News

Consumers and health care professionals can now go to a single Web page on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Web site to find a wide variety of safety information about prescription drugs.

Hershey's Center for Health and Nutrition announced the publication of a study that shows resveratrol, the compound often associated with the health benefits of red wine, is also found in cocoa and dark chocolate products. In the September 24 edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, scientists report that cocoa powder, baking chocolate and dark chocolate all have significant levels of resveratrol, a naturally occurring antioxidant.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today licensed for marketing the first product in the United States intended to protect people with hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare and potentially life-threatening genetic disease. HAE affects about 6,000 to 10,000 individuals in the United States.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued the results of its interim safety and risk assessment of melamine and melamine-related compounds in food, including infant formula.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced the approval of the vaccine Gardasil for the prevention of vaginal and vulvar cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) types 16 and 18 in girls and women ages 9 to 26. These two HPV types cause 70 percent of cervical cancers and are known to also cause some vulvar and vaginal cancers, but the percentages are not well defined.

Elderly people who take a cholesterol drug after a stroke or mini-stroke lower their risk of having another stroke just as much as younger people in the same situation, according to research published in the September 3, 2008 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The diabetes medication metformin (Glucophage, Fortamet, Riomet) may be associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, according to a meta-analysis of previously published studies in the October 27 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.