Weight lifting was one of just nine sports at the first Olympics in 1896, but its days on the summer program may be numbered. From a report: After decades of rampant doping, bribery, vote-rigging and corruption at weight lifting's highest levels, the International Olympic Committee finally took action last year by threatening to drop the sport from the Games in the coming months if the International Weightlifting Federation does not introduce a host of fixes, including rigorous drug testing measures and governance reforms.

The prognosis is not good. The leaders of the weight lifting federation failed during a key vote on June 30 to get the support needed to pass a new constitution aimed at addressing concerns from the Olympic committee. Delegates from the United States, Germany and China, among others, could not persuade their counterparts from the former Soviet republics, Latin America and other "old guard" weight lifting nations that would be hurt by tighter antidoping measures. If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors. Already, the I.O.C. had reduced the number of lifters in Tokyo to 196 from 260 during the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. The number will be cut again, to 120, at the Paris Games in 2024.

"The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt," reports the Guardian, "after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to 'ethical concerns'." The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin — a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice — in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November. It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results...

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction... He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised. It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. "Humorously, this led to them changing 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' to 'extreme intense respiratory syndrome' on one occasion," Lawrence said.

The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence... "In their paper, the authors claim that four out of 100 patients died in their standard treatment group for mild and moderate Covid-19," Lawrence said. "According to the original data, the number was 0, the same as the ivermectin treatment group. In their ivermectin treatment group for severe Covid-19, the authors claim two patients died, but the number in their raw data is four..." Lawrence contacted an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, and a data analyst affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden who reviews scientific papers for errors, Nick Brown, for help analysing the data and study results more thoroughly... "The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records," Brown told the Guardian. "It's certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren't even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural..."

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that "this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there", and it appeared to him the data was "just totally faked".
Meta-analyses incorporating the "just totally faked" data were then published in Oxford Academic's Open Forum Infectious Diseases and in the American Journal of Therapeutics.

Meanwhile, the Guardian also notes a new (and peer-reviewed) paper that was just published last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Its finding? Iermectin is "not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients".

The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it's pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. From a report: The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, will speed up the clinical trials of a few promising drug candidates. If all goes well, some of those first pills could be ready by the end of the year. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics will also support research on entirely new drugs -- not just for the coronavirus, but for viruses that could cause future pandemics. A number of other viruses, including influenza, H.I.V. and hepatitis C, can be treated with a simple pill. But despite more than a year of research, no such pill exists to treat someone with a coronavirus infection before it wreaks havoc. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program for accelerating Covid-19 research, invested far more money in the development of vaccines than of treatments, a gap that the new program will try to fill.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.

The New York Times argues that this week changed Bitcoin's reputation as "secure, decentralized and anonymous" (adding "Criminals, often operating in hidden reaches of the internet, flocked to Bitcoin to do illicit business without revealing their names or locations. The digital currency quickly became as popular with drug dealers and tax evaders as it was with contrarian libertarians.")

"But this week's revelation that federal officials had recovered most of the Bitcoin ransom paid in the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack exposed a fundamental misconception about cryptocurrencies: They are not as hard to track as cybercriminals think..." [F]or the growing community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors, the fact that federal investigators had tracked the ransom as it moved through at least 23 different electronic accounts belonging to DarkSide, the hacking collective, before accessing one account showed that law enforcement was growing along with the industry... The Bitcoin ledger can be viewed by anyone who is plugged into the blockchain. "It is digital bread crumbs," said Kathryn Haun, a former federal prosecutor and investor at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. "There's a trail law enforcement can follow rather nicely." Haun added that the speed with which the Justice Department seized most of the ransom was "groundbreaking" precisely because of the hackers' use of cryptocurrency. In contrast, she said, getting records from banks often requires months or years of navigating paperwork and bureaucracy, especially when those banks are overseas...

