Alleviating radiation sickness

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - 14:10 in Health & Medicine

A combination of two drugs may alleviate radiation sickness in people who have been exposed to high levels of radiation, even when the therapy is given a day after the exposure occurred, according to a study led by scientists from Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Children’s Hospital Boston. Mouse studies of other potential therapies suggest they would be effective in humans only if administered within a few minutes or hours of radiation exposure, making them impractical for use in response to events involving mass casualties.  In contrast, the larger time window for administering the two-drug regimen raises the prospect that it could become a mainstay of the response to public health threats such as a nuclear power plant accident or nuclear terror attack. In a paper published online by the journal Science Translational Medicine, the scientists report the beneficial effects, in mice, of a combination of a fluoroquinolone antibiotic (similar to the...

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