Earlier this summer, dozens of people reported that their boxes of Foot Loops and Apple Jacks contained strange odors and tastes. Some complained of nausea and diarrhea after consuming the cereal. The complaints prompted Kellogg to recall 28 million boxes of the iconic breakfast treats.

Kellogg subsequently blamed the problem on elevated levels of 2-methylnaphtalene, while adding that its experts found “no harmful material” in the cereals.

2-Methylnaphthalene may not be harmful, but it’s hard to know for sure. The FDA has no information about its impact on human health. Neither does the EPA, even though it has been asking the chemical industry to provide health information about 2-methylnaphtalene since 1994.

The EPA made the request 16 years ago because the chemical was being produced in massive quantities and finding its way into dozens, if not hundreds of consumer products.

The cereal recall has refocused attention on huge gaps in Federal regulators’ knowledge about chemicals in consumer products including food, children’s toys and clothing. According to the Washington Post, regulators don’t know squat about “the health risks posed by most of the 80,000 chemicals on the market today.”

The knowledge gap can be traced to the 1976 passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act which exempted 62,000 chemicals, including 2-methylnaphthalene, from regulatory oversight and stipulated that chemicals developed since then need not be tested for safety. Instead, manufacturers were encouraged to volunteer information concerning the health effects of their compounds and required to hand-over any data showing that a chemical harms health.

That created an enormous disincentive for manufacturers to test their chemicals.

Congress is working on legislation that would require companies to undertake health and safety assessments of existing chemicals and prove that new ones are safe before using them. The chemical industry thinks such laws could hamper innovation and competitiveness.

Pizaazz thinks it’ll take a US version of China’s melamine scandal before this legislation makes it to the President’s desk.

So-called pay-for-delay settlements involving generic and branded drug makers are becoming more common and costing consumers $3.5 billion each year, according to FTC Chairman John Liebowitz, who testified before Congress that he wanted to eliminate such agreements altogether.

These deals allow branded drug makers to sell their expensive products without generic competition for a period longer than the duration of the patents they hold on their drugs.

In the first 9 months of fiscal 2010, drug makers entered into 21 patent litigation settlements.  That’s more than the entire previous year.

“That’s almost an epidemic,” Leibowitz told BurrillReport. “Every single FTC Commissioner, going back through the Bush and Clinton administrations, has supported stopping these unconscionable agreements.”

The FTC supports legislation designed to halt pay-for-delay settlements. At the moment, this legislation is tucked into a Senate spending bill.

Both branded and generic drug companies would prefer to leave things just as they are. “The FTC’s testimony fails to present the whole story regarding patent settlements,” according to a statement released by the Generic Pharmaceutical Association. “Over the past 10 years, patent settlements have enabled dozens of first-time generics to come to market many months before patents on the counterpart brand drugs expired.”

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents branded drug makers, agreed. “A blanket ban could decrease the value of patents, remove an important option for a patent-holder’s defense of intellectual property, and reduce the incentives for future innovation of new medicines,” it said.

A Senate panel has already recommended banning pay-for-delay deals, but narrowly. Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter introduced an amendment to remove the ban from the spending bill, but that amendment did not pass. The ban must pass the full Senate and House before becoming law.

Recently, 5 scientists clambered into a steel capsule and shut the door behind them, unceremoniously beginning a scientific experiment designed to simulate a 520-day flight to Mars. Their mission is to help space crews of the future understand the stresses of interplanetary travel.

The all-male crew includes 3 Russians, a Chinese man, a Frenchman and an Italian-Colombian. They will execute a rigorous series of experiments and exercises, while being video-monitored the whole time by researchers from the European Space Agency, Russia’s Institute of Medical and Biological Problems and China’s space training center.

Conditions inside the capsule will mimic space travel in every respect, with the important exception of weightlessness.

The participants will communicate with “Earth” using an Internet connection that will be intentionally delayed and disrupted from time-to-time, to simulate likely communication outages during space travel. Their diet will consist of canned food similar to that consumed by astronauts on the International Space Station. They will shower once, and have 2 days off, per week except during simulated emergencies.

Of course, they can’t go far on their days off.

“For me, it will be mainly my family, the sun and fresh air,” French participant Romain Charles answered in response to a reporters question regarding what he will miss most during the project.

“Certainly, the crew is on its own here, with limited communications with the outside world,” the European Space Agency’s Martin Zell told the Washington Post. “They have to cope with a lot of conditions and organize themselves.”

Human beings are decades away from an actual Mars mission because of cost and technological barriers, including the creation of a lightweight shield to protect crews from space radiation.

Paying people to avoid sexually transmitted diseases effectively reduces their spread, according to a proof-of-concept study carried out by scientists at UC Berkeley, the Development Research Group at the World Bank and the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania.

The study involved young adults in southwestern Tanzania. Subjects were randomly assigned to a high-payment group, a low-payment group and no-payment control group. Participants in the high payment group received $20 every 4 months–up to $60–if they tested negative for STDs. Those in the low-payment group received half that amount.