Tracking down a user's transaction history was a matter of figuring out which public key they controlled, authorities said. Seizing the assets then required obtaining the private key, which is more difficult. It's unclear how federal agents were able to get DarkSide's private key. Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi declined to say more about how the F.B.I. seized DarkSide's private key. According to court documents, investigators accessed the password for one of the hackers' Bitcoin wallets, though they did not detail how. The F.B.I. did not appear to rely on any underlying vulnerability in blockchain technology, cryptocurrency experts said. The likelier culprit was good old-fashioned police work. Federal agents could have seized DarkSide's private keys by planting a human spy inside DarkSide's network, hacking the computers where their private keys and passwords were stored, or compelling the service that holds their private wallet to turn them over via search warrant or other means. "If they can get their hands on the keys, it's seizable," said Jesse Proudman, founder of Makara, a cryptocurrency investment site. "Just putting it on a blockchain doesn't absolve that fact...."

The F.B.I. has partnered with several companies that specialize in tracking cryptocurrencies across digital accounts, according to officials, court documents and the companies. Start-ups with names like TRM Labs, Elliptic and Chainalysis that trace cryptocurrency payments and flag possible criminal activity have blossomed as law enforcement agencies and banks try to get ahead of financial crime. Their technology traces blockchains looking for patterns that suggest illegal activity... "Cryptocurrency allows us to use these tools to trace funds and financial flows along the blockchain in ways that we could never do with cash," said Ari Redbord, the head of legal affairs at TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company that sells its analytic software to law enforcement and banks. He was previously a senior adviser on financial intelligence and terrorism at the Treasury Department.
The story includes three intriguing quotes:

• Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said the Colonial Pipeline ransom seizure was only the latest of "many seizures, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, from unhosted cryptocurrency wallets" used for criminal activity.
• Hunter Horsley, chief executive of cryptocurrency investment company Bitwise Asset Management, said "The public is slowly being shown, in case after case, that Bitcoin is good for law enforcement and bad for crime — the opposite of what many historically believed."
• A spokesperson for Chainalysis, a start-up that traces cryptocurrency payments, tells the Times that in the end, "cryptocurrencies are actually more transparent than most other forms of value transfer. Certainly more transparent than cash."

Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. "There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this..." argues author Steven Johnson.

In a recent 10,000-word excerpt from his new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (now also a four-part PBS/BBC series that's streaming online), Johnson tries to convey the magnitude of humanity's accomplishment: [I]t manifests in countless achievements, often quickly forgotten, sometimes literally invisible: the drinking water that's free of microorganisms, or the vaccine received in early childhood and never thought about again... The decade following the initial mass production of antibiotics marked the most extreme moment of life-span inequality globally. In 1950, when life expectancy in India and most of Africa had barely budged from the long ceiling of around 35 years, the average American could expect to live 68 years, while Scandinavians had already crossed the 70-year threshold. But the post-colonial era that followed would be characterized by an extraordinary rate of improvement across most of the developing world...

The forces behind these trends are complex and multivariate. Some of them involve increasing standards of living and the decrease in famine, driven by the invention of artificial fertilizer and the "green revolution"; some of them involve imported medicines and infrastructure — antibiotics, chlorinated drinking water — that were developed earlier. But some of the most meaningful interventions came from within the Global South itself, including a remarkably simple but powerful technique called oral rehydration therapy... the treatment is almost maddeningly simple: give people lots of boiled water to drink, supplemented with sugar and salts.... The Lancet called it "potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century." As many as 50 million people are said to have died of cholera in the 19th century. In the first decades of the 21st century, fewer than 66,000 people were reported to have succumbed to the disease, on a planet with eight times the population...

Of all the achievements that brought the great escape to the entire world, though, one stands out: the vanquishing of smallpox... One key factor was a scientific understanding about the virus itself... Scientific innovations also played a crucial role in the eradication projects... But another key breakthrough was the development of institutions like the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. themselves. Starting in the mid-1960s, the W.H.O. — led by a C.D.C. official, D.A. Henderson — worked in concert with hundreds of thousands of health workers, who oversaw surveillance and vaccinations in the more than 40 countries still suffering from smallpox outbreaks. The idea of an international body that could organize the activity of so many people over such a vast geography, and over so many separate jurisdictions, would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the 19th century...

