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HELP WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF SPACE The Indian Pharmaceutical Association Students’ Forum 2012-2013 Cover Story: World Population Day 11th July Panache -Live June, 2012 The Monthly Newsletter !!! Our Mission: The Indian Pharmaceutical Association-Students’ Forum is a national body of pharmacy students under IPA. It is a platform to promote increased student interactions and activities bringing more co-operation at a national level. IPA-SF will also link the pharmacy students in India with the rest of the world through memberships and alliances with international organizations. The IPA- SF will serve as a unifying factor for the pharmacy students’ community in India bringing them under one umbrella and thus benefit in turn the profession and thus the future health of INDIA. C E U A T M I C R A A L H A P S S N O A I C D I A N I T I E O H N T 17th Issue
Transcript
HELPWE ARE RUNNING
OUT OF SPACE
The Indian Pharmaceutical AssociationStudents’ Forum
2012-2013
Cover Story:World Population Day11th July
Panache -Live
June, 2012
The Monthly Newsletter !!!
Our Mission:T h e I n d i a n P h a r m a c e u t i c a l Association-Students’ Forum is a national body of pharmacy students under IPA. It is a platform to promote increased student interactions and activities bringing more co-operation at a national level. IPA-SF will also link the pharmacy students in India with the rest of the world through memberships and alliances with international organizations. The IPA-SF will serve as a unifying factor for the pharmacy students’ community in India bringing them under one umbrella and thus benefit in turn the profession and thus the future health of INDIA.
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17th Issue
Editor’s Choice - “Generic Drugs Vs Branded Drugs”
Students’ Speak -”The Spread Of Superbugs”
Excecutive Council
Call for Articles
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Cover Story- “Population issues: Inbreeding”
Student Exchange Program
Homework
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Population Issues: INBREEDING
Inbreeding is simply defined as the mating of relatives. (When thinking about the term relatives, it does not necessarily mean a close relative like a sibling…) It is a mating system in which individuals carry alleles that originated from a common ancestor.
Inbreeding is considered a problem in humans because inbreeding increases the chances of receiving a deleterious recessive allele inherited from a common ancestor. When discussing inbreeding, the level at which is taking place becomes important. Most studies are concerned with close inbreeding, also known as incest, which usually sets a threshold at the level of first-cousin mating. Discussed in this Article, is the reasons for, and the possible damage to the genetic profile of a
population due to the marriages confined to social groups with a common ancestry.When discussing inbreeding, one of the most important values to be concerned with is the
inbreeding coefficient. The inbreeding coefficient represents the probability that an offspring will receive a gene from each parent that is a copy of a single shared ancestral gene. The inbreeding coefficient is zero if the parents do not share a common ancestor, and if the inbreeding coefficient is one than the offspring has a 100% chance of receiving two copies of the ancestral gene REASONS A POPULATION WOULD PRACTICE INBREEDING.
Even though inbreeding levels have decreased in western civilizations, many studies have shown that in many other large societies consanguineous marriages still predominate. In fact, in many large populations of Asia and Africa twenty to fifty percent of all unions are that of consanguineous marriages (marriages to cousins). There are several circumstances that would give a population a reason to practice inbreeding at a large scale. Some of these reasons for practicing inbreeding include royalty, religion and culture, socioeconomic class, and geographic isolation and small populations.
Religion and culture can play a large role in the amount of inbreeding that takes place in a population. In many Muslim and Hindu societies in Africa, Asia, and India, consanguineous marriages, especially unions of first cousins, account for twenty to fifty-five percent of the total marriages. These religions tend to inbreed because of religious acceptance, preference, and tradition. Moreover, the culture of these societies also plays a large role into increased levels of inbreeding. Consanguineous marriages are thought to be an advantage when considering compatibility of the bride and her husband's family. This is particularly important when discussing the bride's relationship with her mother-in-law and the up-keep of the family's property. Another incentive to close relative marriages concerns bride wealth and dowry. Consanguineous marriages can lead to greatly reduced or no payments at all in unions of this culture. This allows s m a l l l a n d o w n i n g f a m i l i e s t o k e e p t h e i r p r o p e r t y a n d l a n d
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Geographic isolation and population size play a large role in many populations when concerning levels of inbreeding and genetic barriers. Migration rates can also play a large role in inbreeding levels. Furthermore, as the number of generations since the isolated population was founded increases so should the inbreeding levels.
