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FDA Reviews MDMA Therapy for PTSD, Citing Health Risks and Study Flaws

✇NYT: Science
By: Andrew Jacobs and Christina Jewett
31 May 2024 at 15:08
The agency’s staff analysis suggests that approval of the illegal drug known as Ecstasy for treatment of PTSD is far from certain, with advisers meeting next week to consider the proposed therapy.

© Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A seizure of the drug MDMA, known as Ecstasy or molly. It and other psychoactive drugs are still classified as illegal drugs with a potential for abuse.

Alzheimer's Takes a Financial Toll Long Before Diagnosis, Study Finds

✇Slashdot
By: msmash
31 May 2024 at 13:36
Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows. The New York Times: A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people's borrowing behavior changed [PDF] in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a similar disorder. What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis. "The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency," said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study's authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, "consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we're observing." The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer's patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1 in 9 American Kids Were Diagnosed With ADHD, New Study Finds

✇Slashdot
By: EditorDavid
27 May 2024 at 00:35
"About 1 in 9 children in the U.S., between the ages of 3 and 17, have been diagnosed with ADHD," reports NPR: That's according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that calls attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder an "expanding public health concern." Researchers found that in 2022, 7.1 million kids and adolescents in the U.S. had received an ADHD diagnosis — a million more children than in 2016. That jump in diagnoses was not surprising, given that the data was collected during the pandemic, says Melissa Danielson, a statistician with the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and the study's lead author. She notes that other studies have found that many children experienced heightened stress, depression and anxiety during the pandemic. "A lot of those diagnoses... might have been the result of a child being assessed for a different diagnosis, something like anxiety or depression, and their clinician identifying that the child also had ADHD," Danielson says. The increase in diagnoses also comes amid growing awareness of ADHD — and the different ways that it can manifest in children... The study, which appears in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, was based on data from the National Survey of Children's Health, which gathers detailed information from parents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ascension Cyberattack Continues To Disrupt Care At Hospitals

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
23 May 2024 at 18:02
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Hospital staff are forced to write notes by hand and deliver orders for tests and prescriptions in person in the ongoing fallout from a recent ransomware attack at the national health system Ascension. Ascension is one of the largest health systems in the United States, with some 140 hospitals located across 19 states and D.C. A spokesperson said in a statement that "unusual activity" was first detected on multiple technology network systems Ascension uses on Wednesday, May 8. Later, representatives confirmed that some of Ascension's electronic health records systems had been affected, along with systems used "to order certain tests, procedures and medications." Some phone capabilities have also been offline, and patients have been unable to access portals used to view medical records and get in touch with their doctors. Due to these interruptions, hospital staff had to shift to "manual and paper based" processes. "Our care teams are trained for these kinds of disruptions and have initiated procedures to ensure patient care delivery continues to be safe and as minimally impacted as possible," an Ascension spokesperson said in a May 8 statement. Kris Fuentes, who works in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin, said she remembers when paper charting was the norm. But after so many years of relying on digital systems, she said her hospital wasn't ready to make such an abrupt shift. "It's kind of like we went back 20 years, but not even with the tools we had then," Fuentes said. "Our workflow has just been really unorganized, chaotic and at times, scary." Fuentes said orders for medication, labs and imaging are being handwritten and then distributed by hand to various departments, whereas typically these requests are quickly accessed via computer. A lack of safety checks with these backup methods has introduced errors, she said, and every task is taking longer to complete. "Medications are taking longer to get to patients, lab results are taking longer to get back," she said. "Doctors need the lab results, often, to decide the next treatment plan, but if there's a delay in access to the labs, there's a delay in access to the care that they order." As of Tuesday, Ascension still had no timeline for when the issues might be resolved, and reported that it continued to work with "industry-leading cybersecurity experts" to investigate the ransomware attack and restore affected systems. The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are also involved in the investigation. "While Ascension facilities remain open, a health system representative said on May 9 that in some cases, emergency patients were being triaged to different hospitals, and some non-emergent appointments and procedures were postponed," reports NPR. "Certain Ascension pharmacies are not operational, and patients are being asked to bring in prescription bottles or numbers." "Individuals who are enrolled in Ascension health insurance plans are being directed to mail in monthly payments while the electronic payment system is down."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK watchdog launches full investigation over fears pet owners are overpaying

✇The Guardian
By: Kalyeena Makortoff
23 May 2024 at 03:39

Inquiry follows concern over rising treatment costs and could cap prescription fees or break up pet-care chains

The UK competition regulator has launched a formal investigation into the £2bn veterinary market, over concerns that pet owners could be overpaying for medicines and are not always aware of the best treatment options available.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Thursday it was pushing ahead with a review of the sector in a move that could result in prescription fees being capped and leading pet-care chains being forced to break up.

