Ore. woman wins $900K in lawsuit over herpes claim

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon jury has awarded $900,000 to a 49-year-old woman who claimed that a 69-year-old Portland man intentionally gave her a sexually transmitted disease after they met on an online dating website.

The Oregonian reports (http://is.gd/cdR7MI ) that it was the first time that a case of a person suing another for intentionally transmitting genital herpes went to trial in Oregon, according to lawyers. They say similar cases have been settled out of court.

The man testified he didn't know he was contagious. His lawyer argued that she was lying about her sexual history and may have had sex with other men who gave her the disease.

The woman from Beaverton, Ore., sued after she suffered repeated painful outbreaks of the disease. The jury award was for pain and suffering.

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Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com

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Oregon woman wins $900K; says date gave her herpes

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon jury has awarded $900,000 to a woman who claimed a retired dentist infected her with genital herpes, in a rare case in which a dispute over a sexually transmitted disease went to a jury trial.

The 49-year-old woman, who filed the suit under a pseudonym, testified last week that she suffered painful outbreaks and spiraled into depression following a sexual encounter with the 69-year-old man she met through the dating website eHarmony.

"I told the jury he's dangerous, and I believe he is," said Randall Vogt, the attorney for the woman, who declined to be interviewed.

High-profile lawsuits accusing celebrities of herpes transmission have been in the news for a quarter-century, but such lawsuits remain relatively rare and typically do not go to trial. The award issued Friday is believed to be the largest of its kind in Oregon. A similar 1996 case ended in a $550,000 settlement.

Vogt said the cases are uncommon because they are difficult to prove and typically embarrassing for the claimants. Moreover, it does not make sense to pursue a civil lawsuit unless the defendant has the money to pay a potential judgment.

The retired dentist, whose name was also omitted from the lawsuit, has had herpes since 1991. He testified he did not know he was contagious because he was not experiencing an active outbreak at the time the pair had sex, which was during their fourth date.

Roughly 1 of 6 adults in the United States has genital herpes, and transmission can occur regardless of whether infected persons have visible sores, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The suit alleged negligence and battery. On the question of negligence, the jury found the man 75 percent responsible and the woman 25 percent. The jurors determined the dentist committed battery because he intentionally engaged in an activity that harmed his date.

"We all felt he should have told her," juror Noah Brimhall told The Oregonian newspaper. "He had the responsibility to tell her."

The dentist's attorney, Shawn Lillegren, argued that the woman was negligent because she did not demand that his client wear a condom. He also portrayed the woman as greedy in his closing argument to jurors.

"Go for a million — that's plaintiff's message," he said, according to The Oregonian. "God bless America. Go for it. Got some coffee to spill on me?"

Lillegren did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday; it was unknown whether his client is considering an appeal.

Vogt said his client handed the dentist a condom, but he did not wear it and "the advance overtook her too quickly."

Later, while the two were lying in bed, the man told the woman he had herpes, Vogt said. She asked him to leave.

The woman received a clean bill of health a few months before having sex with the man on May 25, 2010, and tested positive for herpes less than two weeks later. Vogt said the quick medical test was crucial in proving the case.

Besides suffering from painful outbreaks, Vogt said his client eventually lost a job because of her depression. The viruses that cause herpes are incurable, though symptoms can be managed with medication.

"It made her feel like she needed to isolate herself from society, and she became a recluse," he said. "She was interested in finding a husband but pretty much dropped efforts in that direction because of the herpes."

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Gonorrhea growing resistant to drugs, WHO warns

GENEVA (AP) — A sexually transmitted disease that infects millions of people each year is growing resistant to drugs and could soon become untreatable, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

The U.N. health agency is urging governments and doctors to step up surveillance of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a bacterial infection that can cause inflammation, infertility, pregnancy complications and, in extreme cases, lead to maternal death. Babies born to mothers with gonorrhea have a 50 percent chance of developing eye infections that can result in blindness.

"This organism has basically been developing resistance against every medication we've thrown at it," said Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, a scientist in the agency's department of sexually transmitted diseases. This includes a group of antibiotics called cephalosporins currently considered the last line of treatment.

"In a couple of years it will have become resistant to every treatment option we have available now," she told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of WHO's public announcement on its 'global action plan' to combat the disease.

Lusti-Narasimhan said the new guidance is aimed at ending complacency about gonorrhea and encouraging researchers to speed up their hunt for a new cure.

Once considered a scourge of sailors and soldiers, gonorrhea — known colloquially as the clap — became easily treatable with the discovery of penicillin. Now, it is the second most common sexually transmitted infection after chlamydia. The global health body estimates that gonorrhea is responsible for some 106 million infections annually. It also increases the chances of infection with other diseases, such as HIV.

"It's not a European problem or an African problem, it's really a worldwide problem," said Lusti-Narasimhan.

Scientists believe overuse or incorrect use of antibiotics, coupled with the gonorrhea bacteria's astonishing ability to adapt, means the disease is now close to becoming a super bug.

