After Sandy’s Pain, There Will Be Gain

In terms of sheer size (1,100 miles from end to end) and the number of people in its path (some 60 million), Hurricane Sandy was the biggest storm ever to hit the East Coast of the U.S. Estimates of its devastation range from $ 30 billion in destroyed property and lost business activity to as much as $ 50 billion. Whatever Sandy’s ultimate price tag, it’s a huge number. But as devastating as it was, Sandy’s impact to the national economy will likely be negligible: The short-term loss to economic output should be made up by long-term spending to rebuild.

Photographs by AP PhotoThe bad news: Your town is damaged. The good news: Construction is up

Whether it’s recovering from a war or cleaning up after a natural disaster, periods of severe destruction are usually followed by sharp bursts of economic activity. Money pours in from government and insurers to repair infrastructure. Homes get rebuilt, debris cleared. As a result, the overall economic growth that follows a natural disaster can often outweigh the wealth it destroyed. Economists call this the broken window effect. “To an economist, breaking a window always boosts GDP,” says Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics. Englund thinks that Sandy could end up boosting fourth-quarter gross domestic product by as much as two-tenths of a percentage point. “The backfill activity will probably be bigger,” he says. “By the time the rebuild is over, I think we’ll see this as a net positive [for GDP].”

While the full extent of that rebuilding will take months to show up in the economy, the short-term hit to output could be severe. The 12 states in Sandy’s path, from Virginia to Maine, account for about 23 percent of national GDP. Throwing a giant “Superstorm” at one-quarter of the country’s economic engine will have a major impact on businesses over the next few weeks. In particular, holiday spending on items like clothes and toys could take a hit.

That spending won’t vanish, though; it will merely be delayed and redirected. People may cut back on holiday shopping but end up buying a new car to replace the one that got damaged by a tree. Much of the wealth lost in disasters is assumed by global insurance companies, which make good on policies and pump money into the local economy afterwards. That lost wealth doesn’t get reflected in GDP, while the increase in spending does.

There’s also the question of job creation. While a worker probably won’t lose his job as a result of Hurricane Sandy, there’s a chance he might gain one afterwards, particularly if he’s in the construction industry. “We definitely see stronger job gains in response to natural disasters, particularly when economies are coming out of recession,” says Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial, who has researched the economic effects of natural disasters. He cites two examples: After Hurricane Andrew hit the southeast coast of Florida in August 1992, job growth in Miami went from just under 1 percent a year to more than 5 percent by mid-1993, as more than 1,700 construction jobs were added. In the year after a 6.7 magnitude earthquake hit Northridge, Calif., outside Los Angeles, in January 1994, 16,000 construction jobs were added.

There are exceptions. Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive natural disaster in the U.S. at $ 150 billion in total economic losses, slowed annual growth in the second half of 2005 from 3.3 percent to 2.8 percent, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. Katrina knocked out about 20 percent of the country’s refining capacity and damaged more than 100 oil and gas rigs along the Gulf Coast. Within a week, national gasoline prices had jumped 13 percent.

While a number of refineries shut down along the East Coast as Sandy approached, their suspension of operations likely won’t have the same impact because the East Coast facilities handle a far smaller share of refined products. There’s another crucial difference between Sandy and Katrina that could dampen the overall economic impact of the recent hurricane. The East Coast economy is more knowledge-based, with a higher-skilled, better-educated workforce, which makes it more resilient than the blue-collar Gulf Coast economy.

The bottom line: Hurricane Sandy could cost the economy as much as $ 50 billion, but the payback from rebuilding could end up larger.

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Clinton calls for overhaul of Syrian opposition

ZAGREB (Reuters) – The United States called on Wednesday for an overhaul of Syria‘s opposition leadership, saying it was time to move beyond the Syrian National Council and bring in those “in the front lines fighting and dying”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signaling a more active stance by Washington in attempts to form a credible political opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said a meeting next week in Qatar would be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against him.

“This cannot be an opposition represented by people who have many good attributes but who, in many instances, have not been inside Syria for 20, 30, 40 years,” she said during a visit to Croatia.

“There has to be a representation of those who are in the front lines fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom.”

Clinton’s comments represented a clear break with the Syrian National Council (SNC), a largely foreign-based group which has been among the most vocal proponents of international intervention in the Syrian conflict.

U.S. officials have privately expressed frustration with the SNC’s inability to come together with a coherent plan and with its lack of traction with the disparate internal groups which have waged the 19-month uprising against Assad’s government.

Senior members of the SNC, Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebel groups ended a meeting in Turkey on Wednesday and pledged to unite behind a transitional government in coming months.

“It’s been our divisions that have allowed the Assad forces to reach this point,” Ammar al-Wawi, a rebel commander, told Reuters after the talks outside Istanbul.

