temper their drinking habits? Then ditch the carrot and reach for the stick. Raise prices, reduce availability of booze and block marketing of alcohol to young people. That’s the stern message to the UK and other governments from independent UK think tank the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which published a report on 13 November examining the circumstances under which “nanny state” policies might be justified. “At present the UK government is trying to encourage a sensible drinking culture,” says John Krebs, chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “But walk through ‘vomit alley’ in central
public health, including alcohol, obesity and smoking. It concluded that intervention was most strongly justified to limit excessive alcohol consumption, as drunkards harm others as well as themselves. Nuffield report co-author Roger Brownsword said that excessive alcohol consumption costs the UK £20 billion a year, a third of it through crime and public disorder. It also results in domestic violence, exposing 1 million children to the ill effects of home consumption by parents, carers and siblings, and leads to economic losses through absenteeism. CHRIS MALUSZYNSKI/MOMENT
Tough on booze
“Walk through ‘vomit alley’ on a Saturday night to see an absence of sensible drinking” Oxford on a Saturday night and you will see a conspicuous absence of it.” The council examined several areas in which governments might intervene to improve 6 | NewScientist | 17 November 2007
–Harmful fun–
THE world’s ability to track the evolution of flu and develop vaccines against it hangs in the balance. Governments will meet next week at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, to try and rebuild the global system for sharing flu viruses after protests by Indonesia earlier this year. The country has sent only five H5N1 samples from infected people to WHO labs in 2007. Virologists say this is not enough to track H5N1 evolution. Indonesia and its allies complain that the samples they send to the WHO-run Global
Vioxx settlement HOW can losing $4.85 billion be a good result? Well, it could have been much worse for drugs giant Merck, which has agreed to pay this sum to settle the majority of US lawsuits over claims that its painkiller Vioxx caused tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes – many of them fatal. After Vioxx was withdrawn from the market in September 2004, some analysts predicted Merck would face $30 billion in liabilities. But the company has www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS won 12 of the 17 cases that have come to court in the US so far, and it is unclear whether damages would have exceeded the sum Merck has agreed to pay. Merck’s legal fees alone could have run to billions of dollars – it had already set aside $1.9 billion to fight the cases. Most US states allow people three years to file claims for damages, so a settlement was unlikely before now. “I think most people are surprised that it has come this soon,” says Peter Schuck of Yale Law School. Individual patients or their families can now expect to receive around $70,000 on average, after meeting their legal expenses.
IN A bizarre twist to the evolution wars, supporters of intelligent design are accusing the producers of a TV science documentary series of bringing religion into US classrooms. The Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, Washington, alleges that teaching materials accompanying Judgment Day: Intelligent design on trial, broadcast on 13 November, encourage unconstitutional teaching practices. The teaching package states: “Q: Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion? A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anti-religious is simply
Impact averted?
DEATH ON THE OCEAN WAVES
WHAT goes around comes around. Unfortunately, no such Pollution from ships, in the form of karma figures in plans to deflect tiny airborne particles, kills at least asteroids on a collision course 60,000 people a year – and unless with Earth, a hearing of the US action is taken the toll will climb. So House Science and Technology says a report investigating the number Committee was told last week. of deaths that can be linked to soot One big whack will deflect an emissions from the shipping industry asteroid temporarily, but does not carried out by James Corbett of the guarantee safety next time its University of Delaware, Newark, orbit brings it close. and colleagues. Asteroid researchers have long Ships release between 1.2 and debated the merits of deflecting 1.6 million tonnes of airborne particles asteroids with a powerful blast each year, mostly from burning such as a nuclear explosion. shipping fuel. The particles are less However, Rusty Schweickart, who than 10 micrometres across and heads an asteroid research group include various carbon particles, called the B612 Foundation, told sulphur and nitrogen oxides. They are the committee that the effects of small enough to enter the blood, and powerful blasts are hard to can trigger inflammations which predict, especially if Earth’s eventually lead to heart or lung failure. gravitational pull acts on the object. An asteroid could pass through one of the “keyholes” that would nudge it back onto a collision course, so once diverted it might need to be steered past Earth to prevent this. At the same hearing, members attacked NASA for ignoring smaller asteroids. Two years ago, Congress asked NASA to plan a programme to identify dangerous objects as small as 140 metres across, but the space agency says it prefers to work from other surveys, such as the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. –Shipping under a cloud– www.newscientist.com
false.” According to Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, this answer favours one religious viewpoint, arguably violating the US constitution. “We’re afraid that teachers might get sued,” he says.
Plankton plan nixed Nations should use “utmost caution” before modifying the oceans in a bid to mop up carbon dioxide, international negotiators agreed last week. Several companies offer to offset emissions by triggering plankton growth to absorb CO2. But the London convention, which regulates international waters, says we need to know more before the process can be considered safe.
“We’re afraid that teachers might get sued for bringing religion into the classroom” A lawyer for WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, which produces the show, says the package is covered by the right to free speech. He declined to comment on the claim that teachers risked lawsuits.