Bacteria that survive antibiotic treatment due to a mutation that makes them resistant then quickly spread their genes in an accelerated process of natural selection. This is a general problem affecting all antibiotics, but gonorrhea is particularly quick to adapt because it is good at picking up snippets of DNA from other bacteria, said Lusti-Narasimhan.

"If it didn't do so much damage it would actually be a fun organism to study," she said.

Resistance to cephalosporins was first reported in Japan, but more recently has also been detected in Britain, Australia, France, Sweden and Norway. As these are all countries with well-developed health systems, it is likely that cephalosporin-resistant strains are also circulating undetected elsewhere.

"I think this is probably only the tip of the iceberg," said Prof. Catherine Ison, who oversees the national surveillance program for treatment of resistant gonorrhea in England and Wales.

The over-the-counter availability of low potency antibiotics in some Asian countries is one of the reasons why resistance is increasing, she said.

Doctors in Britain are now switching to using a combination of antibiotics over a longer period of time to combat resistant gonorrhea, said Ison, who is based at the UK's Health Protection Agency.

The Geneva-based WHO wants countries not just to tighten their rules for antibiotic use but also to improve their surveillance systems so that the full extent of the problem can be determined.

Better sex education is also needed, as proper condom use is an effective means of stopping transmission, said Lusti-Narasimhan.

"We're not going to be able to get rid of it completely," she said. "But we can limit the spread."

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Sex Ed For Teens With Intellectual Disabilities

For Judy Blake, a mother of two sons, both with autism spectrum disorder, it was important for her to have the sex talk with them at an early age, in clear and specific terms.

"A parent of a child with special needs doesn't just have to be two steps ahead, but 10 steps ahead," said Blake, author of the book, "Judy's World," which discusses her experience as a mother to two sons with autism. "For many kids, learning about sex requires a lot of repetition about safety, appropriateness, social cues and relationships."

Lorraine Merkl, mother of an 8th grade student at the Aaron Academy, a special education school based in New York City, agrees that sex education must be presented in a gradual, individualistic and repetitive way for many children with intellectual disabilities.

"The school does a good job of laying the foundation of sex, the nuts and bolts, but allows parents like me to talk to their kids about the emotional and moral aspects of sex," said Merkl, whose daughter has Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.

That's because the school makes a conscious effort to incorporate sex education in its mission to educate mindful and responsible adults.

"We have specialized instruction around difficult issues," said Barbara McKeon, director of the Aaron Academy. "Many students are physically mature, but not there emotionally. They are a more vulnerable part of the population, being bombarded by media and social networking, it can be difficult to sort out what is expected."

The Aaron Academy follows an educational framework based on research in cognitive neurosciences. The method encourages flexible learning environments that accommodate individual learning differences, and sex education is a key modality in the school's education mission.

New York City schools are mandated to teach sexual education. Nevertheless, McKeon said "sex ed is not the goal, but a part of the process" at the school.

Relationship and decision-making concepts are built into the school's courses. There is focus around health and hygiene for teens going through puberty and students keep journals to write down thoughts they do not want to discuss out loud. Role play is an important aspect of the learning processes, McKeon said, and all students are encouraged to keep a journal and write down thoughts or experiences they are not comfortable sharing in front of the class.

"You want to accommodate information that accommodates to the unique needs of each student," said Sarah Miranda, a licensed social worker and associate executive director of the Federation for Children with Special Needs. "You're teaching the curriculum for everyone with disabilities, but with each person, you want to adjust and modify it, then go back each year and make sure to see which information is being retained. There tends to be a lot of repetition."

McKeon also said administrator use a "red light, green light" tactic. If students say something inappropriate to another teacher or student, they will hear "red light."

"The inappropriate comment will fade off and the students are able to process appropriate conversations in a better way," said McKeon.

When discussing any type of learning, Bethany Stevens, a disabled sexologist on faculty at the Center for a Leadership in Disability at Georgia State University, said individualized modalities of learning are important for any type of student, disabled or not, in order to "reach your crowd in the most meaningful way."

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Sandoz recalls some Introvale birth control pills

VIENNA (Reuters) - Raising the stakes in Europe's debt crisis, Austria's finance minister said Italy, the euro zone's third economy, may need a financial rescue because of its high borrowing costs. Maria Fekter's comments in a television interview amplified investors' fears that Europe's leaders are far from ending two …

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Superbug gonorrhea spreading across Europe

LONDON (Reuters) - "Superbug" strains of gonorrhea which are becoming untreatable accounted for almost one in 10 cases of the sexually transmitted disease in Europe in 2010, more than double the rate of the year before, health officials said on Monday.

The drug-resistant strains are also spreading fast across the continent, officials warned. They were found in 17 European countries in 2010, seven more than in the previous year.

Gonorrhea was the second most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in Europe in 2010, with more than 32,000 infections, data from the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) showed.

Even though chlamydia was the most frequently reported STI, with more than 345,000 cases, the ECDC's director singled out gonorrhea as presenting a "critical situation".

Marc Sprenger said the increase in cases of superbug strains meant there was a risk gonorrhea may become an untreatable disease in the near future.