Continue reading...

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© Photograph: Pascal Kiszon/Alamy

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© Photograph: Pascal Kiszon/Alamy

‘Although she was dead, I felt as if she was my friend’: what it’s like to perform the last rites for an organ donor

✇The Guardian
By: Ronald W Dworkin
23 May 2024 at 00:00

As an anaesthetist prepares a brain-dead patient for organ removal, he reflects on the need for compassion in a donor’s last hours

• This essay was originally published as Last hours of an organ donor on aeon.co

The patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation. To estimate operative risk, the American Society of Anesthesiologists has a classification system built around how sick a patient is, ranging from a healthy 1 to a moribund 5, the latter meaning someone is not expected to live 24 hours. When the system was created in the mid-20th century, a sixth class for dead people seemed pointless. Death was known to the dead only, and life to the living only, and between the two there had been no bridge. When the definition of death changed in the late 1960s, making it possible for a person to be “brain dead” but with organs still very much alive and available for donation, a bridge appeared and a sixth class was created in the early 1980s. Since 1988, when officials started collecting organ transplant data, almost 1m organ transplants have been performed in the US. Most of the organs have come from brain-dead donors.

When told of my upcoming case, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, being in perfect health, unaccustomed to suffering and therefore easily disconcerted by the thought of death, I was horrified. My attitude toward death was like that of a young person standing blindfolded and tied to a post, awaiting a volley from a firing squad. The whole concept made my blood run cold. Yet on the other, the case also aroused in me a feeling of relief. Simply put, there was no risk of malpractice, as my patient was already dead.

Continue reading...

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© Photograph: Tina Manley/Alamy

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© Photograph: Tina Manley/Alamy

Neuralink To Test Brain Implant On Second Patient

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
21 May 2024 at 03:00
The FDA has approved Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second patient. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company also outlined fixes to an electrode problem that caused its chip to detach from the first patient's brain. They were unharmed and could still control a computer mouse using their thoughts. Axios reports: Neuralink, which is owned by Elon Musk, said it is seeking applications for another patient with quadriplegia to test if the device can allow a person to do tasks like control a phone and computer. It outlined fixes that included embedding some of the device's wiring deeper into the brain, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a document and a person familiar with the company. Neuralink rival Synchron is preparing a large-scale clinical trial with an eye toward seeking commercial approval of its implant. Mass General Brigham has also launched a collaborative effort with stakeholders and the FDA to accelerate the development of the implanted devices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists Develop New Technique To Thaw Frozen Brain Tissue Without Harm

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
20 May 2024 at 23:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: A team of medical researchers at the National Children's Medical Center, Children's Hospital, Fudan University, in China, has developed a technique to freeze and thaw brain tissue without causing damage. In their study, published in the journal Cell Reports Methods, the group tested bathing brain organoid tissue in candidate chemicals before freezing them using liquid nitrogen. [...] The work involved dipping or soaking brain organoids (brain tissue grown from stem cells) in candidate compounds and then freezing and thawing them to see how they fared. After many attempts, they found one combination of solutions that worked best -- a mix of ethylene glycol, methylcellulose DMSO and Y27632. They named the solution mix MEDY. The research team then tested MEDY under a variety of conditions to see how well it prevented damage from freezing. The conditions involved changing variables, such as the age of the organoids prior to freezing and how long they were soaked in a MEDY solution. They then allowed the organoids to resume growing after they were thawed for up to 150 days. The researchers found little difference between organoids that had been frozen and those that had not -- even those that had been frozen for as long as 18 months. As a final test, the research team used their technique on a sample of brain tissue obtained from a live human patient and found that it worked just as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Single brain implant restores bilingual communication to paralyzed man

✇Ars Technica
By: John Timmer
20 May 2024 at 17:50
Single brain implant restores bilingual communication to paralyzed man

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If things work out as hoped, brain implants will ultimately restore communication for those who have become paralyzed due to injury or disease. But we're a long way from that future, and the implants are currently limited to testing in clinical trials.