The list of new ideas that propelled the great escape is long and varied. Some of them took the form of tangible objects: X-ray machines, antiretroviral drugs. Some of them were legal or institutional in nature: the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, seatbelt laws. Some of them were statistical breakthroughs: new ways of tracking data, like the invention of randomized controlled trials, which finally allowed us to determine empirically if new treatments worked as promised, or proved a causal link between cigarettes and cancer. Some of them were meta-innovations in the way that new treatments are discovered, like the development of "rational drug design," which finally moved drug development from the Fleming model of serendipitous discovery to a process built on the foundations of chemistry...

The truth is the spike in global population has not been caused by some worldwide surge in fertility. What changed is people stopped dying... All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves.

Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.

Researchers have developed a tool that can design complex DNA robots and nanodevices in minutes instead of days. Phys.Org reports: In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University -- led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang -- unveiled new software they call MagicDNA. The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery. One advantage is that it allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3-D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2-D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3-D. That meant designers couldn't make their devices too complex.

The software also allows designers to build DNA structures "bottom up" or "top down." In "bottom up" design, researchers take individual strands of DNA and decide how to organize them into the structure they want, which allows fine control over local device structure and properties. But they can also take a "top down" approach where they decide how their overall device needs to be shaped geometrically and then automate how the DNA strands are put together. Combining the two allows for increasing complexity of the overall geometry while maintaining precise control over individual component properties. Another key element of the software is that it allows simulations of how designed DNA devices would move and operate in the real world.

Steve Kirsch has been interested in repurposing drugs since he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer years ago. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, he talks about his efforts to raise funds for Covid research, to get the word out about promising drugs, and to light a fire under the FDA. "If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired," he says. Specifically, Kirsch believes that fluvoxamine will be a game changer for treating Covid-19, as it's an inexpensive, easy-to-take pill with few side effects and has proven to prevent severe illness and death from the coronavirus. Here's an excerpt from the interview he had with IEEE Spectrum: Kirsch: We applied for an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA [for fluvoxamine] in late January. Lately, we've been just trying to find out how that's going, like, 'What do you guys think? Can we have a conversation? We've got new data.' But they won't talk to us, they say it's in process, that we'll hear from them soon, likely in five weeks from submitting our request. But five, six weeks have come and gone, and we've heard nothing back on our application. Meanwhile, people are dying. If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired.

Spectrum: And you got banned from Medium for writing about it.

Kirsch: It's a Catch-22, you can't talk about it until it works but it can't work until you talk about it. I wrote on my Medium blog that fluvoxamine was successful in treating Covid, and that doxazosin [another drug, used to treat high blood pressure among other things] has a 75 percent chance of preventing hospitalization. I was reporting actual results of peer-reviewed studies. In response, Medium removed six years of blogs that I'd written about technology and banned me for life. In my appeal, I said there was no evidence that disputed what I said, and Medium never produced any evidence in response.

Spectrum: You did get covered on 60 Minutes. [On March 7, the news magazine reported on the successful use of fluvoxamine off label to treat a COVID-19 outbreak at the Golden Gate Fields thoroughbred racetrack, with lots of puns about long shots and dark horses.]

Kirsch: Yes, but you could easily watch that 60 Minutes story and believe that we need more data before people should start using fluvoxamine. But a panel of key opinion leaders from the NIH, CDC, and academia met in January and recommended that fluvoxamine be added to the NIH guidelines. They also recommended that doctors should talk to patients about using fluvoxamine for COVID in a process known as "shared decision making." And If you look at the website c19early.com, which rates the drugs with the best evidence, you'll see that the highest-rated FDA-approved drug is fluvoxamine. We shouldn't be ignoring it. Instead of doing nothing, we should be using the drug with the best evidence so far. If you were drowning and someone threw you a life preserver that had only been used 20 times, you don't throw it back complaining there isn't enough evidence that it works.