The proportion of gonorrhea cases with resistance to the antibiotic recommended to treat the disease, cefixime, rose from 4 percent in 2009 to 9 percent in 2010.

The ECDC report follows a warning from the World Health Organisation that virtually untreatable forms of drug-resistant gonorrhea were spreading around the world.

Gonorrhea is a bacterial infection which, if left untreated, can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancies, stillbirths, severe eye infections in babies, and infertility in men and women.

VIGILANT

It is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world and is most prevalent in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

In the United States alone, the number of cases is estimated at about 700,000 a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The emergence of drug-resistant gonorrhea is caused by unregulated access to and overuse of antibiotics, which help fuel genetic mutations within the bacteria.

"Public health experts and clinicians need to be aware of the current critical situation and should be vigilant for treatment failures," Sprenger said in a statement.

Experts say the best way to reduce the risk of even greater resistance developing - beyond the urgent need to develop new drugs - is to rapidly and accurately diagnose the disease and then treat it with combinations of two or more types of antibiotics at the same time.

This technique is used in the treatment of some other infections like tuberculosis in an attempt to make it more difficult for the bacteria to learn how to overcome the drugs.

The ECDC's sexually transmitted infections report covered data and trends on five STIs - syphilis, congenital syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) - in the EU and European Economic Area from 1990 to 2010.

It found diverging trends in sexually transmitted diseases across Europe, with a rapidly increasing trend for chlamydia and slightly decreasing trends for gonorrhea and syphilis.

Genital chlamydia infections are caused by Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria which can irreversibly damage a woman's reproductive organs.

Although the disease is easily treated with antibiotics, infections can remain undiagnosed because many patients - 70 percent of women and 50 percent of men - have no symptoms and so are unaware they are carrying and passing on the infection.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

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Is Chagas the New AIDS?

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Chagas disease, a parasitic infection spread to humans by insects, is not the new HIV/AIDS of the Americas, according to infectious disease experts who called the comparison “unrealistic” and “unfortunate.”

Responding to an editorial posted Monday in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and the media attention that followed, Rick Tarleton, president of the Chagas Disease Foundation, said the diseases have little in common beyond disproportionately affecting poor people.

“I think it’s an unfortunate comparison,” said Tarleton, a distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia studying Chagas disease. “There are stigmas attached to HIV/AIDS that themselves are inappropriate, but it would be even more inappropriate to apply them to something like Chagas disease.”

About 300,000 people in the U.S. have Chagas disease, an infection transmitted to humans by blood-sucking insects. But almost all of them became infected before coming to the U.S. from Mexico, Central America and South America, where roughly 10 million people have the disease.

“It’s difficult to say whether the type of attention this is generating is going to be good or bad for people with the disease,” said Tarleton, describing how many people with Chagas disease face obstacles in getting care. “I don’t think the comparison to HIVAIDS is a realistic one, and I don’t expect it to serve the situation terribly well.”

But Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, said he penned the provocative editorial to rally resources for people with Chagas disease.

“I wanted to call attention to the disease; make people aware of it,” said Hotez, adding he had no intention to diminish the impact of HIV/AIDS. “I believe that Chagas disease is every bit as important as the AIDS problem, but no one’s ever heard of the disease.”

When asked whether drawing a connection to HIV would stigmatize people with Chagas disease, Hotez replied “I don’t think it can get any worse for them.”

“They already lack access to medical care and many governments are ignoring the problem,” he said. “They’re already treated as outcasts.”

The insects that transmit Chagas disease, nicknamed “kissing bugs” for their tendency to bite people’s lips, infest low-income housing in countries where the disease is endemic. They bite at night, allowing parasites from their feces to infect the itchy wound. Insecticide can kill them, but few can afford it.

“For most of the people affected, it’s not an avoidable infection,” said Tarleton. “It is totally preventable, but largely unavoidable in certain regions.”

But unlike HIV, Chagas disease is largely asymptomatic. Only 30 percent of those who get it develop serious health problems such as heart failure.

“An HIV infection without treatment is essentially a death sentence, but most people with Chagas disease live with the infection for many decades and some people live a perfectly long life without any treatment,” said Tarleton.

And unlike HIV, Chagas disease can be treated in three months.

“In Chagas disease, there are treatments that cure the infection,” said Tarleton.  Current HIV treatments are life-long. “The downside is there is toxicity associated with those drugs in a substantial number of people, and it’s difficult to determine how effective the drugs are. They can cure the infection, but they don’t always cure the infection.”

Those drugs also come at a cost upward of $11,000, according to the editorial, making them out of reach for most.

Dr. William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., and president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, agreed there’s much to be done to improve care for people with Chagas disease.

“This might be called a forgotten disease of forgotten people — impoverished people in the developing world. And there have not been major efforts to find better drugs to combat this illness,” he said.

And while the comparison between Chagas and HIV may be alarmist, Schaffner said he hopes it will help rally resources.

“I was surprised, frankly, at the whole tone of the editorial,” he said. “But I hope it shifts the view from forgotten problems of forgotten people to newly recognized and appreciated problems of people who need help.”

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