One of those clinical trials, based at the University of California, San Francisco, has now inadvertently revealed something about how the brain handles language, because one of the patients enrolled in the trial was bilingual, using English and Spanish. By tracking activity in the area of the brain where the intention to speak gets translated into control over the vocal tract, researchers found that both languages produce consistent signals in this area, so training the system to pick up English phrases would help improve its recognition of Spanish.

Making some noise

Understanding bilingualism is obviously useful for understanding how the brain handles language in general. The new paper describing the work also points out that restoring communications in multiple languages should be a goal for restoring communications to people. Bilingual people will often change languages based on different social situations or sometimes do so within a sentence in order to express themselves more clearly. They often describe bilingual abilities as a key component of their personalities.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Another Online Pharmacy Bypasses the FDA To Offer Cut-Rate Weight Loss Drugs

✇Slashdot
By: msmash
20 May 2024 at 13:28
An anonymous reader shares a report: Hims & Hers Health, one of the online pharmacies that got its start prescribing dick pills, is now offering knockoff versions of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Hims & Hers says it will offer drugs that mimic Ozempic and Wegovy, the active ingredient of which is semaglutide. The copycat versions are made by compounding pharmacies. The formulations aren't the same as the FDA-approved versions of the drug and haven't been directly evaluated by the FDA, either. But they're cheaper than the real thing: $199 a month, compared to the branded version, which can cost more than $1,000 a month without insurance. Compounding pharmacies can make knockoff versions of branded drugs when they are in shortage, as the GLP-1 drugs -- prescribed for diabetes and weight loss -- currently are. The FDA has already received reports of adverse events for compounded versions of semaglutide. Hims & Hers says it "conducted extensive research for over a year" into finding a supplier, but does not name the one it chose to partner with. "Over the last year, we have grown in our conviction -- based on our medical experts' evaluation and the strength of our infrastructure -- that if done properly, compounded GLP-1s are safe and effective," the company said in its statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Reversal, Expert Panel Recommends Breast Cancer Screening at 40

✇NYT: Science
By: Roni Caryn Rabin
30 April 2024 at 11:32
Some researchers said the advice did not go far enough. The panel also declined to recommend extra scans for women with dense breast tissue.

© Michael Hanschke/picture alliance, via Getty Images

Breast cancer rates among women in their 40s are on the rise, increasing by 2 percent a year between 2015 and 2019.

Scientists Fault Federal Response to Bird Flu Outbreaks on Dairy Farms

✇NYT: Science
By: Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes
20 April 2024 at 10:18
Officials have shared little information, saying the outbreak was limited. But asymptomatic cows in North Carolina have changed the assessment.

© Jim Vondruska/Reuters

So far, bird flu in cattle seems to affect only lactating cows, and only temporarily. There have been no diagnoses in calves, pregnant heifers or beef cows, and no deaths.

Some Older Women Need Extra Breast Scans. Why Won’t Medicare Pay?

✇NYT: Science
By: Roni Caryn Rabin
19 April 2024 at 09:00
Mammography can miss tumors in women with dense breasts, so their doctors often include ultrasound or M.R.I. scans. Patients often wind up paying the bill.

© Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News, via Getty Images

A mammography machine at a mobile cancer screening clinic in Lancaster, Calif.

CEO of Data Privacy Company Onerep.com Founded Dozens of People-Search Firms

✇Krebs on Security
By: BrianKrebs
14 March 2024 at 17:13

The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.

Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals and $15/mo for families, and promises to remove your personal information from nearly 200 people-search sites. Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites.

A testimonial on onerep.com.

Customer case studies published on onerep.com state that it struck a deal to offer the service to employees of Permanente Medicine, which represents the doctors within the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente. Onerep also says it has made inroads among police departments in the United States.

But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

A search in the data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence for the name Dimitri Shelest brings up the email address dimitri.shelest@onerep.com. Constella also finds that Dimitri Shelest from Belarus used the email address d.sh@nuwber.com, and the Belarus phone number +375-292-702786.