In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it's been marketing its own software for their surveillance work. From a report: Police in China's Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department's disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations. So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company's California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle's website, begin with a "case outline" listing four Oracle "product[s] used" by Liaoning police to "do criminal analysis and prediction." One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect.

Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create "security case heat map[s]." Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been "incomprehensible," more easily "trace the key people/objects/events" and "identify potential suspect[s]" -- which in China often means dissidents. Oracle representatives have marketed the company's data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is the slideshow story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document describing police in Shanxi province as a "client" in need of an intelligence platform. Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents -- including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. In marketing materials, Oracle said that its software could help police leverage information from online comments, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases, and images for facial recognition. Oracle presentations even suggested that police could use its products to combine social media activity with dedicated Chinese government databases tracking drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted company technology for China's "Police Cloud," a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.

A key Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday recommended the approval of Pfizer and BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in people over 16 years old, the last step before the FDA gives the final OK to broadly distribute the first doses throughout the United States. CNBC reports: If the FDA accepts the nonbinding recommendation from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee -- which is expected -- it would mark a pivotal moment in the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 15.4 million people and killed roughly 290,000 in the U.S. in less than a year. The committee plays a key role in approving flu and other vaccines in the U.S., verifying the shots are safe for public use. While the FDA doesn't have to follow the advisory committee's recommendation, it often does.

The FDA could grant emergency use authorization of Pfizer's vaccine as early as Friday, James Hildreth, a member of the committee, told NBC's "Weekend Today" on Saturday. An emergency use authorization, or EUA, generally allows a drug or vaccine to be administered to a limited population or setting, such as to hospitalized patients, as the agency continues to evaluate safety data. It's unclear whether the FDA will authorize Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine for use in certain groups. Some people, including pregnant women and young children, will likely have to wait to get the vaccine in the U.S. until Pfizer can finish trials on those specific groups. The FDA said Tuesday that there is currently insufficient data to make conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in children under age 16, pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems. Regulators in Canada, the U.K. and Bahrain have all cleared the vaccine for use by most adults.

Scientists are tracking small differences in DNA to explain why the disease has different effects. An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian: Key developments include research which indicates that interferon -- a molecular messenger that stimulates immune defenses against invading viruses -- may play a vital role in defending the body. Scientists have found that rare mutations in some people may leave them unable to make adequate supplies of the interferon they need to trigger effective immune responses to Covid. Trials using interferon as Covid treatments are now under way at several centers. Research is also focusing on a gene known as TYK2. Some variants of this gene are involved in triggering some auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and also seems to be involved in causing severe Covid. A drug developed to treat RA, baricitinib, has a genetic common denominator with Covid and this has led to it being used in clinical trails against the virus. Last month the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced that early results showed the drug helped Covid patients recover.

Other research -- pioneered by Kenneth Baillie, of Edinburgh University, and outlined in a recent issue of Science -- has uncovered several other genes that appear to be important. These include OAS genes that are triggered by interferon and which code for proteins that are involved in breaking down viral RNA, from which the Covid-19 virus is made. Baillie's research has yet to be peer reviewed and he has counseled caution in interpreting this work. Nevertheless, he told Science that he hoped his results would speed the development of treatments "because the epidemic is progressing at such an alarming rate, even a few months of time saved will save lots of lives".

In addition, other researchers point out that there are other ways of using genetics to combat Covid. Dr Dipender Gill of Imperial College London has, with colleagues, used genetic data to predict how different interventions could affect disease reactions. To do that, Gill -- working with a team of British, Norwegian and American scientists -- analyzed data from thousands of patients, using genetic variants that increase individuals' risk of acquiring these conditions. They were then able to carry out studies that would show if action taken to modify these traits would reduce susceptibility to severe Covid-19. The team made two key discoveries. "We found there is a causal link between obesity and the risk of having a severe Covid-19 [reaction]. We also found the same effect for smoking. This indicates that losing weight and giving up smoking will have a direct impact in improving your chances of surviving Covid-19. That is the power of genetic studies like these."

