Latest news with #AIDS
Hindustan Times
3 hours ago
- Health
- Hindustan Times
Stronger Than Fentanyl: A Drug You've Never Heard of Is Killing Hundreds Every Year
LONDON—Fentanyl fueled the worst drug crisis the West has ever seen. Now, an even more dangerous drug is wreaking havoc faster than authorities can keep up. The looming danger is an emerging wave of highly potent synthetic opioids called nitazenes, which often pack a far stronger punch than fentanyl. Nitazenes have already killed hundreds of people in Europe and left law enforcement and scientists scrambling to detect them in the drug supply and curb their spread. The opioids, most of which originate in China, are so strong that even trace amounts can trigger a fatal overdose. They have been found mixed into heroin and recreational drugs, counterfeit painkillers and antianxiety medication. Their enormous risk is only dawning on authorities. Europe, which has skirted the kind of opioid pandemic plaguing the U.S., is now on the front line as nitazenes push into big heroin and opioid markets such as Britain and the Baltic states. At least 400 people died in the U.K. from overdoses involving nitazenes over 18 months until January of this year, according to the government. 'This is probably the biggest public health crisis for people who use drugs in the U.K. since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,' said Vicki Markiewicz, executive director for Change Grow Live, a leading treatment provider for drugs and alcohol in the U.K. Particularly worrying, she said, is that most people take nitazenes unwittingly, as contaminants in other drugs. The U.K.'s National Crime Agency has warned that partly due to nitazenes, 'there has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs.' In the U.S., where fentanyl dominated the opioid market, nitazenes had as of last year been found in at least 4,300 drug seizures since 2019, usually in fentanyl mixtures, and have led to dozens of deaths. But reporting on the drugs is sparse and relies on self-reporting. Many overdose toxicology tests don't include nitazenes. The Drug Enforcement Administration has warned that Mexican cartels could use their existing relations with China-based suppliers to obtain nitazenes and funnel them into America. The most common street nitazenes are roughly 50 to 250 times as potent as heroin, or up to five times the strength of fentanyl. They are likely much more prevalent than official statistics suggest, due to limited testing. Authorities say official death tolls are almost certainly undercounts. On an early summer morning in 2023, police arrived at Anne Jacques's door in north Wales. Her 23-year-old son had died in his sleep in his student apartment in London, they told her. Her son, Alex Harpum, was a rising opera singer and healthy. Police found Xanax tablets in his room, and evidence on his phone that he had bought pills illegally, which Jacques said he occasionally did to sleep while on medication for his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet, the coroner established the cause of death as unexplained cardiac arrest, known as sudden adult death syndrome. Jacques, not satisfied with the explanation, researched drug contaminants and requested the coroner test for nitazenes. Seven months after her son's death, police confirmed that his tablets had been contaminated with the potent opioid. 'I basically had to investigate my own son's death,' Jacques said. 'You feel like your child has been murdered.' Harpum wasn't alone. While most known overdoses affect heroin users, nitazenes have also been found in party drugs like cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy, in illegal nasal sprays and vapes, and detected in benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium. In May, two young Londoners died after taking what authorities believe was oxycodone laced with nitazenes upon returning home from a nightclub. 'I basically had to investigate my own son's death,' says Anne Jacques. Dealers aren't trying to kill customers, but the globalized drug trade leads gangs to traffic a wider variety of increasingly potent substances, partly because smuggling gets easier as the volumes involved shrink. U.K. National Crime Agency Deputy Director Charles Yates said dealers are driven mainly by greed. 'They buy potent nitazenes cheaply and mix them with bulking agents such as caffeine and paracetamol to strengthen the product being sold and make significant profits,' he said. Nitazenes are also ravaging West Africa as a prevalent ingredient in kush, a synthetic drug that has killed thousands of people and led Sierra Leone and Liberia to declare national emergencies. 'It's an international concern. They have been detected on every continent,' said Adam Holland, an expert on synthetic opioids at the University of Bristol. 