Last Updated: 2006-07-06 16:30:33 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Jane Sutton and Jim Loney

MIAMI - In a huge victory for Big Tobacco, the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday refused to reinstate a $145 billion punitive damages award against major cigarette makers found liable for selling a dangerous product.

The long-awaited decision sent tobacco stocks up sharply. The court upheld the key portion of a Florida appeals court ruling three years ago that overturned the punitive damages, at the time the largest award in a U.S. product liability case.

The high court ruled that the punitive award was "clearly excessive" and said it would "result in an unlawful crippling of the defendant companies."

The ruling clears one of the biggest legal hurdles for Altria Group Inc.'s plan to spin off its Kraft Foods Inc. business. Altria management has said repeatedly that it plans to spin off Kraft after Engle and other cases are cleared up.

But the Supreme Court also upheld key findings of the Miami trial court in the 12-year-old case known as Engle versus Liggett, including that smoking causes cancer and heart disease and that the cigarette companies marketed "defective and unreasonably dangerous" products.

The high court also upheld the decertification of the class of plaintiffs in the Engle case but reinstated individual damage awards to two cancer patients -- $2.9 million to Mary Farnan and $4 million to Angie Della Vecchia.

A Miami jury ruled in 2000 that the tobacco companies deceived smokers about the dangers of cigarettes and ordered the companies to pay $145 billion to ailing Florida smokers, estimated to number 300,000 to 700,000.

Florida's Third District Court of Appeal overturned the verdict in 2003 and said Florida's settlement with the tobacco companies in a multistate lawsuit barred the awarding of punitive damages. It also decertified the class action, meaning smokers would have to sue individually, not as a group.

Lawyers for the ailing smokers had asked the Florida Supreme Court to reinstate the class-action verdict.

"It's getting harder and harder to get class certification for these tobacco cases, and nine times out of 10 the companies win the individual cases," said Gregg Warren, an analyst who covers the tobacco industry at Morningstar Inc.

The case, filed a decade ago by Miami Beach pediatrician Howard Engle, was the first smokers' lawsuit to be certified as a class action.

The Florida Supreme Court ruling eliminates the largest class-action liability hanging over the tobacco industry, said Charles Norton, co-portfolio manager of Mutuals Advisors Inc.'s Vice Fund, which owns shares in most of the tobacco companies, including 31,000 Altria shares.

"With this out of the way, I believe it relieves a lot of legal risk from the group," Norton said, adding that the result had been expected. "To see it finally on the tape is welcome relief."

Norton said he expects Altria to now spin off Kraft by the first half of 2007, if not sooner.

Matthew Myers, president of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the ruling was not a clear-cut victory for the tobacco industry.

"The court upheld the jury's finding of wrongdoing by the tobacco companies and invited the thousands of members of the class to pursue individual actions," he said.

That, he said, "will enable the plaintiffs in Florida to seek both compensatory and punitive damages in a streamlined process that will continue to put the tobacco industry at significant risk."

Defendants in the case included Altria's Philip Morris USA unit; the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Brown & Williamson units of Reynolds American Inc.; the Lorillard Tobacco Co. unit of Loews Corp, and Vector Group's Liggett.

(Additional reporting by Tom Brown in Miami and by Jessica Wohl, Bradley Dorfman and Emily Kaiser in Chicago)

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

Studies suggest blood test possible for mad cow

Last Updated: 2006-07-06 16:41:03 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON - Tests in hamsters suggest it may be possible to develop a blood test for mad cow and related diseases in both humans and animals before they develop symptoms, researchers reported on Thursday.

The study, published in the journal Science, also suggests that the damaged brain cells may "leak" the infectious prions that cause the diseases, offering a chance to detect the disease in blood.

Such a test would allow animals to be checked before they enter the food supply. It could also screen people, including blood or organ donors, for the rare but devastating Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the researchers said.

Current tests require brain or other tissue samples.

Mad cow disease is another name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and is part of the family of prion diseases that includes scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and CJD in people.

BSE emerged in Britain in the 1980s and swept through dairy herds. Some people who ate infected beef products developed vCJD and at least 191 cases have been identified, mostly in Britain.

People may not know they have CJD, and in a few suspected cases blood and organ donors may have unwittingly infected others.

Claudio Soto of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and colleagues infected hamsters with prions, the misfolded nerve proteins believed to cause the diseases, and then tested blood at various times.

They invented a technique known as protein misfolding cyclic amplification to accelerate the process by which prions convert normal proteins to misshapen infectious forms.

"With this method, for the first time we have detected prions in what we call the silent phase of infection, which in humans can last up to 40 years," Soto said in a statement.

Soto and his university have formed a company, called Amprion, to commercially develop the test.

The test may need to be used at precise times, they said. It worked best in hamsters 40 days after infection. It did not detect prions 80 days after infection.

Then at 114 days, after the hamsters started showing symptoms, the blood test again revealed prions. "It has been reported that large quantities of (infectious prions) appear in the brain only a few weeks before the onset of clinical signs," the researchers wrote.

A second study in Science showed that mice infected with prions developed heart disease similar to a type known as amyloid heart disease in people.

Dr. Bruce Chesebro of the National Institutes of Health and colleagues said these diseases are marked by waxy protein deposits that stiffen the heart, limit its pumping ability and typically lead to fatal heart stoppage.

"Although several types of protein are known to form heart amyloid, this is the first time prion protein amyloid has been found in heart muscle and also found to cause heart malfunction," Chesebro said.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.