The Times of London reports: A gang of cyberexperts turned a former German military bunker into one of Europe's biggest hubs for the "dark web" and a superhighway for at least a quarter of a million offences, including drug trafficking and the falsification of identity papers, a court has been told.

Four people from the Netherlands, three Germans and a Bulgarian are accused of creating a digital safe haven in which criminals could operate with impunity.
Dutch News reports: Deals which were processed through the servers include drugs — with platforms such as Cannabis Road — which had millions of active users, the Telegraaf said on Tuesday. Other sites allowed people to order fake money and ID papers, and the bunker was also used to stage a bot attack on German telecom firm Deutsche Telekom, the paper said.

The investigation into the bunker took years of observation and phone tapping, culiminating in a raid involving 650 police officers in September 2019. .
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: Prosecuters believe to have a case which is set to take 15 months until the end of 2021 simply due to the sheer mass of material they've gatherd to make a case. The defendants, which include adolescents at the time of crime, face up to 15 years in prison should they be convicted.
As recently as this June, the cyberbunker was still being contacted by several phishing sites, as well as thousands of bots looking for their old command and control server.

"An encrypted BlackBerry device that was cracked five years after it was first seized by police is poised to be the key piece of evidence in one of the state's longest-running drug importation investigations," reports the Sydney Morning Herald: In April, new technology "capabilities" allowed authorities to probe the encrypted device, which was used by one of the alleged kingpins and revealed 3000 messages over a one-month period, a Sydney court has heard. The development has paved the way for the arrest of another five members of an alleged criminal syndicate.

For at least two of the men — Frank Farrugia and Deniz Kanmez — the cracked BlackBerry was allegedly the "silver bullet" in netting their arrest, according to a source close to the investigation. Strike Force Millstream detectives arrested the five men in a series of raids from Sydney to Dubai last month. The arrests culminated a seven-year investigation into money laundering, criminal groups and at least four commercial importations between 2013-14, valued at $1.5 billion. Nearly two dozen men have been implicated...

It is the second device to be unlocked as part of the investigation, after Canadian authorities successfully cracked another BlackBerry in 2017, which was central in an earlier trial of four men linked to the syndicate.

Asraa Mustufa and David Eads, reporting for Chicago Reporter: With Chicago reeling this week from a bloody July 4 weekend that saw more than 80 shootings claim the lives of at least 17 people, including young children, police Superintendent David Brown doubled down on his approach to stemming the violence at a press conference Monday. "We must keep violent offenders in jail longer," Brown said, arguing that arrestees are getting released too quickly and that the electronic monitoring program is "clearly not working" and needs to be revamped. Mayor Lori Lightfoot agreed on the need to keep violent offenders locked up in order to reduce crime. Brown had deployed an additional 1,200 officers on the streets ahead of the holiday weekend to break up "drug corners," in a strategy not unlike that of police chiefs before him. His plan was criticized by civil rights advocates and criminologists, WBEZ reported. "Our endgame is arrests for the precursors to violence," Brown said. "But when we clear the corner, we're pleading with the court systems: Keep them in jail through the weekend."

Brown's remarks raise many questions. How did officers carry out this policing strategy? Did they make arrests for violent crimes or other charges? How long were arrestees in police custody? Do these defendants quickly bond out or remain detained? Do these kinds of arrests really keep violent offenders off the street and effectively prevent more violence? Queries like these are key to digging into Brown's claims and gauging how effective CPD's tactics are. But it's now substantially more difficult to check CPD's claims and details about arrests. That's because the department recently shut down its arrest API used by journalists and researchers. A data API, or application programming interface, provides access to structured information in a way machines can read, akin to the difference between getting data in a spreadsheet file versus copying it by hand into a spreadsheet. CPD's API provided access to comprehensive and timely data about arrests going back to 2014 in ways that can be processed and analyzed by software engineers and reporters.