“We are united on toppling Assad. Everyone, including all the rebels, will gather under the transitional government.”

Mohammad Al-Haj Ali, a senior Syrian military defector, told a news conference after the meeting: “We are still facing some difficulties between the politicians and different opposition groups and the leaders of the Free Syrian Army on the ground.”

Clinton said it was important that the next rulers of Syria were both inclusive and committed to rejecting extremism.

“There needs to be an opposition that can speak to every segment and every geographic part of Syria. And we also need an opposition that will be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution,” she said.

Syria’s revolt has killed an estimated 32,000. A bomb near a Shi’ite shrine in a suburb of Damascus killed at least six more people on Wednesday, state media and opposition activists said.

NEW LEADERSHIP

The meeting next week in Qatar’s capital Doha represents a chance to forge a new leadership, Clinton said, adding the United States had helped to “smuggle out” representatives of internal Syrian opposition groups to a meeting in New York last month to argue their case for inclusion.

“We have recommended names and organizations that we believe should be included in any leadership structure,” she told a news conference.

“We’ve made it clear that the SNC can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition. They can be part of a larger opposition, but that opposition must include people from inside Syria and others who have a legitimate voice which must be heard.”

The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance.

It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance – a fact that Assad’s chief backer Russia says shows western powers are intent on determining Syria’s future.

Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.

Clinton said she regretted but was not surprised by the failure of the latest attempted ceasefire, called by international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi last Friday. Each side blamed the other for breaking the truce.

“The Assad regime did not suspend its use of advanced weaponry against the Syrian people for even one day,” she said.

“While we urge Special Envoy Brahimi to do whatever he can in Moscow and Beijing to convince them to change course and support a stronger U.N. action we cannot and will not wait for that.”

Clinton said the United States would continue to work with partners to increase sanctions on the Assad government and provide humanitarian assistance to those hit by the conflict.

(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; editing by Andrew Roche)

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TSX climbs to one-week high as mining stocks surge

TORONTO (Reuters) – Canada‘s main stock index rose on Wednesday, as stronger commodity prices drove materials stocks higher and Research in Motion charged ahead after it said it was on track to launch its new BlackBerry 10 next year.

The materials group rose 1.2 percent as gold prices reached their highest in a week . Copper prices also strengthened.

Centerra Gold charged ahead 6.4 percent to C$ 11.33, while Yamana Gold surged 3.5 percent to C$ 20.17.

Also boosting interest in the sector was Potash Corp , which climbed 0.5 percent to C$ 40.15, after the fertilizer company confirmed its interest in increasing its stake in Israel Chemical Ltd.

“People are certainly feeling more confident in the resource sector,” said Paul Harris, portfolio manager at Avenue Investment Management. “Canadian stocks have been beaten up this year. You’re seeing some pickup of that.”

Volumes on Toronto’s stock market picked up as U.S. equity markets resumed trading after a two-day closure due to storm Sandy. <.N>

A total of 332.9 million shares were traded on the Canadian bourse, nearly double the 178.3 million shares traded on Tuesday when U.S. markets were closed.

“It’s a fairly positive tone here. There is nothing acting as a dramatic catalyst,” said Bob Gorman, chief portfolio strategist at TD Waterhouse.

The Toronto Stock Exchange‘s S&P/TSX composite index <.GSPTSE> ended the session up 45.86 points, or 0.37 percent, at 12,422.91.

The index rose as high as 12,462.26, its strongest level in more than a week. Eight of the ten TSX subgroups ended positive.

RIM, once the largest stock on the exchange, rose 3.7 percent to C$ 7.88, helping drive the TSX info tech sector up 1.4 percent.

The company said it had started carrier testing on its new line of BlackBerry 10 devices and said it was on track to launch the new smartphones in the first quarter of 2013.

Financial stocks climbed 0.3 percent, led by property and casualty insurer Intact Financial , which rose 2.6 percent to C$ 61.25, and life insurer Great-West Lifeco , which gained 1.5 percent to C$ 23.00.

“There’s a feeling of confidence. It isn’t going to go overboard. It is managed confidence that we’re seeing is reflected in the market,” said Fred Ketchen, director of equity trading at ScotiaMcLeod.

The energy sector was one of the few areas of weakness, down 0.2 percent, as Encana Corp , Canada’s largest gas producer, fell 2.8 percent to C$ 22.50.

Cenovus Energy Inc , Canada’s No. 2 independent oil producer, rose 1.3 percent to C$ 35.23 after SocGen upgraded its recommendation to “buy” from “hold”.

Brent crude rose to about $ 109 a barrel, though the gains were limited by concerns over demand impact on the United States.