'You can produce them with different chemicals that are relatively easy to get a hold of, and you can do it in an underground laboratory. And because they're so potent, you need less for the same size of market so they're easier to smuggle.' Chinese suppliers sell nitazenes openly on online marketplaces sometimes using photos of young women as their profile picture. They list phone numbers, social-media handles and business addresses linked to China or Hong Kong. The drugs are sometimes labeled as research chemicals but also often explicitly as nitazenes. The Wall Street Journal found nearly 100 profiles on the Pakistan-based web marketplace TradeKey selling different types of nitazenes, including etonitazenes, estimated to have 15 times the potency of fentanyl. Four suppliers told a Journal reporter they could send any quantity to Europe, including the U.K., and promised they could evade customs. A spokesperson for TradeKey said the company has a 'zero-tolerance policy toward the listing or sale of any controlled substances, including synthetic opioids such as nitazenes.' It said it had added various types of nitazenes to its banned products registry and blocked hundreds of accounts seen to violate its compliance rules. On 'rare occasions,' a prohibited product may pass initial approvals and get listed, but the company worked to routinely clean the site, it said. 'We take this issue very seriously and are fully committed to ensuring our platform is not misused in any way. We also cooperate with regulatory and law enforcement bodies as needed,' the spokesperson said. Nitazenes were never approved for medical use in Europe. Developed in the 1950s, they were found in trials to cause fatal breathing problems. They were detected sporadically over the years: in a lab in Germany in 1987; in 1998 in Moscow, where they were linked to a dozen deaths; and in 2003 in Utah, where a chemist manufactured them apparently for personal use. Nitazenes appeared in drug seizures in Europe and the U.S. beginning in 2019, and began spreading quickly in Europe in 2023, their high potency leaving a trail of fatal overdoses even among seasoned drug users. In Scotland, whose population of 5.5 million has the highest overdose death rate per capita in Europe, nitazenes have been involved in 150 to 200 drug-related deaths in the past two years alone, said Austin Smith, head of policy with the Scottish Drug Forum charity. 'Imagine mixing salt in sand on a beach, it's impossible to do that evenly,' he said. Europe's medical practices have protected it from fentanyl, which first took off in the U.S. in the 1990s due to private prescriptions and aggressive marketing. However, Europe is vulnerable to opioids in ways that echo the American experience. The second big boost in fentanyl usage in the U.S. came in the 2010s, when drug cartels began adulterating the heroin supply with fentanyl. So far, nitazenes appear to be supplied by individual brokers and sellers, but Europe is rife with international drug gangs that could turn to nitazenes. 'Synthetic opioids in the U.S. have not been driven by demand, they have been driven wholesale by supply,' said Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow and expert on the global opioid trade with the Brookings Institution, a think tank. 'If large criminal groups such as Albanian mafia groups, Turkish criminal groups or Italian or Mexican groups get into supplying nitazenes to Europe on a large scale, we can anticipate a massive public healthcare catastrophe.' They may be prompted to do so. Since the Afghan Taliban most recently banned in 2022 the cultivation of poppies, which supplied about 90% of the world's heroin, experts have warned that a heroin shortage could lead gangs to cut the drug with other, more dangerous substances. Nitazenes are at the top of the list. 'If the heroin supply is interrupted, that will have a knock-on effect on drug use within Europe, and on things users can turn to in the absence of heroin, such as synthetic opioids and synthetic crystal meth,' said Andrew Cunningham, expert on drug markets with the European Union Drugs Agency. The tiny nation of Estonia has firsthand experience of what that is like. When the Taliban first banned poppy cultivation in 2000, fentanyl flooded the Estonian drug market as a replacement for heroin. Drug-related deaths grew fourfold in two years, and put the Baltic country in a fentanyl grip that it was unable to shake. For a decade, from 2007 to 2017, Estonia had the highest per capita overdose death rate in Europe. And Estonia is already feeling the influx of nitazenes, which since 2023 have been involved in nearly half of all drug-induced deaths in the tiny Baltic nation. When a batch of drugs contaminated with nitazenes hits the streets, it often results in a cluster of overdoses. Late last year, about 80 people overdosed and needed medical treatment in Dublin over a weekend. In March of this year, at least 31 users overdosed over a few days in Camden, north London. One of them, Tina Harris, 41, who has been using heroin since her early teens, said she bought a £5 bag of what she thought was fentanyl from a drug dealer in Camden. 