The Chicago Reporter used the API last month to analyze police tactics during local mass protests following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. CPD had released figures stating that the majority of arrests made on the weekend of May 29 were for criminal conduct related to looting, not protesting. But by using CPD's own data from the arrest API, we found the opposite to be true: the majority of civil unrest-related arrests made that weekend had been for offenses related to protesting. [...] Within a day of our publishing this analysis, CPD removed access to the API for all users.

The U.S. has bought up virtually all the stocks of remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat COVID-19. The Guardian reports: Remdesivir, the first drug approved by licensing authorities in the U.S. to treat Covid-19, is made by Gilead and has been shown to help people recover faster from the disease. The first 140,000 doses, supplied to drug trials around the world, have been used up. The Trump administration has now bought more than 500,000 doses, which is all of Gilead's production for July and 90% of August and September. "President Trump has struck an amazing deal to ensure Americans have access to the first authorised therapeutic for Covid-19," said the U.S. health and human services secretary, Alex Azar. "To the extent possible, we want to ensure that any American patient who needs remdesivir can get it. The Trump administration is doing everything in our power to learn more about life-saving therapeutics for Covid-19 and secure access to these options for the American people."

The drug, which was trialled in the Ebola epidemic but failed to work as expected, is under patent to Gilead, which means no other company in wealthy countries can make it. The cost is around $3,200 per treatment of six doses, according to the US government statement. The deal was announced as it became clear that the pandemic in the U.S. is spiralling out of control. Anthony Fauci, the country's leading public health expert and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Senate the U.S. was sliding backwards.

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known U.S. healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals. Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided the database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies. Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American counties. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. Late on Tuesday, the Lancet released an "expression of concern" about its published study. The New England Journal of Medicine has also issued a similar notice. According to an independent audit by authors not affiliated with Surgisphere, the article includes a list of "concerns that have been raised about the reliability of the database." Some of the main points include: Surgisphere's employees have little or no data or scientific background; While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest growing hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence; and The firm's chief executive, Sapan Desai, has been named in three medical malpractice suits.

The Food and Drug Administration is cautioning the public about the reliability of a widely used rapid test for the coronavirus. The test, made by Abbott Laboratories, has been linked with inaccurate results that could falsely reassure patients that they are not infected with the virus. From a report: The Trump administration has promoted the test as a key factor in controlling the epidemic in the U.S., and it's used for daily testing at the White House. As first reported on NPR, as many as 15 to 20 out of every 100 tests may produce falsely negative results. A study released this week indicated that the test could be missing as many as 48% of infections. The FDA issued the alert on the Abbott test "in the spirit of transparency." In a press release, the agency said it's investigating whether the false-negative results could be connected to the type of swab used in the test or the material the samples are stored in for transport. It also cautions that "any negative test results that are not consistent with a patient's clinical signs and symptoms or necessary for patient management should be confirmed with another test."

The Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5 billion. From a report: The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright's bitcoin haul over the pair's involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013. Kleiman's estate alleges Wright and Kleiman were partners, and therefore his family is entitled to a share of the bitcoin that was mined by the pair in that time. Wright denies there was a partnership. A US district court in Florida on Tuesday ruled that half of the bitcoin mined and half of the intellectual property held by Wright from that time belongs to Kleiman.

One issue is it is not known exactly how much bitcoin Wright holds. It has been claimed that the Kleiman estate could get anywhere between 410,000 and 500,000 bitcoin, putting the value at between $4.1 billion and $4.99 billion as of Wednesday. Wright claimed to the court that he couldn't access the bitcoin because he doesn't have a list of the public addresses of that bitcoin. He claimed in 2011, after seeing the cryptocurrency had begun to be associated with drug dealers and human traffickers, he put the bitcoin he mined in 2009 and 2010 into an encrypted file and into a blind trust. The encrypted key was divided into multiple key slices, and the key slices were given to Kleiman who distributed them to people through the trust.