In India, due to recurrent attacks, forced conversions and tyranny during the Mogul Era, small groups of a common ancestral background migrated in other safer and distant parts of the nation. This led to decrease in the genetic diversity, and isolation of the group due to geographical, lingual, social, b a r r i e r . T h e r e b y p r o m o t i n g t h e p r a c t i c e o f i n b r e e d i n g .The inbreeding levels decreased over time, and it was thought to be due to industrialization, greater population movement, a decrease in family size, and an increase in literacy rates. Studies show that inbreeding levels can depend largely on geographic, demographic, social, and economic factors
Shockingly, the highest intensities of inbreeding have been accounted in the Royal classes Inbreeding has been seen to occur frequently in many royal families'
histories. Royal incest was commonly found in Ancient Egyptian, Incan, Hawaiian, and many European royal families. Brother-sister unions become more frequent when royalty is the major factor concerning the incidence of inbreeding. There are several factors that can explain why royalty leads to high levels of inbreeding. One factor is that the king has limitless power in many cultures, and he can do what he wants and marry who he wants. Also, in many cases inbreeding is practiced in royal families to preserve royal blood lines. Another explanation is that a royal family can keep land, material possessions and resources within the family. Moreover, brother-sister royal incest allows succession of the throne to both a male and female blood line. There are also cases in which royal incest is part of a culture and is sometimes linked to legends or myths. One of the best documented cases of this was seen in the Incan culture in the 16th century. The Incan king was
to marry his full sister. This was done to emulate the king's mythical ancestor, the Sun, who married his sister, the Moon, and this was thought to preserve the purity of the divine royal blood line.
EFFECTS OF INBREEDING The negative health effects caused by inbreeding are due to the expression of rare, recessive deleterious genes that are inherited from common ancestors or a single shared ancestor. Studies on population in which inbreeding is common have shown increased levels of mortality and morbidity due to a variety of genetic defects
Study of European Royal Families Inbreeding was very common among the royal families of Europe, and it has been linked as the cause of the widespread number of cases of hemophilia in the families. The presence of hemophilia in the royalty of Europe started with Queen Victoria of England. Victoria is thought to be the original carrier for the recessive X-linked hemophilia gene, which lead to over twenty members of royal families inheriting the disease in just over 100 years. The disease was spread throughout Europe, because Queen Victoria's children and grandchildren married into many different royal houses in Europe to create political alliances.
Queen Victoria of England
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Study on Japanese Children after WWII Shortly after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in World War II there was an increase in the number of consanguineous marriages in the areas surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most common union was seen to be inbreeding at the first-cousin level. The study was set up to study some of the possible effects of inbreeding. The five effects of inbreeding looked at in this study was: the fertility of the marriages, the mortality of the offspring, the morbidity of the offspring, the reproductive performance of the offspring, and the characteristics of the offspring.
CONCLUSION There are several reasons that a population would practice inbreeding that span from religion to geography to royal bloodlines. Many studies have shown that inbreeding can cause increases in mortality and morbidity. As populations become more knowledgeable to these possible effects levels of inbreeding tend to decrease. However, there are other populations that are less knowledgeable to the possible negative outcomes of inbreeding, and it is possible that the effects of inbreeding may not be detectable or visible. Therefore, if there are harmful recessive alleles present in the population, the genes and characteristics still have the possibility of surfacing and negatively affecting a population, but it is very possible that the population will never see any harmful effects due to incest. In fact, some experts believe that in some cases inbreeding can be helpful to a population by constantly exposing harmful recessive genes to selection. By frequently exposing these genes to selection, the harmful alleles can become permanently eliminated from the population. Inbreeding is a very touchy and controversial subject when it concerns humans, and there is still a lot that we do not know about the possible effects of inbreeding. It is very difficult to run experiments to determine all the possible effects of inbreeding in humans, because there are just too many variables to control. However, most experts would agree that practicing outbreeding will provide a population with the best opportunity to achieve a high level of health.
by Pr. Avinash Bichave Bpharm
Reference: www.as.wvu.edu Eugene Ochap Genetics
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Generic Drugs Vs Branded Drugs. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet."
These words of Juliet do have a profound meaning when it comes to generic and branded drugs. The confusion around, which type of drug is better or cheaper still haunts the society. Many people do not even know the distinction, as that itself is a thin line. This issue was brought to light recently on television and it definitely led to an arousal among the people.