'He told me, 'be careful because it's strong.' I thought he was just chatting sh—,' she said. After smoking the drug, she passed out, and survived only because a friend administered shots of naloxone, an antidote that users carry for emergencies, until the ambulance arrived. Harris woke up in the hospital, rattling from withdrawal. Since then, she has twice saved the life of friends who mistakenly took nitazenes, by providing naloxone and CPR. She has become increasingly worried about the drug supply in London, but said her addiction is impossible to kick. 'It's a devil's trap,' she said. Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at and Ming Li at
The Sun
4 hours ago
- Health
- The Sun
Shenzhen and Hong Kong Join Hands to Promote the Development of the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science & Technology Innovation Co-operation Zone
HONG KONG SAR - Media OutReach Newswire - 30 July 2025 - The Greater Bay Area International Clinical Trial Institute of Hong Kong ('GBAICTI'), the Greater Bay Area International Clinical Trials Center of Shenzhen ('BAY TRIAL'), Immuno Cure BioTech ('Immuno Cure') in Hong Kong are pleased to jointly announce today the signing of a tripartite Memorandum of Understanding ('MOU') in Shenzhen on July 29, 2025. This collaboration aims to advance the globalization of clinical trials in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area ('GBA'), further deepens clinical research cooperation between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and implements the first ever cross-border multi-centre Phase II clinical trial project for ICVAX, a therapeutic DNA vaccine for HIV/AIDS, developed through collaboration between Immuno Cure and the AIDS Institute at the University of Hong Kong. This marks a significant milestone in the development of the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Co-operation Zone. This collaboration is witnessed by a Hong Kong Government delegation led by the Director of Health, Dr. Ronald LAM, and a Shenzhen Government delegation led by the Deputy Director General of Public Hygiene and Health Commission of Shenzhen Municipality, Ms. ZHOU Liping, following their GBA Clinical Trial Collaboration meeting held in Shenzhen. GBAICTI and the BAY TRIAL plan to establish the GBA Clinical Trial Collaboration Platform ('Platform') by the end of this year. The Platform is expected to offer a range of services, including project evaluation, trial design consultation, and subject recruitment planning for multi-centre clinical trials, provided by a joint Shenzhen-Hong Kong advisory team; integration of artificial intelligence technologies to assist with matching clinical trial institutions and researchers, as well as offering intelligent consultation services; establishment of a coordinated ethics review mechanism between the two regions to enhance approval efficiency; promotion of talent exchange, collaboration, and professional training; creation of a research talent pool to facilitate talent mobility and regional collaboration; and as a pilot, the development of clinical databases and biobanks based on disease areas of strength in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Professor Bernard CHEUNG Man-yung, Chief Executive Officer of GBAICTI, said: 'The ICVAX vaccine, developed by Immuno Cure and the AIDS Institute at the University of Hong Kong, is now poised for cross-border clinical trials in the Greater Bay Area. This highlights the achievements and potential of innovation and technology in China and the Hong Kong SAR. If the clinical trial results are positive, the new vaccine would bring hope to HIV/AIDS patients worldwide, particularly in Belt and Road countries. We aim to leverage the strength of both Guangdong and Hong Kong to establish the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as a global hub for clinical trials.' Dr. LI Yichong, Director of BAY TRIAL, said: 'This collaboration marks the first cross border clinical trial project between the BAY TRIAL and Hong Kong, signifying a new phase in the cooperation between Shenzhen and Hong Kong in the biopharmaceutical sector of GBA. We will fully leverage the synergistic advantages of both regions to establish an international clinical trial platform with the BAY TRIAL, continuously injecting new momentum into the high-quality development of the Bay Area's pharmaceutical and medical device industry.' Since the first discovery of AIDS in 1981, 40 million people have died from HIV infection. Currently, there are still over 39 million people living with HIV worldwide. Although antiretroviral therapy ('ART') can effectively control HIV, it cannot cure the disease, highlighting the importance of immunotherapy. Immunotherapy aims to