The Dutch health ministry and addiction clinic Trimbos have issued a warning about a life-threatening fake version of the drug oxycodone which may have already killed one user in the Netherlands.

The fake pills contain a different chemical – isotonitazepyne – a synthetic opioid which, according to some research, is 1,000 times more potent than morphine.

The person who died last Friday may taken the fake drug, having bought the pills online without a prescription, although the cause of death has not yet been confirmed, the Trimbos institute told Dutch News. The pills were found close to the body of the 30-year-old man in Amsterdam.

Oxycodone is a highly addictive painkiller used in the Netherlands by cancer patients and as part of palliative care.

Isotonitazepyne and other nitazenes “work for longer than other strong synthetic opioids and that increases the risk of overdosing,” Trimbos said. “A couple of milligrammes can cause serious health risks such as breathing difficulties, which in turn can lead to death.”

Another version of the drug, protonitazene, was found earlier by researchers for the Dutch Drugs Information and Monitoring System in fake oxycodone pills which had been bought online.

Chief health inspector Henk de Groot said the incident “shows how dangerous it is to buy pills which require a prescription online.”

“It might look real, but you have absolutely no idea what you are buying,” he said.

With the average American spending more than $1,400 on prescription medications a year, many people look to cut corners to help budget themselves — with dangerous and even fatal consequences.

“For many, that’s a budget buster, so they skip doses or delay filling prescriptions,” Charlie Harger said on “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. “Money-saving strategies that can have some serious, life-threatening consequences.”

Herb Weisbaum, a contributing editor at Checkbook.org known as “The ConsumerMan,” shared a few ways people can spend less on prescription medications.

“One way is by (getting) a larger amount,” Weibaum said. “If you know you’ll be on a drug for more than three months, ask your doctor, ‘Can I get a prescription for 90 days supply?’ Chances are you’ll pay significantly less per dose than with a 30-day supply, and you only get that if you have insurance. You only have that one co-pay.”

He also recommends checking at least one online coupon site, such as GoodRx or SingleCare.

“There are a whole bunch of them to see if the price you pay is cheaper,” Weisbaum said. “If you don’t use Medicare or insurance and pay yourself, these discounts can be up to 80% off the cash price. Personal story: My wife and I were taking a prescription drug. It was generic and it was $12 and we were buying it for years and years. All of a sudden, we pull up to the pharmacy and, this time, it’s $122. Like, what? So I said, ‘Take it back.’ We went home, got on the computer, logged onto GoodRx, and found a coupon for 12 bucks at another pharmacy in our neighborhood just a mile away.”

A new set of guidelines have been launched to create trustworthy AI systems in health care. The first of its kind, the FUTURE-AI guideline provides recommendations covering the entire lifecycle of medical AI, from design, development and validation to regulation, deployment, and monitoring.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in health care, helping with tasks like disease diagnosis and predicting treatment outcomes. However, despite these advances, many health care professionals and patients are still hesitant to fully embrace AI technologies. This hesitation largely stems from concerns about trust, safety, and ethics.

In particular, existing research has shown that AI tools in health care can be prone to errors and patient harm, biases and increased health inequalities, lack of transparency and accountability, as well as data privacy and security breaches.

To overcome these challenges the FUTURE-AI Consortium has developed a comprehensive set of guidelines published in the BMJ. Developed by an international consortium of 117 experts from 50 countries the new guidelines called FUTURE-AI provide a roadmap for creating trustworthy and responsible AI tools for health care.

The FUTURE-AI guidelines are built around six guiding principles:

1. Fairness: AI should treat all patients equitably and without bias.
2. Universality: AI solutions should be applicable across different health care contexts and populations.
3. Traceability: It should be possible to track how AI systems make decisions.
4. Usability: AI tools must be user-friendly for health care professionals and patients alike.
5. Robustness: AI systems should perform reliably under various conditions.
6. Explainability: Patients and clinicians need clear explanations of how AI arrives at its conclusions.

Gary Collins, Professor of Medical Statistics at the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences (NDORMS), University of Oxford, and author of FUTURE-AI said, “These guidelines fill an important gap in the field of health care AI to give clinicians, patients, and health authorities the confidence to adopt AI tools knowing they are technically sound, clinically safe, and ethically aligned. The FUTURE-AI framework is designed to evolve over time, adapting to new technologies, challenges, and stakeholder feedback. This dynamic approach ensures the guidelines remain relevant and useful as the field of health care AI continues to rapidly advance.”

We may have just found an easy-to-swallow cure for one of the deadliest diseases out there. In research released this month, scientists report that an once-daily experimental pill dramatically reduced the high fatality rate of Ebola infection, at least in nonhuman primates.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch led the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances. The treatment, an oral antiviral called obeldesivir, prevented up to 100% of deaths in monkeys given a high dose of the deadliest species of Ebola. These findings and others suggest that obeldesivir can become a highly effective measure against Ebola and similar infections that can quickly lead to massive bleeding and death, the researchers say.

Ebola is caused by several related strains of viruses (formally called orthoebolaviruses). The most commonly seen and deadliest version of Ebola is caused by the Zaire ebolavirus (named after where it was first discovered), which can have a fatality rate as high as 90% if untreated.

Symptoms of Ebola initially include fever, aches, and other flu-like symptoms, but the infection can rapidly progress and cause widespread organ damage and heavy internal bleeding that seeps out of people’s bodies, which is known as hemorrhagic fever.

Ebola is a zoonotic disease, meaning outbreaks typically begin when a person is exposed to infected animals (African fruit bats are thought to be a primary reservoir). But it can also spread between people through close contact with bodily fluids, including blood and semen. While the rapid progression of symptoms and high lethality of Ebola often prevent the infection from spreading widely, it has occasionally sparked large-scale outbreaks. During 2014 to 2016, for instance, a Zaire ebolavirus outbreak in West Africa infected almost 30,000 people and killed more than 11,000. No outbreaks since have reached that level of destruction, but Ebola and related hemorrhagic viruses continue to be a grave public health threat in the countries where they’re natively found.

Nowadays, there are effective approved vaccines and treatments for some species of Ebola. But the vaccine supply is limited and the current antibody-based treatments have to be stored in cold conditions and taken intravenously, limiting their availability and usefulness. So the UTMB researchers believe that obeldesivir—an oral version of the antiviral remdesivir, originally developed to treat covid-19—can represent a pivotal step forward in Ebola treatment.

In their new study, they gave cynomolgus and rhesus macaques a lethal dose of a variant of Zaire ebolavirus, then gave them obeldesivir starting a day after exposure for 10 days. Incredibly, 100% of rhesus macaques given obeldesivir survived their infection, while 80% of cynomolgus macaques did as well. The treatment delayed the virus’ ability to replicate and even seemed to promote the monkeys’ adaptive, or antibody-based, immune response to it.

The team’s earlier work with monkeys has already found that obeldesivir might be effective against Sudan virus, the second most commonly encountered species of Ebola. Earlier this January, the researchers also found that obeldesivir could protect monkeys from Marburg, another deadly cousin of Ebola (a recently ended outbreak of Marburg killed at least 10 people in Tanzania this year).

More research will be needed to validate the drug’s potential against Ebola in humans, of course. But the researchers are hopeful that obeldesivir can become a broadly applied and more convenient weapon against these deadly infections.

“For outbreak response, oral antivirals might present substantial advantages over now approved intravenous drugs, such as easy supply, storage, distribution, and administration,” they wrote in their paper.