What are generic drugs and are they really safe??Generic drugs are copies of brand-name drugs that have exactly the same dosage, intended use, effects, sideeffects, route of administration, risks, safety, and strength as the original drug. In other words, their pharmacological effects are exactly the same as those of their brand-name counterparts.An example of a generic drug, one used for diabetes, is metformin. A brand name for metformin is Glucophage. (Brand names are usually capitalized while generic names are not.) A generic drug, one used for hypertension, ismetoprolol, whereas a brand name for the same drug is Lopressor.Many people become concerned because generic drugs are often substantially cheaper than the brand-name versions. They wonder if the quality and effectiveness have been compromised to make the less expensive products. The FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) requires that generic drugs be as safe and effective as brand-name drugs.
Actually, generic drugs are only cheaper because the manufacturers have not had the expenses of developing and marketing a new drug. When a company brings a new drug onto the market, the firm has already spent substantial money on research, development, marketing and promotion of the drug. A patent is granted that gives the company that developed the drug an exclusive right to sell the drug as long as the patent is in effect.As the patent nears expiration, manufacturers can apply to the FDA for permission to make and sell generic versions of the drug; and without the startup costs for development of the drug, other companies can afford to make and sell it more cheaply.
So there's no truth in the myths that generic drugs are manufactured in poorer-quality facilities or are inferior in quality to brand-name drugs. In fact, the FDA estimates that 50% of generic drug production is by brand-name companies.Another common misbelief is that generic drugs take longer to work. The FDA requires that generic drugs work as fast and as effectively as the original brand-name products.Sometimes, generic versions of a drug have different colors, flavors, or combinations of inactive ingredients than the original medications. Trademark laws in the United States do not allow the generic drugs to look exactly like the brand-name preparation, but the active ingredients must be the same in both preparations, ensuring that both have the same medicinal effect.
Many pharma companies have profound influence over published scientific articles and thus over the thought process of the people. They promote their brand of drugs over others through doctors. 94% of the claims made by the companies about their products are false. Many consumers have faced problems with even generic drugs because of their improper labelling. Yet, Federal officials appear to have once again sided with Big Pharma rather than the people they are supposed to represent. In a 5 - 4 ruling, the US Supreme Court has decreed that patients injured by improperly or inadequately labeled generic drugs cannot sue their makers in state court for damages.
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So are generic drugs really safe or are they just cheap?That`s not a trick question, but the answer is tricky. In reporting on the most thorough study of the comparative cost of generic and brand drugs to date, the Journal of the American Medical Association says the right answer is true "most of the time but by no means always." The research involved almost 900,000 prescriptions from 1,400 pharmacies in 39 states, and when it was all over, the researchers concluded: "The consumer is best advised to search for low prices without regard to whether the drug is brand or generic.So it is in fact true that generic drugs are cheaper and safer but there are some exceptions to this too. Yet avoiding those exceptions it is safe to say that generic drugs will definitely provide cure without making your pockets lighter. A very good example of this is the fact that a branded anti-cancer drug costs over one lakh while its generic version costs less than half a lakh.The awareness in India about the availability of generic drugs is paramount. The medical stores should be stocked with such drugs so that a poor man can get a drug and his can be saved. According to Dr Uma Tekur, head of the pharmacology department at Maulana Azad Medical College that conducted the study, the prescription of generic drugs improved post-intervention. "We conducted two workshops with the prescribers/doctors from medicine and surgery department — one immediately after the finding and the other a month later. The prescription of drugs as generics almost doubled," she said. The prices of generic drugs, which have the same therapeutic qualities, are significantly lower than their branded versions. For example, popular brands of paracetamol cost Rs 10 for a strip of 10 tablets (500 mg). Whereas, its non-branded generic equivalent costs as less as Rs 2.45 for the same batch of tablets.
Where do we get generic drugs??Generic drugs are sold everywhere including your local chemist. To buy them one simply has to ask for generic version of a branded drug though they don't have them for all medicines. The department of pharmaceuticals of the government is responsible for promoting generic drugs but they haven't done a very good job. To promote cheap drugs in 2008, the government had set up a scheme called Jan Ausadhi whose purpose was to set up generic drugstores around the country. Their initial plan was to set up 3000 stores but four years later only 300 of them exist. An insider felt that private doctors would never hand out generic drugs because there are no kickbacks or incentives involved from pharma companies. According to a highly placed source in the MCI, the body has very little say in the doctor-pharma relationship. Most guidelines are blatantly ignored.Generic drugs are the answer to better healthcare for all. India has one the highest out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure in the world and despite providing very cheap services (compared to rates of the countries like USA and UK) it's still inaccessible to many due to poor purchasing power. The only way to promote generic drugs is to curb illicit medical practices. Though the MCI guidelines dictate that doctors should prescribe generic medicines as far as possible, very few private practitioners actually do it.
