Health Center hours change for holidays\nThe IU Health Center's holiday hours begin Nov. 24, the first day of IU's Thanksgiving break. That day, the IUHC will be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. On Nov. 25, Thanksgiving Day, and the day after, the IUHC will be closed all day. It will re-open when fall classes resume Nov. 29 at the regular hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.\nNext month, the IUHC will also observe shortened hours and certain closed days in honor of IU's winter break.
Thursday Smokeout aided by free IU class\nIn 2002, 22.5 percent of U.S. adults were current smokers, a figure down from 24.1 percent in 1998, according to surveys done by the Center for Disease Control. To assist in keeping numbers down, the American Cancer Society is sponsoring the 28th annual Great American Smokeout Thursday, an event aided at IU by a group offering a free quitting class on at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Fitness and Wellness Center in Briscoe Quad. The program, which was also offered last Wednesday night, is sponsored by the IU Health Center, the Alcohol-Drug Information Center, Monroe Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Coalition and Rhino's Youth Center. For more information on the program, call 855-5414 or e-mail adic@indiana.edu.
Radio tags to vouch for drugs legitimacy\nWASHINGTON -- The makers of the impotency drug Viagra and the painkiller OxyContin said Monday they will add radio transmitters to bottles of their pills to fight counterfeiting.\nThe technology will allow the medicines to be tracked electronically from production plant to pharmacy, a development the Food and Drug Administration said is an important tool to combat the small but growing problem of drug counterfeiting.\nShipments of OxyContin bottles with the transmitters will begin this week to two large customers, Wal-Mart and wholesaler H.D. Smith, the drug manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, announced.\nPfizer Inc. plans to start shipping bottles of Viagra with radio frequency identification, or RFID, by the end of next year, Pfizer spokesman Bryant Haskins said.\nThe RFID tags look like ordinary labels but are really computer chips with antennas wrapped around them. The tag works like a passport, picking up a notation at each stage of the distribution chain when the chip is activated. Sensors at distribution centers use radio waves to activate the tags, which are electronically read and stamped with a record of where they have been.\nA counterfeit drug would have no such record.
'Super pill' might aid weight loss, smoking and drug abuse \nNew 'super pill' might help solve drug abuse
NEW YORK -- A pill that helps you lose weight and quit smoking? Scientists say the experimental drug might be even more versatile, providing a new tool to help people stop abusing drugs and alcohol, too.\nIt's called rimonabant, or Acomplia, and last week researchers reported it could help people not only lose weight but keep it off for two years.\nThat burnished the drug's reputation after two studies in March, which suggested it could fight both obesity and smoking, two of humanity's biggest killers.\nThe French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi-Aventis plans to seek federal approval for rimonabant next year.\nBut the drug's benefits may go beyond just smokers and obese people, researchers say.\n"I think it's going to have a big impact on the treatment of addiction," said Dr. Charles O'Brien, an addiction expert at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center.\nAnimal studies suggest rimonabant can block the effects of marijuana and fight relapse in alcohol and cocaine abuse, he said. Once it is approved for treating obesity or smoking, "we'll be free to study it in these other areas, and I'll try to get my hands on it as quickly as possible," O'Brien said.\nRimonabant's versatility traces back to its effects on the brain's reward system, circuitry that tells you to keep on doing something. Basically, it appears to help break the connection between an activity like smoking and the rewarding feeling it causes in the brain.
