Women’s advocates split on libido pill
WHOdownplays MERSthreat as S. Korea reports 14th death
SEOUL, South Korea — Experts from the World Health Organization and South Korea on Saturday downplayed concerns about the Middle East respiratory syndrome virus spreading further within the country, which recorded its 14th death and a dozen new infections, but said it was premature to declare the outbreak over.
After a weeklong review of the outbreak of MERS, the panel of experts told a news conference that there was no evidence to suggest the virus is spreading. The outbreak in South Korea has so far been occurring only in hospitals, among patients, family members who visited them and medical staff treating them.
The virus has spread at a pattern similar to previous outbreaks in the Middle East, and the sequencing studies of samples from South Korea show no signs that the virus has increased its ability to trans- mit between humans, said WHO Assistant Director Keiji Fukuda.
Experts think MERS can spread in respiratory droplets, such as by coughing. But transmissions have mainly occurred through close contact, such as living with or caring for an infected person.
While the infections seem to be stagnating, the South Korean government must continue to maintain strong control measures, such as thoroughly tracing patients’ contacts and preventing suspected patients from traveling because it’s still early to declare the situation over, he said.
New infections appear to be declining, which suggests that the government’s control measures are having an impact, he said.
There has been widespread fear here of the poorly understood disease, which has no vaccine and had a mortality rate as high as 40 percent. There also had been growing criticism over failures by health workers and the government to initially recognize and quickly contain the disease.
Fukuda said overcrowded emergency rooms and hospital wards might have contributed to a widerthan-expected transmission of the virus. South Korea’s habits of “doctor shopping” — visiting multiple facilities to treat the same infection — and the custom of having many friends and family members visiting hospitalized patients might have also facilitated the spread, he said.
A 67-year-old woman who had thyroid problems and high blood pressure before she was confirmed as having MERSdied early Saturday, becoming South Korea’s 14th fatality from the virus, the Health Ministry said.
Nearly 140 people in the country have been diagnosed with MERS since last month — including 12 new cases reported Saturday — in the largest outbreak outside Saudi Arabia. By Sabrina Tavernise and Andrew Pollack
WASHINGTON — At a small luncheon in July in an elegant downtown restaurant, two well-known Washington feminists came to celebrate Cindy Whitehead, a senior executive at a pharmaceutical company that is developing a pill to revive women’s sex drive.
In some ways, it was an unlikely gathering. The feminists, Susan Scanlan and Audrey Sheppard, had worked on women’s issues for years, including on Capitol Hill and, in Sheppard’s case, at the Food and Drug Administration. Whitehead, many years their junior, had managed brands, sales and marketing strategies for pharmaceutical companies. Meager benefits?
But they had a common cause — getting the drug approved — a mission they said they believed in, but also one that the feminists were getting paid to promote. The occasion was captured in a splashy photo spread on the website of a Washington lifestyle magazine.
The women, together with a public relations company, Blue Engine Message & Media, are central players in the unusual story of how a female libido pill that had been twice rejected by the FDAachieved a surprise success on June 4, when a panel of experts recommended the agency approve it.
The FDA has not yet made a final decision. But by lending their heft to a campaign for the drug, the feminists won the support of much of the nonprofit women’s health community in Washington, galvanizing it with the charge that a refusal to approve the drug would be sexist.
Less noticed were women’s groups that refused to join the campaign, contending that waving the flag of gender bias would undermine what should be an impartial process based on science. Among them were the National Women’s Health Network and Our Bodies Ourselves. Many believed the pill’s risks — fatigue, fainting, dizziness and nausea — outweighed the benefits, which they said were meager. (Women taking the drug had about one more satisfying sexual event per month than women receiving a placebo.)
The campaign divided the normally cohesive women’s health community, which has long fought together for access to birth control and for abortion rights. “From my perspective, that was a really inappropriate strategy, and I really didn’t like it,” said Susan Wood, director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health at George Washington University. She said the company had “made the rounds,” asking for the support of women’s health organizations, including hers. “There are some very important issues around ensuring that women get studied and women’s health needs are addressed,” she said. “This trivializes that work.”
Women hold many senior roles at the FDA, including director of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Dr. Janet Woodcock. Wood herself served as assistant commissioner for women’s health at the FDA but quit in 2005 over delays in approval of Plan B emergency contraception as an overthe-counter medicine. ‘It’s called advocacy’
Advocates who support the libido drug, flibanserin, say they believe it has the potential to improve the lives of millions of U.S. women and strongly reject the charge that they were in any way co-opted by the company. They say passionate supporters are needed to move impassive federal agencies to action, and cite ACT UP, which pushed the FDA on AIDS drugs in the 1980s. “I’ve been accused of bullying the FDA, and I say, ‘No, it’s called advocacy,’ ” said Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League, who took part in the campaign for the drug’s approval.
The drug company, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, was formed by Whitehead and her husband, Robert Whitehead, after the company that previously owned flibanserin gave up on it following the first FDA rejection in 2010. The FDA made its ruling after a panel of outside experts voted unanimously against the drug. Whitehead said she was inspired by video testimonials from women in the clinical trials who were told that the drug was being abandoned.
“I immediately saw that for the women whose lives and relationship had been meaningfully improved over the course of the trial, this news was devastating,” she said in an email.