Nuwber.com is a people search service whose employees all appear to be from Belarus, and it is one of dozens of people-search companies that Onerep claims to target with its data-removal service. Onerep.com’s website disavows any relationship to Nuwber.com, stating quite clearly, “Please note that OneRep is not associated with Nuwber.com.”

However, there is an abundance of evidence suggesting Mr. Shelest is in fact the founder of Nuwber. Constella found that Minsk telephone number (375-292-702786) has been used multiple times in connection with the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com. Recall that Onerep.com’s domain registration records in 2018 list the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

It appears Mr. Shelest sought to reinvent his online identity in 2015 by adding a “2” to his email address. The Belarus phone number tied to Nuwber.com shows up in the domain records for comversus.com, and DomainTools says this domain is tied to both dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com. Other domains that mention both email addresses in their WHOIS records include careon.me, docvsdoc.com, dotcomsvdot.com, namevname.com, okanyway.com and tapanyapp.com.

Onerep.com CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest, as pictured on the “about” page of onerep.com.

A search in DomainTools for the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com shows it is associated with the registration of at least 179 domain names, including dozens of mostly now-defunct people-search companies targeting citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia and Mexico, among others.

Those include nuwber.fr, a site registered in 2016 which was identical to the homepage of Nuwber.com at the time. DomainTools shows the same email and Belarus phone number are in historic registration records for nuwber.at, nuwber.ch, and nuwber.dk (all domains linked here are to their cached copies at archive.org, where available).

Nuwber.com, circa 2015. Image: Archive.org.

Update, March 21, 11:15 a.m. ET: Mr. Shelest has provided a lengthy response to the findings in this story. In summary, Shelest acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, but said there was “zero cross-over or information-sharing with OneRep.” Mr. Shelest said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.” The full statement is available here (PDF).

Original story:

Historic WHOIS records for onerep.com show it was registered for many years to a resident of Sioux Falls, SD for a completely unrelated site. But around Sept. 2015 the domain switched from the registrar GoDaddy.com to eNom, and the registration records were hidden behind privacy protection services. DomainTools indicates around this time onerep.com started using domain name servers from DNS provider constellix.com. Likewise, Nuwber.com first appeared in late 2015, was also registered through eNom, and also started using constellix.com for DNS at nearly the same time.

Listed on LinkedIn as a former product manager at OneRep.com between 2015 and 2018 is Dimitri Bukuyazau, who says their hometown is Warsaw, Poland. While this LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/dzmitrybukuyazau) does not mention Nuwber, a search on this name in Google turns up a 2017 blog post from privacyduck.com, which laid out a number of reasons to support a conclusion that OneRep and Nuwber.com were the same company.

“Any people search profiles containing your Personally Identifiable Information that were on Nuwber.com were also mirrored identically on OneRep.com, down to the relatives’ names and address histories,” Privacyduck.com wrote. The post continued:

“Both sites offered the same immediate opt-out process. Both sites had the same generic contact and support structure. They were – and remain – the same company (even PissedConsumer.com advocates this fact: https://nuwber.pissedconsumer.com/nuwber-and-onerep-20160707878520.html).”

“Things changed in early 2016 when OneRep.com began offering privacy removal services right alongside their own open displays of your personal information. At this point when you found yourself on Nuwber.com OR OneRep.com, you would be provided with the option of opting-out your data on their site for free – but also be highly encouraged to pay them to remove it from a slew of other sites (and part of that payment was removing you from their own site, Nuwber.com, as a benefit of their service).”

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Bukuyazau declined to answer questions, such as whether he ever worked at Nuwber.com. However, Constella Intelligence finds two interesting email addresses for employees at nuwber.com: d.bu@nuwber.com, and d.bu+figure-eight.com@nuwber.com, which was registered under the name “Dzmitry.”

PrivacyDuck’s claims about how onerep.com appeared and behaved in the early days are not readily verifiable because the domain onerep.com has been completely excluded from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The Wayback Machine will honor such requests if they come directly from the owner of the domain in question.

