HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Center for Health Communication
Jay A. Winsten, Ph.D., Associate Dean and Center Director

Highlights from this week’s issue of Harvard's World Health News (www.WorldHealthNews.harvard.edu):

Universal Health Care: Will 2004 Be the Year?
Examining the Risks of the Acne Drug Accutane
Did a Powerful Acne Drug Play a Role in a 14-Year-Old's Suicide?
(San Francisco Chronicle) -- "On a cool, sunny morning last October, just before his first-period honors math class began, a 14-year-old freshman named Steven Wertheimer killed himself by standing in front of a 750,000-ton commuter train traveling northward beside the Palo Alto High School football field...Steven had been treated for acne with a powerful ingestible medication called Accutane, which has been linked to other teen suicides...Accutane has been available for 20 years, and cases of depression after taking it were reported in medical literature as early as 1985. Yet it has never been scientifically proved that what a Roche spokeswoman calls, 'a powerful drug, a potent drug, a drug to be taken very seriously,' can cause depression and suicide. The problem of demonstrating scientific causality is daunting."

What Price Beauty?
(The Boston Globe) -- "Accutane carries the notorious distinction of being the most widely prescribed birth-defect-causing medicine in the United States. And, unlike other prescription drugs that carry risks of birth defects, such as epilepsy or anticancer medications, Accutane is not a treatment for a life-threatening condition. No woman on Accutane who gets pregnant can comfort herself with the knowledge that her baby's exposure was incidental to lifesaving treatment. And no woman can comfort herself with the thought that the risk is relatively small. It's not."

Mexico: Pesticides Stake a Claim on Farmers
(The Boston Globe) -- "Nayarit, Mexico's tobacco region, has the country's most pesticide poisonings; government figures report an average of nearly 300 cases and several deaths per year, among a population of 1 million. Activists say those numbers do not represent the extent of the problem, since most victims never see a doctor. In contrast, California, regarded to have one of the most accurate systems of pesticide poisoning reporting in the United States, reported 448 cases last year among a population of 36 million, according to the Pesticide Action Network, based in San Francisco. The problem is not restricted to the tobacco industry."


For links to the full text of these and other articles, go to www.worldhealthnews.harvard.edu.

World Health News is an online news digest from the Center for Health Communication of the Harvard School of Public Health, offering a combination of original reporting and links to news stories and commentaries from newspapers and magazines worldwide on pressing issues in public health.  The site is designed as a resource for an international audience of policy makers and journalists, as well as public health researchers, practitioners, and advocates.


Contact:
Terri Mendoza
Director of Health Information
Harvard Center for Health Communication
(617) 432-1038
tmendoza@...