Pharmacy Blames Cleaners in Meningitis Outbreak

Jan 4, 2013 11:41am

Credit: Minnesota Department of Health/AP Photo

The pharmacy at the heart of the fungal meningitis outbreak says a cleaning company it hired should share the blame for the tainted steroid injections that caused more than 600 illnesses in 19 states, killing 39 people.

Click here to read about the road to recovery for fungal meningitis victims.

The New England Compounding Pharmacy, which made the fungus-tainted drugs, sent a letter to UniFirst Corp., which provided once-a month cleaning services to the Framingham, Mass., lab, “demanding” it indemnify NECC for the meningitis outbreak, according to a UniFirst filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Based on its preliminary review of this matter, the company believes that NECC’s claims are without merit,” UniFirst wrote in its quarterly filing.

The New England Compounding Center recalled 17,000 vials of tainted steroid injections on Sept. 26 before recalling all drugs and shutting down on Oct. 6.

The Food and Drug Administration investigated NECC’s lab and found that a quarter of the steroid injections in one bin contained “greenish black foreign matter,” according to the report.  The FDA also identified several cleanrooms that had bacterial or mold overgrowths.

UniFirst’s UniClean business cleaned portions of the NECC cleanrooms to NECC’s specifications and using NECC’s cleansing solutions, UniFirst spokesman Adam Soreoff said in a statement. It provided two technicians once a month for about an hour and a half.

“UniClean was not in any way responsible for NECC’s day-to-day operations, its overall facility cleanliness, or the integrity of the products they produced,” Soreoff said. “Therefore, based on what we know, we believe any NECC claims against UniFirst or UniClean are unfounded and without merit. ”

Click here for our fungal meningitis outbreak timeline, “Anatomy of an Outbreak.”

NECC was not immediately available for comment.

The House of Representatives subpoenaed Barry Cadden, who owns NECC,  to a hearing in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 14. He declined to testify when members of Congress pressed him on his role in ensuring that the drugs his company produced were safe and sterile.

“On advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer on the basis of my constitutional rights and privileges including the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States,” he said at the hearing.

Members of Congress also questioned whether the FDA could have prevented the outbreak.

Compounding pharmacies, which are intended to tailor drugs to individuals with a single prescription from a single doctor, are typically overseen by state pharmacy boards rather than the FDA because they are so small. However, in 2006, the FDA issued a warning letter to NECC, accusing it of mass-producing a topical anesthetic cream, and jeopardizing another drug’s sterility by repackaging it.

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Abbas sees Palestinian unity as Fatah rallies in Gaza

GAZA (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Abbas predicted the end of a five-year split between the two big Palestinian factions as his Fatah movement staged its first mass rally in Gaza with the blessing of Hamas Islamists who rule the enclave.

"Soon we will regain our unity," Abbas, whose authority has been limited to the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the 2007 civil war between the two factions, said in a televised address to hundreds of thousands of followers marching in Gaza on Friday, with yellow Fatah flags instead of the green of Hamas.

The hardline Hamas movement, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist, expelled secular Fatah from Gaza during the war. It gave permission for the rally after the deadlock in peace talks between Abbas's administration and Israel narrowed the two factions' ideological differences.

The Palestinian rivals have drawn closer since Israel's assault on Gaza assault in November, in which Hamas, though battered, claimed victory.

Egypt has long tried to broker Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, but past efforts have foundered over questions of power-sharing, control of weaponry, and to what extent Israel and other powers would accept a Palestinian administration including Hamas.

An Egyptian official told Reuters Cairo was preparing to invite the factions for new negotiations within two weeks.

Israel fears grassroots support for Hamas could eventually topple Abbas's Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.

"Hamas could seize control of the PA any day," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.

The demonstration marked 48 years since Fatah's founding as the spearhead of the Palestinians' fight against Israel. Its longtime leader Yasser Arafat signed an interim 1993 peace accord that won Palestinians a measure of self rule.

Hamas, which rejected the 1993 deal, fought and won a Palestinian parliamentary election in 2006. It formed an uneasy coalition with Fatah until their violent split a year later.

Though shunned by the West, Hamas feels bolstered by electoral gains for Islamist movements in neighboring Egypt and elsewhere in the region - a confidence reflected in the fact Friday's Fatah demonstration was allowed to take place.

"The success of the rally is a success for Fatah, and for Hamas too," said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. "The positive atmosphere is a step on the way to regain national unity."

Fatah, meanwhile, has been riven by dissent about the credibility of Abbas's statesmanship, especially given Israel's continued settlement-building on West Bank land. The Israelis quit Gaza unilaterally in 2005 after 38 years of occupation.

"The message today is that Fatah cannot be wiped out," said Amal Hamad, a member of the group's ruling body, referring to the demonstration attended by several Abbas advisers. "Fatah lives, no one can exclude it and it seeks to end the division."

