Health News Roundup: Nobel medicine prize; concerns over CAR-T therapies and more

Following is a summary of current health news briefs.

Eli Lilly's diabetes treatment meets the main goal in two late-stage studies

Eli Lilly and Co said on Tuesday its experimental diabetes treatment was shown to be as effective as the drugmaker's Humalog medicine in two late-stage studies. The study also found that the drug, Ultra Rapid Lispro, significantly improved post-meal blood sugar levels in people with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes and had a similar safety profile as Humalog.

Scientists behind game-changing cancer immunotherapies win Nobel medicine prize

American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer. The scientists' work in the 1990s has since swiftly led to new and dramatically improved therapies for cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer, which had previously been extremely difficult to treat.

Rare manufacturing glitch raises concern over CAR-T therapies: study

A single leukaemia cell inadvertently got mixed in with a batch of a patient's immune cells that were being manufactured into a CAR-T cell therapy and it acquired resistance to the treatment with deadly results, University of Pennsylvania researchers reported on Monday. The mishap occurred in a 20-year-old leukaemia patient treated with cells manufactured at the university, eventually causing a fatal relapse of the blood cancer, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine.

Japan's Kansai to help Zambia paint out malaria

Kansai Plascon, owned by Tokyo-listed Kansai Paint Co Ltd, has launched the world's first mosquito repellant paint in Zambia to help it reach a target to eliminate malaria by 2021, the company and a Japanese government official said. Malaria, spread by mosquitoes, is a treatable disease if caught early, but current anti-malarial drugs are failing in many areas as people develop resistance to them.

Women who drink more water get fewer UTIs

Women who drink extra water to avoid urinary tract infections (UTIs) may be on to something. A new experiment offers fresh evidence that drinking more water each day can make UTIs less frequent. For the study, researchers focused on 140 women with recurrent UTIs who typically drank fewer than 1.5 litres of fluid (about six 8-ounce glasses) a day. For 12 months, researchers asked half of these women to continue their usual fluid intake and asked the other half to drink an additional 1.5 litres of water daily.

Oversupply of drugs in Mekong, East Asia puts younger users at risk, U.N. says

Production and trafficking of illicit drugs have reached unprecedented levels in Southeast Asia's Mekong region and East Asia, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning that oversupply increases the risks for younger users. Even as authorities seize larger amounts of illicit drugs, oversupply pushes down prices, bringing some, such as methamphetamine, within reach, an official of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said.

Philip Morris sues South Korea over e-cigarette info disclosure

Philip Morris Korea Inc. said on Monday it has filed a lawsuit against the South Korean government, demanding the disclosure of information on a recent test that concluded electronic cigarettes contain harmful substances. Seoul's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said in June after a study that up to five cancer-causing substances were found in the heated smoking devices, and the level of tar discovered in two products, including Philip Morris' iQOS, exceeded that of regular cigarettes.

Virus hurts hopes of fatter returns for Russian pork producers

Russia's pork industry is being hampered by African Swine Fever (ASF) as outbreaks of the virus are preventing producers from exporting more to lucrative Asian markets and leaving them with falling prices at home, industry experts say. Russia first reported ASF in 2007 and has registered more than 1,300 cases since then as the highly contagious hemorrhagic disease of pigs has spread from the southern Caucasus region to the country's northwest region and Siberia in the east.

Doors open to London's latest vegan venture: fish and chips

Fish and chips, scampi and prawn cocktail are all on the menu at chippie owner Daniel Sutton's newest branch, with one caveat: "There's no fish in our fish," he says. Sutton began serving "vegan fish and chips" at one of his east London chip shops as an experiment earlier this year but did not expect such high demand.

U.S. still outpaces other nations in infant, child mortality

Mortality rates for infants, children, and young adults have fallen in the U.S., Canada, England and Wales, but death rates in a new study were still higher for American youth than for young people in other countries. Previous research has found babies more likely to die in the U.S. than in other developed and affluent nations, but the current study suggests this is true even later in childhood and early adulthood.