Health Highlights: Feb. 7, 2008

Mar. 23 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Tobacco Could Kill 1 Billion People This Century: WHO

Smoking and other types of tobacco use killed 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century, and could kill as many as 1 billion people this century unless dramatic global action is taken to curb tobacco use, said a World Health Organization report released Thursday.

It said all countries must significantly boost efforts to prevent young people from starting to smoke, help smoker kick the habit, and protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, the Associated Press reported.

The WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2008 listed six specific tobacco-control policies that should be adopted by governments: raise tobacco taxes and prices; ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; protect people from secondhand smoke; warn people about the dangers of tobacco; help people who want to quit smoking; and monitor tobacco use to understand and reverse the epidemic.

"The tobacco epidemic already kills 5.4 million people a year from lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses,'' said WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan. ''Unchecked, that number will increase to more than 8 million a year by 2030.''

It's expected that more than 80 percent of tobacco-related deaths will be in low- and middle-income countries by 2030, the AP reported.

The WHO report said nearly two-thirds of the world's smokers live in 10 countries, with 30 percent in China and about 10 percent in India. Other countries with large numbers of smokers include Indonesia, Russia, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Germany and Turkey.

Governments worldwide collect more than $200 billion in tobacco taxes a year, but spend less than one-fifth of 1 percent of that revenue on tobacco control, the WHO report said.

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FDA Panel Recommends Long-Acting, Injectable Zyprexa

A long-acting, injectable form of the drug Zyprexa is "acceptably safe" for use in certain schizophrenia patients, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel recommended Wednesday.

But the group of outside medical experts did express concern that the drug was associated with "profound sedation" so severe that it caused loss of consciousness and coma in some people taking part in clinical studies, Dow Jones Newswires reported. This occurred in 24 of 2,045 patients who received the drug. All of these patients recovered and most went on to receive additional injections of the drug.

Use of long-acting, injectable Zyprexa should be limited to schizophrenia patients with a history of chronic non-compliance with oral medications, the panel said. Some of the experts also suggested the FDA approve the product as a second-line treatment, meaning that other treatments should be tried first.

While not required to do so, the FDA usually follows the recommendations of its expert panels.

The clinical studies also found that long-acting Zyprexa, made by Eli Lilly & Co., was associated with weight gain, changes in blood sugar, and high cholesterol. These side effects also are associated with the oral form of Zyprexa and similar drugs.