Still, Mr. Shelest’s name, phone number and email also appear in the domain registration records for a truly dizzying number of country-specific people-search services, including pplcrwlr.in, pplcrwlr.fr, pplcrwlr.dk, pplcrwlr.jp, peeepl.br.com, peeepl.in, peeepl.it and peeepl.co.uk.

The same details appear in the WHOIS registration records for the now-defunct people-search sites waatpp.de, waatp1.fr, azersab.com, and ahavoila.com, a people-search service for French citizens.

The German people-search site waatp.de.

A search on the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com suggests Mr. Shelest was previously involved in rather aggressive email marketing campaigns. In 2010, an anonymous source leaked to KrebsOnSecurity the financial and organizational records of Spamit, which at the time was easily the largest Russian-language pharmacy spam affiliate program in the world.

Spamit paid spammers a hefty commission every time someone bought male enhancement drugs from any of their spam-advertised websites. Mr. Shelest’s email address stood out because immediately after the Spamit database was leaked, KrebsOnSecurity searched all of the Spamit affiliate email addresses to determine if any of them corresponded to social media accounts at Facebook.com (at the time, Facebook allowed users to search profiles by email address).

That mapping, which was done mainly by generous graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University, revealed that dmitrcox@gmail.com was used by a Spamit affiliate, albeit not a very profitable one. That same Facebook profile for Mr. Shelest is still active, and it says he is married and living in Minsk [Update, Mar. 16: Mr. Shelest’s Facebook account is no longer active].

The Italian people-search website peeepl.it.

Scrolling down Mr. Shelest’s Facebook page to posts made more than ten years ago show him liking the Facebook profile pages for a large number of other people-search sites, including findita.com, findmedo.com, folkscan.com, huntize.com, ifindy.com, jupery.com, look2man.com, lookerun.com, manyp.com, peepull.com, perserch.com, persuer.com, pervent.com, piplenter.com, piplfind.com, piplscan.com, popopke.com, pplsorce.com, qimeo.com, scoutu2.com, search64.com, searchay.com, seekmi.com, selfabc.com, socsee.com, srching.com, toolooks.com, upearch.com, webmeek.com, and many country-code variations of viadin.ca (e.g. viadin.hk, viadin.com and viadin.de).

The people-search website popopke.com.

Domaintools.com finds that all of the domains mentioned in the last paragraph were registered to the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com.

Mr. Shelest has not responded to multiple requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from onerep.com, which likewise has not responded to inquiries about its founder’s many apparent conflicts of interest. In any event, these practices would seem to contradict the goal Onerep has stated on its site: “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

The people-search website findmedo.com.

Max Anderson is chief growth officer at 360 Privacy, a legitimate privacy company that works to keep its clients’ data off of more than 400 data broker and people-search sites. Anderson said it is concerning to see a direct link between between a data removal service and data broker websites.

“I would consider it unethical to run a company that sells people’s information, and then charge those same people to have their information removed,” Anderson said.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity published an analysis of the people-search data broker giant Radaris, whose consumer profiles are deep enough to rival those of far more guarded data broker resources available to U.S. police departments and other law enforcement personnel.

That story revealed that the co-founders of Radaris are two native Russian brothers who operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of the Radaris founders’ businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

KrebsOnSecurity will continue investigating the history of various consumer data brokers and people-search providers. If any readers have inside knowledge of this industry or key players within it, please consider reaching out to krebsonsecurity at gmail.com.

Update, March 15, 11:35 a.m. ET: Many readers have pointed out something that was somehow overlooked amid all this research: The Mozilla Foundation, the company that runs the Firefox Web browser, has launched a data removal service called Mozilla Monitor that bundles OneRep. That notice says Mozilla Monitor is offered as a free or paid subscription service.

“The free data breach notification service is a partnership with Have I Been Pwned (“HIBP”),” the Mozilla Foundation explains. “The automated data deletion service is a partnership with OneRep to remove personal information published on publicly available online directories and other aggregators of information about individuals (“Data Broker Sites”).”

In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Mozilla said they did assess OneRep’s data removal service to confirm it acts according to privacy principles advocated at Mozilla.

“We were aware of the past affiliations with the entities named in the article and were assured they had ended prior to our work together,” the statement reads. “We’re now looking into this further. We will always put the privacy and security of our customers first and will provide updates as needed.”

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