Italy experiencing measles epidemic after fall-off in vaccinations

Italy has announced that it is experiencing a measles epidemic following a fall-off in vaccinations, as the United States issued a warning to visitors about the outbreak of the potentially fatal disease.

The Italian health ministry said on Wednesday there had been almost 1,500 registered cases of measles so far this year against some 840 in all of 2016 and some 250 in 2015.

“Italy and Romania have an epidemic at the moment,” said Walter Ricciardi, president of the Higher Health Institute, adding that he understood why the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an advisory this week.

Ricciardi told Radio 24 that unlike in Italy, the United States had launched a large campaign to convince parents to vaccinate their children.

The Higher Health Institute says only around 85% of two-year-olds are being vaccinated against measles at present, well below the 95% threshold recommended by the World Health Organisation to block the illness.

The centre-left government has accused the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) of spreading concern among parents by questioning the safety of some vaccines and by loudly denouncing efforts to make vaccinations mandatory.

“Vaccinations have played a vital role in eradicating terrible illnesses … but nonetheless, they bring a risk associated with side-effects,” the M5S founder Beppe Grillo wrote in 2015, saying mandatory vaccination represented a gift for multinational pharmaceutical firms.

A leading M5S politician, Andrea Cecconi, suggested last month that the jump in measles cases might be part of a natural cycle for the illness rather than a preventable epidemic.

Renewed concern over measles came amid fury among doctors over a programme on the state broadcaster RAI that highlighted the possible side-effects of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer.

The M5S defended the report, but health officials accused RAI of being unnecessarily alarmist.

“It is very serious that a TV programme, which is supposed to be at the service of citizens, spreads fear by telling lies and giving credence to the anti-vaccine lobby,” said Giuseppe Mele, chairman of the Italian Society of Paediatricians.

Italy experiencing measles epidemic after fall-off in vaccinations

Merck Makes use of Legal Threats To Stifle Negative Suggestions About Zetia And Vytorin In Italy

In response to repeated legal threats, a public health physician in Italy has withdrawn tips to curtail use of a controversial drug. The drug, ezetimibe, is a important ingredient in Zetia and Vytorin, which is produced by Merck Merck. The cholesterol-reducing drug has been the subject of fierce controversy due to the fact it has never ever been shown to improve clinical outcomes. Regardless of the controversy, in 2013 the medicines had mixed revenue of a lot more than $ two.six billion.

MSD Italy, the Italian arm of the company, sent two “cease and desist” letters to Alberto Donzelli, who is “the head of education, appropriateness, and evidence based mostly medication at the public health authority of Milan (Milan Healthcare),” according to The  BMJ, which published a information report of the affair. The letter was also sent to Milan Healthcare’s director standard and to Roberto Carlo Rossi, the president of the physicians’ regulatory organization in Milan.

As reported in The BMJ, right after the very first letter Rossi replied that the medical commission had concluded “that there was no purpose to object on ethical grounds to Donzelli’s behaviour. Donzelli also replied to every single level raised in the letter. ‘I exercised my right to inform the general practitioners what emerged from our in-depth analyses of the published literature, on a peer to peer basis.’”

In a second letter MSD Italy “reaffirmed its intention to go to court except if Donzelli stopped his ‘seriously damaging action, [that was] tarnishing the company’s and the drug’s picture and status.’” MSD’s medical director, Patrizia Nardini, advised The BMJ: “We are in favour of balanced info, and we decided to write individuals letters simply because we didn’t see a willingness to assess all the data in a balanced way.”

Last month Donzelli capitulated and removed the contentious material from his internet site “until the problem is more clarified within the scientific neighborhood,” The BMJ reports.

In a published statement, quoted by The BMJ, the editors of 5 Italian publications expressed assistance for Donzelli: “In the educational and informational process, the disagreement should be expressed on the pages of scientific journals as a debate between peers, such as the readers who will be ready to determine freely what is the most proper option for individuals.”

Donzelli is hardly alone in criticizing the continued use of ezetimibe in spite of the absence of evidence for clinical benefit. Just recently, ACP Internist, an inner medicine website, raised the query: “Why are we even now prescribing what appears to be a ineffective drug?” The continued use of ezetimibe in clinical practice was also the topic of a information feature in JAMA.

Merck Makes use of Legal Threats To Stifle Negative Suggestions About Zetia And Vytorin In Italy