THE SPREAD OF SUPERBUGSWhat can be done about the rising risk of antibiotic resistance?
ON DECEMBER 11th 1945, at the end of his Nobel lecture, Alexander Fleming sounded a warning. Fleming's chance observation of the antibiotic effects of a mould called Penicillium on one of his bacterial cultures had inspired his co-laureates, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, two researchers based in Oxford, to extract the mould's active principal and turn it into the miracle cure now known as penicillin. But Fleming could already see the future of antibiotic misuse. “There is the danger”, he said, “that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”
Penicillin and the other antibiotics that its discovery prompted stand alongside vaccination as the greatest inventions of medical science. Yet Fleming's warning has always haunted them. Antibiotic resistance has now become a costly and dangerous problem. Some people fear there may be worse to come: that a strain of resistant bacterium might start an epidemic for which no treatment was available. Yet despite Fleming's warning and despite a fair understanding of the causes of resistance and how they could be dealt with, dealing with them has proved elusive. Convenience, laziness, perverse financial incentives and sheer bad luck have conspired to nullify almost every attempt to stop the emergence of resistance.
There are good reasons to hope that the extreme threat of a resistant epidemic will never come to pass—not least that 65 years of routine antibiotic use have failed to prompt one. Even so, the lesser problems of resistance continue to gnaw away at medicine, hurting people and diverting resources from more productive uses, often in the countries that can least afford it.
Ignorant humans, smart microbesThere is, however, a third approach to the problem of resistance. This is to make new
antibiotics, to which bacteria will not, at first, be resistant. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the best weapons in the armoury are still decades-old drugs that would have been familiar to Fleming and his contemporaries. Here, it is the last two causes on the list that are to blame: perverse financial incentives and bad luck. Drugmakers have poured huge sums into applying genomics and proteomics (the study of how proteins behave) to the problem. It has not worked. Despite the millions spent, argued David Payne of GlaxoSmithKline, a big British drugs company, in a paper in Nature a few years ago, his firm and others came up empty-handed: “It was clearly very hard to find targets, so we stopped.” Other drug-research chiefs share his frustration. Mark Fishman of Novartis, a Swiss company, says that after a similar lack of breakthroughs in genomics “we've gone back to the brute-force method of screening millions of candidates that kill a bug—and then evaluating them for safety in humans.”
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IrresistibleConvenience and laziness top the
list of causes of antibiotic resistance. That is because those who misuse these drugs mostly do not pay the cost. Antibiotics work against bacteria, not viruses, yet patients who press their doctors to prescribe them for viral infections such as colds or influenza are seldom harmed by their self-indulgence. Nor are the doctors who write useless prescriptions in order to rid their
surgeries of such hypochondriacs. The hypochondriacs can, though, act as breeding grounds for resistant bacteria that may infect others. Even when the drug has been correctly prescribed, those who fail to finish the course are similarly guilty of promoting resistance. In some parts of the world, even prescription is unnecessary. Many antibiotics are bought over the counter, with neither diagnosis nor proper recommendations for use, multiplying still further the number of human reaction vessels from which resistance can emerge
Nor is the problem confined to people. Analyzing official figures, Louise Slaughter, an American congresswoman who is also a microbiologist, calculates that four-fifths of the antibiotics used in America are given to livestock, often to get perfectly healthy animals to grow faster. That is convenient, because it produces cheaper meat, but it creates yet more opportunities for bugs to evolve resistance.
At the moment, resistant bacteria threaten mostly children, the old, cancer patients and the chronically ill (especially those infected with HIV). However, there could be worse to come. Nearly 450,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are recorded each year; one-third of these people die from the disease. More than a quarter of new cases of TB identified recently in parts of Russia were of this troublesome kind.
The price in money, too, is high. On the basis of the Cook County study the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, a non-profit group, calculates that resistance to antibiotics costs America alone between $17 billion and $26 billion a year—perhaps 1% of the country's vast spending on health care. The poorer the country, the larger the share of its health-care budget typically absorbed by the cost of drugs.As a report last year by the Centre for Global Development, an American think-tank, pointed out, resistance often increases the drug bill, because patients are forced to turn from cheap, widely used drugs (whose very ubiquity encourages the evolution of resistant strains) to dearer alternatives. That imposes a disproportionate burden on poor countries. For the cost of treating one person with extensively drug-resistant TB, for example, a hospital could treat 200 with the less lethal variety.