U.S. health authorities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating the cases of 153 people, mostly teenagers and young adults, who developed several lung illnesses after using electronic cigarettes (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The Wall Street Journal reports: The cases have occurred in 16 states over the past two months, with many of the injured rushing to emergency rooms with difficulty breathing and other symptoms. No deaths have been reported, but some patients were so ill they spent days in intensive-care units on mechanical ventilators, the health authorities said. What exactly is causing the acute illnesses is unknown, though health experts suspect vaping plays a role. Vaping refers to the use of an electronic cigarette to inhale.

Many of the injured have told doctors or health authorities they were vaping products containing tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a key ingredient in marijuana, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is working with state health departments to identify the cause. At least some of the products were purchased from unlicensed sellers. "Investigators have not identified any specific product or compound that is linked to all cases," the CDC said in a statement. The Food and Drug Administration said it is testing e-cigarette products that the patients used. The health effects of vaping any product, even a well-known brand name, are under research and not yet fully known, tobacco researchers said.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from ZDNet argues that "the expensive and abusive pharmaceutical industry needs to open up to improve everyone's health." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Now, I know little about creating and testing drugs. Here's what I do know: Open source and data produces better results than proprietary methods. In technology, the field I know best, almost every company -- including open source poster-child enemy Microsoft -- has embraced open source. Why? Because it works better than the short-sighted proprietary approaches. It's not just programming that benefits from open source. Cars now run Linux under the hood. Energy and electricity transmission managers are moving to open source. Most of the movies you love are made with open-source programs. Heck, even contract law is going open source.

I'm far from the only one to conclude that open-source methods are needed to break what amounts to broken pharmaceutical research methodology and drug price gouging. Open Source Pharma, an organization devoted to building on existing initiatives to develop an alternative, comprehensive, open-source pharmaceutical system, is leading the way. Dr. Manica Balasegaram, executive director for the Access Campaign of Medecins Sans Frontieres, aka Doctors Without Borders, explained: "There is something rotten in the kingdom of biomedical R&D... That the system is inefficient is probably difficult to dispute. It works in silos, encourages a protectionist, proprietary approach, promotes duplication, multiplies failure, is costly, and importantly, is directed at markets and not at public health needs. The consequences are fatal." Open source can revolutionize our hunt for better, more affordable medicine. It has everywhere else. It can in medicine, too. "We need to fundamentally let go of thinking that there is only one possible business model," says Balasegaram. "We need alternatives. Open source R&D is the key." Since the biomedical field is dominated by big companies with an iron grip on IP, Balasegaram admitted: "Promoting the concept of sharing will be tough. Sharing, however, is a difficult and somewhat scary idea to promote. It sounds suspiciously 'radical.' However, when one takes into account that this has been done in other areas, we need to rethink our reservations."

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The first medical device to treat childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, was OK'd Friday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Designated for children ages 7 to 12 who are not currently on medication for the disorder, the device delivers a low-level electrical pulse to the parts of the brain responsible for ADHD symptoms.... The pocket-sized device is connected by wire to a small adhesive patch placed on the child's forehead above the eyebrows. Designed to be used at home while sleeping, it delivers a "tingling" electrical stimulation to branches of the cranial nerve that delivers sensations from the face to the brain.

A clinical trial of 62 children showed that the Monarch external Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation System increases activity in the regions of the brain that regulate attention, emotion and behavior, all key components of ADHD. Compared to a placebo, children using the device had statistically significant improvement in their ADHD symptoms, the FDA said, although it could take up to four weeks to see improvement. Authors of the clinical trial called for additional research to examine if the response to treatment will last over time, and its potential impact on brain development with prolonged use....

The device was previously approved for the treatment of epilepsy and depression in Europe and Canada. Studies at UCLA found the stimulation decreased seizure activity by inhibiting overactive neurons in one section of the brain, while stimulating blood flow in the areas that control mood, attention and executive function.
CNN reports that the manufacturer's web site says the device costs around $1,000 -- and is not covered by insurance.

The FDA added that common side effects could include headache, teeth clenching, and trouble sleeping (as well as fatigue and sleepiness).