enhance the host's immune response, with the expectation of controlling viral replication without ART, ultimately achieving complete viral suppression and functional cure. Immuno Cure's ICVAX induces broad-spectrum, multifunctional virus-specific T cells to achieve the goal of controlling viral replication without ART. Immuno Cure completed the first-in-human Phase I clinical trial of the ICVAX vaccine in November 2024. The results demonstrated excellent safety and good immunogenicity. This year, two multi-center Phase II clinical trials will be conducted to evaluate the mechanism of action and efficacy, respectively, of ICVAX in humans. Both are randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-escalation studies, with clinical trial centres in the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong and eight Grade 3A hospitals in China, including The Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, Beijing Ditan Hospital, Beijing Youan Hospital, Guangzhou Eighth People's Hospital, Tianjin Second People's Hospital, The Sixth People's Hospital of Zhengzhou, Chengdu Public Health Clinical Medical Center, and Chongqing Public Health Medical Center. Dr. Xia JIN, Chief Executive Officer of Immuno Cure, said: 'We are delighted to receive support from both GBAICTI and BAY TRIAL, integrating medical resources from both regions to advance Immuno Cure's therapeutic vaccine for HIV, ICVAX, to multi-center Phase II clinical trials. We will continue to collaborate with the HKU AIDS Institute to drive innovation in drug development, leverage local advantages in drug research and translation, accelerate ICVAX towards commercialization, provide more effective treatment options for HIV patients, and contribute to global health.' GBAICTI, BAY TRIAL, and Immuno Cure look forward to further deepening clinical trial cooperation between Shenzhen and Hong Kong in future collaborations, jointly promoting the development and globalisation of innovative drug development, and supporting the national 'Healthy China' strategic goals.
Mid East Info
15 hours ago
- Health
- Mid East Info
Mayo Clinic researchers develop first salivary gland regenerative biobank to combat chronic dry mouth - Middle East Business News and Information
Dubai, United Arab Emirates;July 2025 — Millions of people are affected by chronic dry mouth, or xerostomia, an agonizing side effect of damaged salivary glands. While chemotherapy and radiation treatment for head and neck cancer are the most common causes of this, aging, certain medications and other factors, including diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer's disease and HIV/AIDS, can also cause chronic dry mouth. Currently, there is no cure for it. Mayo Clinic researchers have established the world's first biobank of human salivary gland tissue-organoids that opens the door to research to find a cure. 'This unique biobank resource overcomes a major barrier we've faced in the field, namely: limited access to standardized salivary specimens suited for salivary gland regeneration research. This collection provides a foundation for regenerative therapy development, especially for radiation-induced chronic dry mouth,' says Nagarajan Kannan, Ph.D., lead author of the study published in NPJ Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Kannan is also the director of the Mayo Clinic Stem Cell and Cancer Biology Laboratory. Nearly 70% of patients with head and neck cancer who are undergoing radiation therapy experience permanent damage to their salivary glands. People with this condition experience diminished quality of life from a constant feeling like cotton is lining their mouths. Besides being uncomfortable, chronic dry mouth can lead to difficulties with chewing, tasting, speaking and swallowing. It also can cause tooth decay. 'Chronic dry mouth can extend long after radiation treatments are complete. It's among the top concerns I hear from patients with head and neck cancer. Unfortunately, there aren't many therapeutics available commercially for these patients,' says co-author Jeffrey Janus, M.D., an ear, nose and throat specialist at Mayo Clinic in Florida. One promising avenue of research is the cultivation of rare regenerative cells to greater numbers that can help people someday heal and grow new, healthy salivary gland cells. The biobank consists of specimens collected from 208 donors. From this repository, researchers have already found biomarkers for mature, saliva-producing cells, and with the help of a high-resolution protein map, they have identified the potential tissue origin of rare, self-renewing salivary cells. The research team also developed a radiation injury model, which paired with the biobank, provides an integrated platform to discover new, personalized regenerative biotherapeutics. This is a collaboration between Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and Department of Otolaryngology.