In his speech, Abbas promised to return to Gaza soon and said Palestinian unification would be "a step on the way to ending the (Israeli) occupation".

(Editing by Dan Williams, Alistair Lyon and Jason Webb)

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Davos 2013 to focus on health issues

GENEVA: The World Economic Forum will focus on global health issues when it holds its annual winter meeting in Davos, Switzerland from January 23-27, Forum organisers said on Thursday.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and World Bank president Jim Yong Kim are to be joined by several health ministers and more than 25 heads of healthcare companies under the theme of "Resilient Dynamism," a Forum statement said.

"The health community will focus on the future of sustainable national health systems, workplace wellness and individual health," it added.

According to the Forum's organisers, global consideration of health-care issues often is held back by short-term thinking and entrenched positions, and they urged countries to "break from the status quo to embark on courageous transformation to sustainably deliver access to high-quality health services."

The Forum plans to launch a report on sustainable health systems and health in the workplace as the meeting gets under way.

The report is based on a study of more than two million workers in 125 countries.

- AFP/jc

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Watch CNET's The British Are Coming panel at CES

From left: Colin Crawford (Pure), Ian Drew (ARM) and Ambarish Mitra (Blippar)

I am the Editor of CNET UK and I have been going to CES for over a decade now, but there's one country's tech that I almost never see reported on at the show -- my own. I've always wondered why that is.

Brits have been involved in so many important tech inventions over the years, from television to the World Wide Web -- are our best discoveries behind us, or do we still have something left to give?

On Tuesday at 2pm Pacific time (10pm UK time) I'll be trying to find the answer to that question and more by talking to three people at the coalface of the UK tech industry, to find out what they are up to. From the gadget side, I'll have Colin Crawford of Pure, a company dedicated to streaming audio and radio products, which is launching a wireless speaker to rival Sonos into the US.

Representing British inventors will be Ian Drew from ARM, probably the UK's biggest tech success story. ARM's technology dominates the mobile industry, featuring in most smart phone and
tablet chips.

Finally, as a young successful company that won a place at the 2012 CES in a competition, Blippar has a thing or two to say about what it's like to start and run a company from the UK. Ambarish Mitra, Founder & CEO, will be at the stage to tell us about that.

We'll discuss what each of them is launching at the show and get into subjects such as what it's like to run companies in these fields from Britain -- the advantages and disadvantages. We'll chat about the tech scene in the UK, whether it's thriving or shrinking and how it compares to the big daddy, Silicon Valley.

So please do join us at 2pm on Tuesday - it'll either be live-streamed at ces.cnet.com or live.cnet.com (once I find out for sure, I'll update this post). Toodle-pip for now.

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FTC: Google does not violate antitrust laws

Google hasn't violated any antitrust laws, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday, but it has agreed to make some changes in how it treats its rivals as part of a settlement to end the 19-month investigation into its business practices.

The FTC's investigation focused on allegations that Google has been abusing its dominance in Internet search. Google's rivals say the company has been highlighting its own services on its influential results page while burying the links to competing sites.

Google Inc. has fiercely defended its right to recommend the websites that it believes are the most relevant.

The FTC said it voted unanimously to close the investigation on whether Google's algorithm unfairly favored itself because there was no evidence that Google violated antitrust laws.

"Although some evidence suggested that Google was trying to eliminate competition, Google's primary reason for changing the look and feel of its search results to highlight its own products was to improve the user experience," FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said to reporters Thursday.

Google was also investigated for abusing patent protection against competitors like Apple. As part of the settlement, Google is agreeing to license patents deemed to be "essential" for rival mobile devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPad, regulators said.

Regulators say Google is also promising that upon request, it will exclude snippets copied from other websites in its summaries of key information, even though the company had insisted the practice is legal under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law.

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Sandy Hook Parents Cope With Students' Return

Sandy Hook parents put their children on school buses this morning and waved goodbye as the yellow bus rolled away, but this first day back since the pre-Christmas massacre is anything but normal for the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Erin Milgram, the mother of a first grader and a fourth grader at Sandy Hook, told "Good Morning America" that she was going to drive behind the bus and stay with her 7-year-old Lauren for the entire school day.

"I haven't gotten that far yet, about not being with them," Milgram said. "I just need to stay with them for a while."

Today is "Opening Day" for Sandy Hook Elementary School, which is re-opening about six miles away in the former Chalk Hill school in Monroe, Conn.

Lauren was in teacher Kaitlin Roig's first grade class on Dec. 14 when gunman Adam Lanza forced his way into the school and killed 20 students and six staffers.

Roig has been hailed a hero for barricading her students in a classroom bathroom and refusing to open the door until authorities could find a key to open the door.

The 20 students killed were first-graders and the Milgrams have struggled to explain to Lauren why so many of her friends will never return to school.

