Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union ministers have been asked to approve the transfer of Euro 60 million from the general EU 2001 budget, (most of which is currently earmarked for fishery support), to help finance the UN’s Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament has widened health research under the oncoming EU Sixth Framework Programme to include studies on traditional diseases, widening European Commission plans to limiting its life science work to genomics and biotechnology. By contrast, the parliament wants money spent on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, degenerative nervous system illnesses, (including CJD), diabetes, viral hepatitis C, allergies, rare diseases and ageing conditions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EU Council of Ministers, (health), has adopted formal guidelines on the prudent use of antibiotics and other anti-microbial agents in human medicine, to contain the spread of resistance in viruses and bacteria to these pharmaceuticals.

This non-binding Recommendation asks national governments to provide public information on the subject, to use a precautionary ‘by prescription only’ approach, to carry out more research and to improve monitoring of consumption of these drugs.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union-wide strategy to guarantee the production, supply and availability of medicines warding off the effects of a biological terrorist attack have been debated at a meeting between the European Commission and the EU pharmaceutical industry. They discussed possible threats, and how to ensure medicines are made available in emergencies.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKE AND KEITH NUTHALL
THE SCENE is familiar; armed robbers hold up a bank and a teller moves to dive beneath a desk to hit the panic button, but is told to freeze or be shot. Companies with exposed personnel such as these might consider buying a new wristband alarm developed by Japanese company Takenaka Engineering Co.,…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WHEN publishers bind imported preprinted material in a book, pamphlet, leaflet and brochure, they have created a new locally manufactured product, the rules of origin committee of the World Trade Organisation has ruled.

The decision means that worldwide, such products would in future be affected by duties, quotas and other import and export regulations relating to the country where they were bound, rather than where their pages were printed.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICA’S Readers Digest Association Inc. showed a significant loss of US 1.1 million or a penny a share for the quarter ended September 30, 2001, compared with a net income at US $22.3 million or 21 cents a share for the same period last year.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
HEATHER Reisman, CEO of Canada’s Indigo Books and Music Inc., has banned copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf from bookshelves in the merged chain’s 200 plus Indigo and Chapters outlets. “We consider it hate literature. With freedom of expression, the line is drawn on hate literature.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
CHAPTERS Online Inc., Canada’s leading online book retailer, that was once the Internet arm of the Chapters chain of bookstores in the country, has been officially bought out by shareholders of Indigo Books & Music Inc., the same company that swallowed up its former parent earlier this year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE DEVELOPMENT of so-called smart houses, specially designed for the elderly and disabled, is being promoted by the European Commission, notably through schemes to finance adapted electronic devices built into these homes.

Speaking to a conference on Vitality in the Age of the Information Society, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, EU information society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said that the concept of promoting products and services for householders with impaired mobility was central to Brussels’ high-tech strategies.…