Miami Herald
16 hours ago
- Health
- Miami Herald
David Nabarro, doctor who tried to raise millions to treat cholera in Haiti, dies at 75
The United Nations and world health community are mourning the death of David Nabarro, the British physician and public health champion who led the U.N response to eradicating cholera in Haiti after taking on some of the world's most pressing diseases, including Ebola. A passionate advocate who was once described to the Miami Herald as the U.N.'s go-to guy for responding 'to really tricky' situations, Nabarro died Friday at his home in Ferney-Voltaire, France, a suburb of Geneva, according to the 4SD Foundation, a Switzerland-based social enterprise he founded and where he served as strategic director. He was 75. His passing was described as a 'sudden death.' 'Dr. Nabarro was a tireless advocate for global health -- a leader who brought clarity, compassion and conviction to some of the world's most complex health emergencies, from AIDS and malaria to avian influenza and the COVID-19 pandemic,' Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said in a statement Tuesday. 'He dedicated his life to the conviction that health is a human right — and worked to help make that right a reality for all people everywhere,' Haq added. Nabarro was known for his organized, results-oriented style and willingness to take personal risks. During the COVID pandemic, he served as one of six special envoys to the World Health Organization dealing with the coronavirus crisis. For his efforts and overall contributions to global health, he was knighted by King Charles III in 2023. Among those contributions was his fight against Ebola. With more than 30 years experience as a public health doctor when he was appointed coordinator of the U.N's efforts, Nabarro ended up raising $3.5 billion to fight Ebola despite the incessant and worrying questions from donors asking him if he knew what he was doing and if he had a strategy. 'There was a question mark always over whether or not we had a strategy that made sense, whether or not we knew what we were up to,'' he told the Herald in a 2016 interview. Soon he faced the same kinds of question as he tried to raise $400 million for the U.N.'s cholera plan in Haiti. Nabarro had been tapped to serve as special adviser to then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who after years of fighting litigation efforts by victims and refusing to acknowledge the U.N.'s role in inadvertently introducing the deadly disease into Haiti, was ready to take it on the problem. Scientific studies and a confidential U.N. report had traced Haiti's outbreak to Nepalese soldiers, part of a U.N. peacekeeping contingent stationed near a river in the rural town of Mirebalais after the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake. By the time Nabarro was involved cholera had killed at least 9,393 people and sickened more than 790,840 in the Caribbean country. His job was to help the secretary general raise hundreds of millions of dollars over two years to fund a U.N. plan to eliminate cholera with rapid responses, vaccinations and improving long-term access to clean water and sanitation. By the time Nabarro came on the scene in late 2016, Ban had finally admitted the U.N.'s role and offered an apology during a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. He wanted Nabarro to do for cholera what he had done for Ebola in Africa: galvanize government efforts and raise money. 'I have no illusions about this. It's going to be tough,' Nabarro told the Herald two weeks before visiting Haiti with Ban. 'But I am not scared by it.' Over the next few months, Nabarro made other visits and devoted himself to the cholera problem as well as to the fight against global hunger. To understand the waterborne disease's evolution and response, he reached out to a number of public health experts including Ariel Henry. The physician, who would later serve as Haiti's prime minister, was in the administration of then-President René Préval and was helping with the government's response. At the time Préval was facing immense pressure from the Obama administration to hold presidential and legislative elections in Haiti despite the deaths of more than 300,000 people and 1.5 million homeless in the quake. Fearing that placing blame on the U.N. would lead to the departure of its blue helmet peacekeepers and open the door to more violence and instability, Préval tried to manage the response on his own. But as time went by, pressure built for the U.N. to not only acknowledge its role but to apologize and compensate victims. Instead of checks to victims, Ban called for vaccinating adults and dispatching more rapid response teams within 24 to 48 hours of an infection. He also pledged that the U.N. would improve water and sanitation in places where cholera had spread. In an email exchange in 2017 while vying for the top job at the World Health Organization, Nabarro acknowledged that the effort to raise financing to eradicate cholera in Haiti had not been easy. The amount of money raised was small, but he still held onto hope that the benefits would be enormous. 