"She knows her friends and she'll also see on the bus... there will be some missing on the bus," Milgram said. "We look at yearbook pictures. We try to focus on the happy times because we really don't know what we're doing."

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"How could someone be so angry?" Lauren's father Eric Milgram wondered before a long pause. "We don't know."

The school has a lecture room available for parents to stay as long as they wish and they are also allowed to accompany their children to the classroom to help them adjust. Counselors will be available throughout the day for parents, staff and students, according to the school's website.

The first few days will be a delicate balancing act between assessing the children's needs and trying to get them back to a normal routine.

"We don't want to avoid memories of a trauma," Dr. Jamie Howard told "Good Morning America." "And so by getting back to school and by engaging in your routines, we're helping kids to do that, we're helping them to have a natural, healthy recovery to a trauma."

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy announced at a news conference today that he has created a 15-member Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, which will be led by Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson. The commission will review gun control laws and regulations, school safety and mental health issues.

"It would be stupid for us not to have this conversation," Malloy said, speaking from the State Capitol in Hartford.

Security is paramount in everyone's mind. There is a police presence on campus and drivers of every vehicle that comes onto campus are being interviewed.

"Our goal is to make it a safe and secure learning environment for these kids to return to, and the teachers also," Monroe police Lt. Keith White said at a news conference on Wednesday.

A "state-of-the-art" security system is in place, but authorities will not go into detail about the system saying only that the school will probably be "the safest school in America."

White said at a news conference today that the security presence would be evaluated on a day-by-day and week-by-week basis moving forward.

"We are trying to keep a balance," he said. "We don't want them [the students] to think that this is a police state. This is a school and a school first."

Every adult in the school who is not immediately recognizable will be required to wear a badge as identification, parent and school volunteer Karen Dryer told ABCNews.com.

"They want to know exactly who you are at sight, whether or not you should be there," Dryer said.

Despite the precautions and preparations, parents will still be coping with the anxiety of parting with their children.

"Rationally, something like this is a very improbable event, but that still doesn't change the emotional side of the way you feel," Eric Milgram said.

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Syria rebels in push to capture air base

AZAZ, Syria (Reuters) - Rebels battled on Thursday to seize an air base in northern Syria, part of a campaign to fight back against the air power that has given President Bashar al-Assad's forces free rein to bomb rebel-held towns.

More than 60,000 people have been killed in the 21-month-old uprising and civil war, the United Nations said this week, sharply raising the death toll estimate in a conflict that shows no sign of ending.

After dramatic advances over the second half of 2012, the rebels now hold wide swathes of territory in the north and east, but are limited in exerting control because they cannot protect towns and villages from Assad's helicopters and jets.

Hundreds of fighters from rebel groups were attempting to storm the Taftanaz air base, near the northern highway that links Syria's two main cities, Aleppo and the capital Damascus.

Rebels have been besieging air bases across the north in recent weeks, in the hope this will reduce the government's power to carry out air strikes and resupply loyalist-held areas.

A rebel fighter speaking from near the Taftanaz base overnight said the base's main sections were still in loyalist hands but insurgents had managed to infiltrate and destroy a helicopter and a fighter jet on the ground.

The northern rebel Idlib Coordination Committee said the rebels had detonated a car bomb inside the base.

The government's SANA news agency said the base had not fallen and that the military had "strongly confronted an attempt by the terrorists to attack the airport from several axes, inflicting heavy losses among them and destroying their weapons and munitions".

Rami Abdulrahman, head of the opposition-aligned Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict from Britain, said as many as 800 fighters were involved in the assault, including Islamists from Jabhat al-Nusra, a powerful group that Washington considers terrorists.

Taftanaz is mainly a helicopter base, used for missions to resupply army positions in the north, many of which are cut off by road because of rebel gains, as well as for dropping crude "barrel bombs" of explosives on rebel-controlled areas.

"WHAT IS THE FAULT OF THE CHILDREN?"

Near Minakh, another northern air base that rebels have surrounded, government forces have retaliated by regularly shelling and bombing nearby towns.

In the town of Azaz, where the bombardment has become a near nightly occurrence, shells hit a family house overnight. Zeinab Hammadi said her two wounded daughters, aged 10 and 12, had been rushed across the border to Turkey, one with her brain exposed.

"We were sleeping and it just landed on us in the blink of an eye," she said, weeping as she surveyed the damage.

Family members tried to salvage possessions from the wreckage, men lifting out furniture and children carrying out their belongings in tubs.

"He (Assad) wants revenge against the people," said Abu Hassan, 33, working at a garage near the destroyed house. "What is the fault of the children? Are they the ones fighting?"

Opposition activists said warplanes struck a residential building in another rebel-held northern town, Hayyan, killing at least eight civilians.