(Additional reporting by Cameron French; editing by Andrew Hay)

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Broadway lights go up in post-Sandy NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — The lights went up again on Broadway Wednesday for the first time since Hurricane Sandy hit New York, as entertainers headed back to work in a city still wracked by power-outages and a suspended subway system.

Though some Broadway shows, including Disney’s “Mary Poppins” and “The Lion King” remained dark Wednesday night, the curtain was to rise for many of the other 38 shows, including “Cyrano De Bergerac.” Patrick Page, who plays the villain Comte de Guiche in the production, was heading back to the theater for a matinee performance, even if he was unsure if there would be anyone in the seats.

“Broadway is as important an icon of New York City as the subways, so to get back to work is a sign that we can bounce back,” he said. “This has been such a tough time for so many and it’s vital that we show the lights are on and there’s great work being done onstage.”

Page said he spent a restless time off in his Upper West Side neighborhood, worried about his in-laws along the New Jersey shore — he is married to actress and TV personality Paige Davis. He said he checked Facebook to find out how friends were fairing, obsessively watched the news and went out to check that neighbors had ridden out the storm.

“We’re New Yorkers,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”

The company of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” the Tony Award-nominated prequel to Peter Pan, faced some tense moments before their Wednesday matinee. Five of their dozen cast members live in Brooklyn and faced a dicey commute. For instance, their Peter Pan, Adam Chanler-Berat, didn’t fly to the theater — he biked.

As the 2 p.m. show loomed, all the cast was in place, except for Isaiah Johnson, who plays Captain Scott. Playwright Rick Elice and co-director Roger Rees, who were both at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, each was ready to go on if he didn’t make it. He did — but only five minutes until curtain.

In downtown theaters, though, the stories were grim.

The SoHo Rep was without power and had some flooding, while MCC Theatre had no electricity Wednesday. The Barrow Street Theatre was dark and facing the prospect of canceling additional performances of “Tribes” while they await power. The Bank Street Theater is without power and its basement is flooded, forcing the Labyrinth Theater Company to put off the first preview of their “Radiance.” One of the cast members of Eve Ensler’s “Emotional Creature,” playing on 42nd Street, lives in Long Island, has no electricity and may not be able to get to tonight’s performance.

All Broadway shows planned to be back on schedule Thursday and some even managed to turn the mess into promotions. “The Performers” was offering a “Sandy Special” of $ 29.50 for top tickets, while the Roundabout Theatre Company let patrons with MetroCards buy tickets for $ 20 to its “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

New York‘s late-night TV hosts were back in swing, though, with all resuming regular production Wednesday. The remaining holdouts — Jon Stewart with “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert with “The Colbert Report” — were to join David Letterman (“The Late Show”), Jimmy Fallon (“Late Night”) and Jimmy Kimmel (“Jimmy Kimmel Live”), who is doing a week of shows in Brooklyn, on the airwaves.

All were to tape with a live studio audience Wednesday. Out of safety and caution, Letterman taped Monday and Tuesday’s episodes in front of an empty Ed Sullivan Theater, but it will again be full Wednesday. Fallon did the same at Rockefeller Center on Monday.

Other New York cultural institutions were forced to continue to cancel planned events. Carnegie Hall, which sits on 57th Street near the hanging crane, announced that its Thursday concerts were postponed, after having already done the same for Wednesday night’s performances. Lincoln Center swung back into business Wednesday, with the exception of a handful of events. Performances were also to resume at the Metropolitan Opera.

For many, figuring out exactly when to reopen business was a daunting and uncertain decision. While parts of the New York transit system have been restored, predictions on when subways, commuter rails and power to the southern end of Manhattan have generally been vague. Knowing when both performers and audience can get to their stages, TV studios and concert halls has been a day-by-day waiting game.

The Keep a Child Alive foundation announced Wednesday that the 9th annual Black Ball, scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed. Alicia Keys was to host, Oprah Winfrey was to be honored and Beyonce was to perform at the Hammerstein Ballroom event, which raises money to fight AIDS in Africa.

Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Enterprises, the umbrella organization that includes the annual Tribeca Film Festival and the film distribution company Tribeca Film, has remained closed and without power. The organization’s nonprofit arm, the Tribeca Film Institute, on Wednesday canceled its annual benefit which was to be a special screening Thursday for the James Bond film “Skyfall.” It has been postponed until Monday, and cast members are no longer able to attend.

Film and TV production in New York has ceased outside of sound stages, as the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting said it would not grant permits to shoot in exterior locations throughout the five boroughs until at least Saturday. Production on shows from “30 Rock” to “Gossip Girl” has been affected.

