EPA Announces Final 9/11 Testing and Cleanup Program
The final 9/11 contamination testing and cleanup program in New York City will be launched next month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday.
Under the $7 million program, workers will test the air and dust in commercial buildings and apartments near the World Trade Center site. The tests will look for four contaminants -- asbestos, lead, man-made fibers and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- associated with the collapse of the twin towers, the Associated Press reported.
In 2002 and 2003, the EPA checked more than 4,000 units in the area.
"The vast majority of occupied residential and commercial spaces in lower Manhattan have been repeatedly cleaned, and we believe the potential for exposure related to dust that may remain from the collapse of the World Trade Center building is low," said EPA official Dr. George Gray.
The agency has been criticized for not doing enough to protect public health following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-N.Y.) called the new program "incredibly frustrating and disappointing," the AP reported.
"EPA has now acknowledged that additional testing is necessary, but the program announced today is totally inadequate," Clinton said in a statement released Wednesday.
-----
Schizophrenia Drug Shows Promise
The investigational schizophrenia drug iloperidone was effective in a late-stage clinical trial, Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Thursday.
During the four-week trial of 604 patients, the drug was tested in two doses. The data showed that patients who took iloperidone, an atypical antipsychotic, showed statistically significant symptom improvement compared to those who took a placebo, the Associated Press reported.
Patient responses to the drug and a placebo were measured on the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS), which lists hallucinations, delusions, racing thoughts and other psychotic symptoms as positive symptoms. Negative symptoms include moodiness, inability to feel pleasure, difficulty concentrating, and sleeping and eating disturbances.
The results of this study increase the likelihood that Vanda will file a new drug application for iloperidone with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in late 2007, the AP reported.
-----
Brain Scans Could Help Predict Schizophrenia
MRI brain scans could help predict schizophrenia, researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland say.
They found that MRI can detect key changes in the brain's gray matter before a person develops symptoms of schizophrenia. The researchers said that tracking these changes over time, combined with traditional assessments, could help doctors predict the mental health disorder, BBC News reported.
In this study, the researchers analyzed a series of MRI brain scans (taken, on average, 18 months apart) of 65 young people at high risk of developing schizophrenia because two or more members of their family had been diagnosed with the illness.
Within about 2.3 years of the first scan, eight of the 65 participants had developed schizophrenia. The MRIs of those eight people showed they had experienced changes in their brain gray matter before they developed symptoms of schizophrenia, BBC News reported.
The changes involved a reduction of gray matter in an area of the brain that's linked to the processing of anxiety. The findings appear in the journal BMC Medicine.
"Although there are no preventative treatments for the illness, an accurate predictive test could help researchers to assess possibilities for prevention in the future," said lead researcher Dr. Dominic Job. |