Bearly clinging on The sun bear of south-east Asia has for the first time been classified as vulnerable on the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Six out of the eight bear species are now considered threatened with extinction.
Last common ancestor
Deaths caused by these particles worldwide will increase by 40 per cent by 2012, the team predicts. Corbett’s team used two independent inventories of the emissions produced by the shipping industry. They fed these figures into climate models to predict where the winds would carry the emissions and added population density figures for the areas affected. Using this they were able to compare the concentrations of the particles with the incidence of premature deaths to arrive at an estimate of the total number of deaths that can be attributed to shipping emissions (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es071686z). “A significant number of the deaths are related to fuel quality,” Corbett says.
A 10-million-year-old jawbone found in Kenya may be very similar to that of the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. The discovery indicates that the ancestor of African great apes and humans likely evolved in Africa, and didn’t return from Europe or Asia, as some have proposed (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0706190104).
Breast cancer gene boost
M.LANGER/PLAINPICTURE
No religion please
Breast cancer treatments could work better if drugs were chosen according to gene signatures in a patient’s DNA, according to a study in The Lancet Oncology (DOI: 10.1016/S14702045(07)70345-5). An analysis of breast cancer patients showed that treatments successful in 44 per cent of the patients could have worked in 70 per cent of them if doctors had based drug regimes on the results of genetic tests.
Probe pops by to say hello The comet-chasing Rosetta space probe swung by Earth on 13 November, picking up speed in a gravitational slingshot to help it on its way to the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerismenko. The European Space Agency probe was launched in 2004.
17 November 2007 | NewScientist | 7
REUTERS
Upfront– OIL BLUES IN BLACK SEA The Black Sea just got a lot blacker. Thousands of tonnes of oil and sulphur have been spilled as a result of storms last weekend that sank at least 10 ships in the Strait of Kerch, a channel linking the Black Sea with the smaller Sea of Azov to the north. The oil tanker Volganeft-139 ran aground and split open, releasing half of its 4800-tonne load of heavy fuel oil. Two other freighters sank and between them released 6500 tonnes of sulphur. Greenpeace Russia fears the heaviest oil could sink and contaminate the environment for years to come. “Bottom pollution destroys spawning grounds and hinders fish spawning and reproduction,” it said in a statement issued on 12 November. Jim Readman of the Plymouth Marine
Laboratory in the UK monitored pollution in the Black Sea in 1995. Because the Black Sea is uniquely bereft of oxygen below about 150 metres, no one knows how oil will behave in such conditions, he says. For the same reason, it is difficult to predict the impact of the sulphur spill. “There are no precedents for this type of incident,” he says. Meanwhile in the US, a South Korean container ship, the Cosco Busan, crashed into San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in thick fog. Some 180 tonnes of oil escaped, and a criminal investigation is under way to establish how the collision occurred. The US Coast Guard has been criticised for failing to grasp the serious nature of the spill – the worst in the area for 20 years.
Bird flu stand-off
Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN) are being turned into patented diagnostic tests and vaccines that they can’t afford. “There has been a huge spike in H5N1-related patents recently,” says Ed Hammond of pressure group the Sunshine Project. In August, Indonesia argued that countries that supply virus should be guaranteed access to vaccines. It is unclear whether the Geneva meeting will make enough progress towards setting up such a system to get Indonesia sending samples again. But “we need to know what is happening to the Indonesian virus,” says Dave Heymann, head of flu at the WHO.
–There’ll be more to come–
WANT people to temper their drinking habits? Then ditch the carrot and reach for the stick. Raise prices, reduce availability of booze and block marketing of alcohol to young people. That’s the stern message to the UK and other governments from independent UK think tank the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which published a report on 13 November examining the circumstances under which “nanny state” policies might be justified. “At present the UK government is trying to encourage a sensible drinking culture,” says John Krebs, chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “But walk through ‘vomit alley’ in central
public health, including alcohol, obesity and smoking. It concluded that intervention was most strongly justified to limit excessive alcohol consumption, as drunkards harm others as well as themselves. Nuffield report co-author Roger Brownsword said that excessive alcohol consumption costs the UK £20 billion a year, a third of it through crime and public disorder. It also results in domestic violence, exposing 1 million children to the ill effects of home consumption by parents, carers and siblings, and leads to economic losses through absenteeism. CHRIS MALUSZYNSKI/MOMENT
Tough on booze
“Walk through ‘vomit alley’ on a Saturday night to see an absence of sensible drinking” Oxford on a Saturday night and you will see a conspicuous absence of it.” The council examined several areas in which governments might intervene to improve 6 | NewScientist | 17 November 2007
–Harmful fun–
THE world’s ability to track the evolution of flu and develop vaccines against it hangs in the balance. Governments will meet next week at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, to try and rebuild the global system for sharing flu viruses after protests by Indonesia earlier this year. The country has sent only five H5N1 samples from infected people to WHO labs in 2007. Virologists say this is not enough to track H5N1 evolution. Indonesia and its allies complain that the samples they send to the WHO-run Global
Vioxx settlement HOW can losing $4.85 billion be a good result? Well, it could have been much worse for drugs giant Merck, which has agreed to pay this sum to settle the majority of US lawsuits over claims that its painkiller Vioxx caused tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes – many of them fatal. After Vioxx was withdrawn from the market in September 2004, some analysts predicted Merck would face $30 billion in liabilities. But the company has www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS won 12 of the 17 cases that have come to court in the US so far, and it is unclear whether damages would have exceeded the sum Merck has agreed to pay. Merck’s legal fees alone could have run to billions of dollars – it had already set aside $1.9 billion to fight the cases. Most US states allow people three years to file claims for damages, so a settlement was unlikely before now. “I think most people are surprised that it has come this soon,” says Peter Schuck of Yale Law School. Individual patients or their families can now expect to receive around $70,000 on average, after meeting their legal expenses.