'I really do hope that I get to the director general of the World Health Organization as I would then be able to give a very high priority to a concerted and sustained effort to reduce the incidence of cholera in the country and to help all Haitians to access drinking water and functioning sanitation,' he told a Herald reporter. Nabarro lost out on the WHO job to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a post on the social media platform X on Saturday, Ghebreyesus remembered Nabarro as 'a great champion of global health and health equity, and a wise, generous mentor to countless individuals.' Through Nabarro's efforts and those of others in Haiti, the country was declared cholera-free in February 2022 by Henry, now the country's prime minister, after three years without a confirmed case. The celebration was short-lived. By the end of the year, repeated gang clashes, which cut off access to water, fuel and hospitals in Port-au-Prince, gave rise to a resurgence of cholera cases. Nabarro is survived by his wife, Flo; his children, Tom, Ollie, Polly, Josie and Lucas, and seven grandchildren.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Olly Alexander says It's A Sin helped him confront his 'fear of HIV and sex'... as Tatler cover star reveals what he really thinks of his Eurovision nightmare
To date, it is arguably his most successful acting role - and with good reason. Set against the backdrop of 1980s London, the Russell T. Davies scripted It's A Sin won multiple awards for its heart wrenching portrayal of a gay community torn apart by the ravages of AIDS. But it was Olly Alexander who commanded the screen as Richie Tozer - a fun-loving young actor who would ultimately fall victim to the disease. Already established as lead singer of pop group Years & Years, Alexander, 35, consequently received multiple award nominations, while the show earned a BAFTA TV win for its harrowing portrayal of a society left blindsided by the AIDS crisis. Reflecting on his involvement in the Channel 4 mini-series with the September issue of Tatler, the British star admitted accepting the role helped him face an uncomfortable truth. He said: 'I didn't realise it until I went towards it, but I had inherited this fear around HIV and sex, which is connected to the shame I had about being gay. 'It helped me unpack all of that. I never understood actors who say they brought their characters home with them until I did.' In It's A Sin, Tozer is an openly gay man among friends, but remains closeted to his parents until they are forced to confront his sexuality head on after discovering he has AIDS. While Alexander has always been open about his own sexuality off-screen, he admits a media advisor warned him not to 'come out' to the public when he first entered the music industry in his twenties. 'You'd never give that advice now, and it was terrible advice then,' he said. 'I knew it was never really going to be an option for me, but it did feel like a fork-in-the-road moment.' But North Yorkshire born Alexander admits his own journey as a young gay man confronted by the bright lights of London mirrors that of Tozer. 'I feel like a lot of my identity has been fostered in London,' he said. 'I was a very young gay boy, too scared to go out until I was 20. 'Then I would just go to every club: Madame Jojo's, East Bloc, Dalston Superstore, The Joiners Arms and The George and Dragon. 'I was there every weekend, trying to find my people. It was just joyful chaos.' Away from the small screen, Alexander released solo album Polari - his first without Years & Years - in February, just nine months after representing the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest. With his pop star pedigree, there were high hopes for the singer after he announced his involvement in the annual competition and unveiled his chosen song, the upbeat electro-pop single Dizzy. But it would end in bitter disappointment for Alexander after a sexually charged performance at Sweden's Malmö Arena failed to impress viewers across mainland Europe, with the United Kingdom winning 46 points and finishing in a miserable 18th place. 'Now that I've had a bit of time away, I'm so proud I got to do it,' he told Tatler. 'But it was also very stressful, it can be very vulnerable and isolating.' After years of failure at the competition, Alexander admits he'd predicted the outcome long before he took to the stage. 'Everyone said, 'You're going to bring it home, Olly'', he recalled. 'I knew I wouldn't.'