The price in money, too, is high. On the basis of the Cook County study the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, a non-profit group, calculates that resistance to antibiotics costs America alone between $17 billion and $26 billion a year—perhaps 1% of the country's vast spending on health care.
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The poorer the country, the larger the share of its health-care budget typically absorbed by the cost of drugs.As a report last year by the Centre for Global Development, an American think-tank, pointed out, resistance often increases the drug bill, because patients are forced to turn from cheap, widely used drugs (whose very ubiquity encourages the evolution of resistant strains) to dearer alternatives. That imposes a disproportionate burden on poor countries. For the cost of treating one person with extensively drug-resistant TB, for example, a hospital could treat 200 with the less lethal variety.
A tragedy of the commons Derrick Crook, a consultant microbiologist at Oxford, where Florey and Chain once worked, observes, “It is hard to massively restrict the use of antimicrobials when they are doing good. It is possible that the enormous use in Asia is a good thing for a short time in a given country.” That, combined with ignorance about precisely how much the unnecessary use of antibiotics contributes to increasing resistance, makes restriction highly controversial.Tim Peto, a colleague of Dr. Crook's at Oxford, though skeptical of the idea that resistance might bring about a catastrophe, also notes that much of modern surgery relies on the risk of infection remaining low. At the moment, it is close to zero. If resistant strains raise it to even 5%, let alone 10%, a lot of orthopedic surgery, cataract replacements and other discretionary but life-enhancing procedures would simply stop. That would not be the end of the world, but it would be a step backwards. Kunal Rode, S.Y.Bpharm. (mum university)
Reference: 1. The Economist, march 31st 2011
2. http://www.nber.org
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HOMEWORK
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*answers on page (12)
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1) Inducted as the Director on Board on Dec 19, 2008 and appointed as the Non-Executive non-Independent Chairman of Board of Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited on May 24, 2009. He graduated from Hokkaido University School of Veterinary Medicine and holds Ph.D in Microbiology. He is connected to 30 board members in 3 different organizations across 4 different industries.
2) Appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of Ranbaxy since August, 2011. He is the founder of Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil) and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of United States Pharmacopoeia (USP). He graduated in commerce from Sydenham College of Commerce, Mumbai.
3) They started Ranbaxy in 1937 as distributor for Japanese company Shionogi. The name 'Ranbaxy' is a combination of their names. A cousin of theirs , Bhai Mohan Singh, bought the company in 1952.
4) This nationalist and anti-imperialist Indian scientist founded Cipla as the Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories in 1935, founded prior to independence. He is known as the 'father of indigenous modern Pharmaceutical industry of india. He graduated from Allahabad University and held MA and Ph.D degrees from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was a disciple of M.K.Gandhi. He was of member of Senate of Bombay University and Bombay Legislative council 1937-1962. He also served as the Sheriff of Bombay.
5) He is the chairman of Cipla. He was born to a Muslim father and Russophone Jewish mother in Vilnius, Lithuania. He holds a Ph.D in Chemistry from Christs College, Cambridge. He is best known outside India for defying giant western Pharmaceutical company inorder to provide generic AIDS drugs. His friends affectionately called Yuku. He has been awarded Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Identify the personality
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL FOR THE YEAR 2012-13
POSITIO N NAME CONTACT NO. E-MAIL ID Chairperson Chittoory Ratna
1. The selection of articles will solely be the discretion of the Publication Committee of IPA-SF.
2. Every article should have a word limit between 150 to 200 words.3. Articles should be typed in any normal font (Times New Roman) and should have a font size 12 and sent to [email protected] in Microsoft Word Format.
4. Articles should be the Author's original work. If the article has been directly picked up from some source then it may amount to plagiarism and such Author's will be barred from any future participation.
5.The names of any references used should be clearly mentioned.6.The names of any Co-author/s should also be mentioned.7.The name of the institution/company of the Author/Co-author/s should be mentioned.8.The efforts of the Authors and Co-authors whose articles have been selected will be duly acknowledged.
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL FOR THE YEAR 2010-2011CALL FOR ARTICLES
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Answers to homework:1) Dr. Tsutomu Une.2) Mr. Arun Sawhney.3) Ranbir Singh and Gurbax Singh.4) Khwaja Abdul Hamied.5) Yusuf Khwaja Hamied.