IN A bizarre twist to the evolution wars, supporters of intelligent design are accusing the producers of a TV science documentary series of bringing religion into US classrooms. The Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, Washington, alleges that teaching materials accompanying Judgment Day: Intelligent design on trial, broadcast on 13 November, encourage unconstitutional teaching practices. The teaching package states: “Q: Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion? A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anti-religious is simply
Impact averted?
DEATH ON THE OCEAN WAVES
WHAT goes around comes around. Unfortunately, no such Pollution from ships, in the form of karma figures in plans to deflect tiny airborne particles, kills at least asteroids on a collision course 60,000 people a year – and unless with Earth, a hearing of the US action is taken the toll will climb. So House Science and Technology says a report investigating the number Committee was told last week. of deaths that can be linked to soot One big whack will deflect an emissions from the shipping industry asteroid temporarily, but does not carried out by James Corbett of the guarantee safety next time its University of Delaware, Newark, orbit brings it close. and colleagues. Asteroid researchers have long Ships release between 1.2 and debated the merits of deflecting 1.6 million tonnes of airborne particles asteroids with a powerful blast each year, mostly from burning such as a nuclear explosion. shipping fuel. The particles are less However, Rusty Schweickart, who than 10 micrometres across and heads an asteroid research group include various carbon particles, called the B612 Foundation, told sulphur and nitrogen oxides. They are the committee that the effects of small enough to enter the blood, and powerful blasts are hard to can trigger inflammations which predict, especially if Earth’s eventually lead to heart or lung failure. gravitational pull acts on the object. An asteroid could pass through one of the “keyholes” that would nudge it back onto a collision course, so once diverted it might need to be steered past Earth to prevent this. At the same hearing, members attacked NASA for ignoring smaller asteroids. Two years ago, Congress asked NASA to plan a programme to identify dangerous objects as small as 140 metres across, but the space agency says it prefers to work from other surveys, such as the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. –Shipping under a cloud– www.newscientist.com
false.” According to Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, this answer favours one religious viewpoint, arguably violating the US constitution. “We’re afraid that teachers might get sued,” he says.
Plankton plan nixed Nations should use “utmost caution” before modifying the oceans in a bid to mop up carbon dioxide, international negotiators agreed last week. Several companies offer to offset emissions by triggering plankton growth to absorb CO2. But the London convention, which regulates international waters, says we need to know more before the process can be considered safe.
“We’re afraid that teachers might get sued for bringing religion into the classroom” A lawyer for WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, which produces the show, says the package is covered by the right to free speech. He declined to comment on the claim that teachers risked lawsuits.
Bearly clinging on The sun bear of south-east Asia has for the first time been classified as vulnerable on the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Six out of the eight bear species are now considered threatened with extinction.
Last common ancestor
Deaths caused by these particles worldwide will increase by 40 per cent by 2012, the team predicts. Corbett’s team used two independent inventories of the emissions produced by the shipping industry. They fed these figures into climate models to predict where the winds would carry the emissions and added population density figures for the areas affected. Using this they were able to compare the concentrations of the particles with the incidence of premature deaths to arrive at an estimate of the total number of deaths that can be attributed to shipping emissions (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es071686z). “A significant number of the deaths are related to fuel quality,” Corbett says.
A 10-million-year-old jawbone found in Kenya may be very similar to that of the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. The discovery indicates that the ancestor of African great apes and humans likely evolved in Africa, and didn’t return from Europe or Asia, as some have proposed (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0706190104).
Breast cancer gene boost
M.LANGER/PLAINPICTURE
No religion please
Breast cancer treatments could work better if drugs were chosen according to gene signatures in a patient’s DNA, according to a study in The Lancet Oncology (DOI: 10.1016/S14702045(07)70345-5). An analysis of breast cancer patients showed that treatments successful in 44 per cent of the patients could have worked in 70 per cent of them if doctors had based drug regimes on the results of genetic tests.
Probe pops by to say hello The comet-chasing Rosetta space probe swung by Earth on 13 November, picking up speed in a gravitational slingshot to help it on its way to the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerismenko. The European Space Agency probe was launched in 2004.
17 November 2007 | NewScientist | 7