Participants in all groups received individual counseling and could attend monthly group counseling sessions as well. Any participant that tested positive for an STD received free care for the condition.

By the end of the year, 9% of participants in the high-payment group had tested positive for an STD. That was significantly better than the 12% rate seen in both the control group and the low-payment group. The cash reward had the same impact in men and women. It had a more pronounced effect in people with lower incomes.

“For many of our study participants, $60 represented about one-fourth of their reported annual income, so it was a significant incentive,” says Will Dow, a study author and a health economist at Berkeley. “The question we tested is whether the cash reward was enough of an incentive to reduce risky behavior. The fact that disease prevalence decreased suggests the incentives worked.”

Participants were tested for chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. HIV/AIDS status was not tested, but the same sexual behaviors that increase the risk of the STDs increase the risk of HIV.

UK-based consumer-products giant Reckitt Benckiser Group has entered the bedroom by acquiring SSL International, the maker of Durex, for $3.9 billion. Durex is the world’s best-selling condom brand.

Before purchasing the condom-maker, Reckitt had accumulated a ménage of decidedly unsexy products including d-Con mousetraps, Clearasil acne cream, Veet hair remover, Mucinex decongestant, Lysol disinfectants and Harpic toilet-bowl cleaner.

In marketing Durex, SSL had recently moved from a “safe sex” message to “better sex.”  It introduced a line of lubricants and began selling vibrators in supermarkets and pharmacies. It also entered emerging markets like India and China. Durex sales rose nearly 5% last year, to $410 million.

In addition to condoms, the SSL deal allows Reckitt to market Scholl bunion pads outside the US (Merck has rights in the US), where they can enhance Reckitt’s already profitable line of OTC health care products including Gaviscon heartburn elixir and Strepsils cough drops. Even before the deal, health and personal care had been Reckitt’s largest market, accounting for about 40% of its $9.3 billion in sales.

In this market, shoppers will pay a premium for trusted brands, according to Julian Hardwick, a Royal Bank of Scotland analyst. “If you’ve got a sore throat, runny nose or splitting headache,” she explained to the Wall Street Journal, “You want something to sort that out for you. You really don’t care how much you pay for it.”

Reckitt’s offer of £11.71 per share was 45% above SSL’s average share price over the last 6 months. SSL shares traded below £5.50 just 9 months ago, suggesting the acquisition might have come a bit late for Reckitt.

The deal was prompted by pressure from consumer-goods colossus Procter & Gamble, which had been gaining market share vs. Reckitt in several categories in Western Europe over the last year.

In Victorian times, dreams were believed to represent repressed sexual desires or random brain activity. Now scientists believe they reflect an attempt by the unconscious mind to process and store emotion-laced events from the day.

“We take our problems to sleep and work through them during the night,” Rosalind Cartwright, a neuroscience professor at Rush University Medical Center told the Wall Street Journal.

According to Cartwright, during dreams the mind juxtaposes unprocessed emotions encountered during waking hours with older, related memories. “That’s why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other,” she added. “They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.”

If this theory is true, it may be possible for people to direct their own dreams. For example, people who experience recurring nightmares might learn to substitute happier endings or eliminate them altogether.

A small group of people who practice “lucid dreaming” believe this is indeed possible. According to these people, recurring nightmares are caused when people wake up from the frightening experiences, thereby interrupting the normal process of emotional reconciliation that takes place during dreaming. Without the reconciliation, the dream is left to repeat itself.

“Your brain seems to think that it’s helping you to prepare, but you don’t allow yourself to finish it so it becomes a broken record,” Shelby Freedman Harris, a Behavioral Sleep Medicine expert at Montefiore Medical Center explained to the Journal.

Harris runs a program that tries to help folks either rewrite or delete the script of recurring dreams using a technique known as Image Rehearsal Therapy. In implementing the technique, dreamers recreate the nightmare with better endings or more palatable story-lines (substituting dolphins for sharks, for example), and rehearse the new script several times per day. 

While far from 100% effective, many of Harris’ patients are able to dream the revised script, while others stop having the nightmare completely.

Private health insurance companies have long since required patients to pay higher out-of-pocket fees when they see physicians who are not in the insurers’ contracted physicians network. In a more recent development, they have begun to rank physicians according to quality and cost parameters and offer enrollees lower out-of-pocket charges if they see physicians who fare better on these parameters.

In such programs for example, a doctor shown to order fewer imaging tests that are of questionable value would rank in a higher category.

Physicians have always objected to these practices. A March article in the New England Journal of Medicine brought the issue to a boil by showing that these tiered rating systems misclassified 22% of all doctors.

The study prompted provider organizations to release a letter protesting the payer’s practices. “Physicians’ reputations are being unfairly tarnished using unscientific methodologies and calculations,” the letter claimed.