Video footage showed men carrying dismembered bodies of children and dozens of people searching for victims in the rubble of the destroyed building, shouting "God is greatest". The provenance of the video could not be independently confirmed.

In addition to their tenuous grip on the north, the rebels also hold a crescent of suburbs on the edge of Damascus, which have come under bombardment by government forces that control the center of the capital.

On Wednesday, according to opposition activists, dozens of people were incinerated in an inferno caused by an air strike on a petrol station in a Damascus suburb where residents were lining up for precious fuel.

The civil war in Syria has become the longest and bloodiest of the conflicts that rose out of uprisings across the Arab world in the past two years.

Assad's family has ruled for 42 years since his father seized power in a coup. The war pits rebels, mainly from the Sunni Muslim majority, against a government supported by members of Assad's Shi'ite-derived Alawite minority sect and some members of other minorities who fear revenge if he falls.

The West, most Sunni-ruled Arab states and Turkey have called for Assad to leave power. He is supported by Russia and Shi'ite Iran.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman and Dominic Evans in Beirut; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

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Amazon fends off Apple claim to "Appstore" name

OAKLAND: A federal judge on Wednesday rejected Apple's claim of false advertising for Amazon.com to refer to its online shop for mobile gadget applications as an "app store."

"Apple has failed to establish that Amazon made any false statement of fact that actually deceived or had the tendency to deceive a substantial segment of its audience," US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said in her ruling.

"The mere use of 'Appstore' by Amazon to designate a site for viewing and downloading/purchasing apps cannot be construed as a representation that the nature, characteristics, or quality of the Amazon Appstore is the same as that of the Apple App Store."

Apple in 2008 launched its App Store, which is stocked with mini-programs for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch devices.

Amazon in late 2011 opened its "Appstore," which sells applications tailored for Android-powered mobile devices for the Seattle, Washington-based retail giant's Kindle Fire tablets.

Apple sued Amazon, claiming its rival was engaging in false advertising as well as trademark infringement.

US officials are still considering Apple's application to trademark the term "App Store," but that did not deter the company from pressing its case in Hamilton's courtroom in the California city of Oakland.

Software titan Microsoft is among the companies that have weighed in against letting the Cupertino, California, company have a trademark giving it the exclusive right to call a mobile applications market an "app store."

- AFP/jc

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Google, Yahoo among list of top ad companies funding piracy

'Everyone knows piracy has destroyed the record business,' said Jonathan Taplin, director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET)

Google and Yahoo's advertising networks are accused of financially supporting those who pirate music and movies online, according to a report from the University of Southern California.

The school's Annenberg Innovation Lab studied which ad networks placed the most ads on sites accused of infringing music and film copyrights and today issued a list of the top 10. Google is No. 2 and Yahoo came in at No. 6.

OpenX, a company that supplies digital and mobile advertising tools and based in Pasadena, Calif, was the top advertiser on pirate sites, the report said. To help compile the list of the "top infringing sites," USC used Google's own Transparency Report, which lists the names of the sites that receive the most requests from copyright owners to remove infringing content.

Google told CNET that it hadn't seen the report but that it was a mistake to suggest the company's ads are a major source of funds for pirate sites, saying: "The complexity of online advertising has led some to conclude incorrectly that the mere presence of any Google code on a site means financial support from Google."

Entertainment companies are trying to hit pirates in the wallet. The trade groups of the largest film and music companies have pressured Google for years to tweak its search rankings and ad networks to help choke off traffic and funds to pirates.

Google, which now sells movies and music as part of Google Play (the successor to the
Android Market) and YouTube, has acquiesced in some ways, such as removing millions of URLs to pirated content from its search function. The entertainment sector has applauded the efforts but they want Google to keep going.

USC, which has long had strong ties to Hollywood and the television sector, isn't planning to stop. The school plans to issue a report on the top 10 offending ad networks every month. Jonathan Taplin, a former film industry executive told The Los Angeles Times: "All musicians know ... why their incomes have plummeted," Taplin said. "Everyone knows piracy has destroyed the music business."

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Stocks soar after Congress passes "fiscal cliff" bill

A trader smiles on Jan. 2, 2013, on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York. / Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Congress approves plan to avert "fiscal cliff"

NEW YORK Stocks roared higher on Wall Street and around the world after Congress passed a last-minute budget deal to avert sweeping tax hikes and government spending cuts.

The Dow Jones industrial jumped 308 points to close at 13,412 Wednesday, the first trading day of the year. That's the biggest gain the Dow has had since December 2011.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 36 points to 1,462. The Nasdaq composite rose almost 93 points to 3,112.

The gains were broad. Ten stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange.

Technology and bank stocks had the biggest gains.

Car-sharing company Zipcar (ZIP) surged 48 percent after agreeing to be bought by Avis (CAR) for nearly $500 million.

Volume was heavier than the recent average at 4.1 billion shares.

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