“There are serious flaws in health insurers’ programs to try to rate individual physicians,” AMA President Cecil Wilson added in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The provider organizations implored payers to reevaluate their ranking programs.

Payers’ reactions to the letter were lukewarm. For example, Cigna told the Journal that its doctor-rating program already addressed issues raised in the study by focusing on physician groups rather than individuals. Besides that, “Some physicians do provide higher-quality or more-efficient care, and it makes sense to provide modest incentives for choosing that care,” said Dick Salmon, the company’s VP for network quality.

A spokesperson for WellPoint responded it has “taken a thorough, thoughtful approach in introducing measures of physician quality and cost effectiveness” and that the effort is “collaborative with the physician community.”

Last week, 2 Iowa-based egg producers recalled more than half a billion eggs after federal investigators traced a recent salmonella outbreak to their production facilities. The outbreak began in May. So far, it has not been linked to any deaths.

The two companies are Wright County Egg, which recalled 380 million eggs that had been distributed across the nation, and Hillandale Farms, which recalled 170 million eggs that had been distributed to 14 states in the West and Midwest. According to the Washington Post, the companies use some of the same suppliers of feed and young chickens, a fact that may help investigators trace the source of the outbreak.

Hinda Mitchell, a spokesperson for Wright County Egg told the Post that her company “recognizes the significant consumer concern about the potential incidence of Salmonella Enteritidis…we continue to work cooperatively with FDA after our voluntary recall. This is consistent with our commitment to egg safety.”

It turns out that the Iowa-based DeCoster family owns or has close ties with both egg producers.

For what it’s worth, the Post reported yesterday that the family has a long history of run-ins with federal officials. In 1996 for example, another DeCoster-owned egg farm was dunned $3.6 million for health and safety violations after inspectors found employees handling dead chickens and manure with their bare hands.

Then, in 2001, Iowa’s Supreme Court cited the family as a “repeat violator” of its environmental laws, singling-out violations involving DeCoster’s hog-farms. Later that year, the family settled a complaint that company supervisors subjected 11 female workers to a “sexually hostile work environment,” including assault and rape.

What is more, in 2002 and again in 2008, OSHA cited the family for several violations that resulted in the exposure of workers to dangerous conditions.

Of course none of this is directly relevant to the salmonella outbreak…

An FDA advisory panel has voted to allow ongoing sales of the diabetes drug Avandia despite the fact that Glaxo’s former blockbuster poses a “significant safety” concern by increasing the risk of cardiovascular events.

The FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of its panels, although it usually does.

Nearly one-third of the 33-member panel voted to ban Avandia. Most panelists who voted to keep the drug on the market called for increased restrictions on its use, and said it should be used only as a second- or third-line drug for the treatment of diabetes.

For example, David Oakes, a statistics professor at the University of Rochester, told the Wall Street Journal that his vote for continued sales of Avandia should not be construed a “vote of confidence,” but rather that he was concerned about the quality of studies which link Avandia to heart attack risk.

Janet Woodcock, who heads-up the FDA’s drug division, said her agency will decide on the matter within the next few weeks.

Avandia sales have plummeted since a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported a 43% bump in heart attack risk with the drug. Q1, 2010 world-wide sales of Avandia were reported to be $245 million, off 10% year-over-year.

The FDA panel also concluded that Avandia posed a greater heart attack risk than Actos, a rival drug made by Takeda. Both drugs were approved in 1999 for blood-glucose control in patients with Type 2 diabetes.

In the wake of the panel’s announcement, Glaxo’s Chief Medical Officer Ellen Strahlman defended the safety record of Avandia. She said the drug would remain on the market pending the FDA’s decision.

The Affordable Care Act has catapulted the US Preventive Services Task Force from an obscure agency which produced unenforceable guidelines about screening and preventive services into one whose recommendations directly impact reimbursement.

The health reform law requires insurers to pay in full for services receiving an A or B recommendation from the Task Force. The flip-side is that insurers may not have to pay at all for services that are not recommended by the Task Force. As a result, the Task Force’ new best friends include lobbyists and disease advocates who want their priorities – things like screening for Alzheimer’s disease, HIV and diabetes or HIV – to get covered.

The American Diabetes Association, for example, is advocating that insurers be required to cover a broader population than current Task Force recommendations suggest. Current recommendations are that only patients with high blood pressure should be screened.

The HIV Medicine Association has made a similar argument to the Task Force. It claims that a key reason why 20% of people infected with HIV are unaware of that fact is because most insurers don’t cover the costs of testing.

“If you want to be evidence-based, lobbying doesn’t fit,” Ned Calonge, the chairman of the Task Force told the Washington Post. “My charge to members would be to stay true to the methods and the evidence.”

The Task Force, by the way, is the same one that caused a stir before the 2008 presidential election when it recommended that women should start receiving screening mammograms at the age of 50, rather than 40. That move was eventually trumped by an amendment to the Affordable Care Act which required insurers to cover mammograms for women in their 40s.