“The city has not issued any location permits this week, so probably the earliest we’ll be able to shoot is this weekend,” said Warren Leight, executive producer of “Law & Order: SVU.” ”We are able to do some location scouting tomorrow and we have our production meetings by phone, with people on their cells and calling from their cars. The main issue is going to be getting power restored.”

Some celebrities sought to raise money for those affected by Hurricane Sandy. Edward Norton on Wednesday kicked off a crowd-funded relief effort via the website CrowdRise.com, with money donated from various companies to help spark giving.

“We wanted to make it easy for people to quickly support relief efforts after Hurricane Sandy through reliable organizations and, even better, to have the impact of their dollars doubled,” said Norton. “So CrowdRise has rallied a bunch of great companies committed to matching the funds raised through our page.”

The storm also made a mess of Henry Winkler’s birthday plans. The one-time TV “Fonzie,” rode out the storm safely in upper Manhattan but his thoughts were with those suffering in New Jersey, Long Island and lower Manhattan. He turned 67 on Monday.

“It made my birthday insignificant,” said Winkler, who stars as a veteran porn star in the new Broadway comedy “The Performers.” ”Just to be able to take a walk was pretty terrific. You think you know how to plan for a storm after all these years and then it makes history. All those millions of people affected, it breaks my heart.”

___

AP TV Writer Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Sensitive New Sensor Detects Prostate Cancer in Early Stages

British scientists have designed a prototype of a highly sensitive scanner that can detect diseases such as prostate cancer and HIV in very early stages. They consider their discovery extremely useful in countries where high-tech detection equipment is scarce.

The researchers, from Imperial College London, reported that their new visual sensor technology is 10 times more sensitive than traditional disease detectors that measure biomarkers in the body, according to Medical News Today.

The team tested the sensor’s accuracy in looking for a biomarker known as p24 that’s associated with HIV in human blood samples. They tested other samples for the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) marker, one indicator of prostate cancer.

The National Cancer Institute predicts that more than 240,000 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2012 and that more than 28,000 of them will die. A male newborn has a one in six chance of developing this disease.

The two standard ways of detecting this cancer are a digital rectal exam and a PSA test. In early stages, many cases have no symptoms. According to the Mayo Clinic, use of the PSA test is debatable because studies have never proven that the blood test saves lives. It can yield suspicious results even when the patient merely has an infection.

The new sensor detects prostate cancer by looking for PSA in a blood sample. With a positive result, irregular clumps of nanoparticles form and emit a specific blue shade inside the disposable container. For a negative test, the nanoparticles separate and form shapes that resemble a ball. The process creates a red hue. Both colors are visible to the naked eye.

The ultra-sensitive sensor could detect certain diseases at much earlier stages than current technology can find. It found miniscule levels of p24 in samples from patients with low HIV viral loads, a result impossible with standard tests like the Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA).

The next step toward implementation is finding a sponsor among not-for-profit global health organizations to oversee the strategy for development, funding, and distribution of the technology.

While use of the sensor in the United States might be years away, the device is of special interest to my family. After years of lower-than-average PSA results, the numbers for my husband, who has a family history of prostate cancer, shot up last year. A test six months later showed even higher numbers.

The urologist performed prostate biopsies that caused bleeding and discomfort for weeks. The results showed no sign of malignancy, calling into question the validity of the two tests. A year later, the numbers mysteriously returned to the low end of the normal range. It would be reassuring to have access to this sensitive new sensor, knowing that it has the capacity to detect prostate cancer in very early stages.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

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NYC Rats: Stronger Than Sandy

Unprecedented flooding throughout low-lying portions of New York City over the past two days undoubtedly left hundreds—if not thousands—of rats scrambling for their dear lives. According to experts, most of them likely survived. “They’re a jack of all trades when it comes to locomotion,” says Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. “They can’t sprint, but they run well; they’re not Michael Phelps, but they’re strong swimmers; and even though they don’t have prehensile tails, they climb well. They do it all.”

Ostfeld notes that rats can easily swim a couple hundred yards. In fact, he says, “one of the ways that rats have dispersed around the world is by jumping off of ships and swimming to shore—the proverbial ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’ is actually based on reality.”

No one knows exactly how many rats live in New York City, but Ostfeld suspects that there are at least as many rats as humans. The city’s population is dominated by the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), an invader from Europe, and the Black rat (Rattus rattus), which originated in Asia. These highly resilient rats can be found throughout New York City, but they usually don’t travel far within those limits.

The displacement of rats caused by Hurricane Sandy—a dispersal of rats that is likely unprecedented for the city in terms of numbers—has Ostfeld concerned about a possible increased spread of rat-borne diseases. “You get infected individuals mixing with uninfected individuals and that’s a recipe for an outbreak,” says Ostfeld. “It spreads like the flu, from rat to rat.”

Urban rats are known to carry infectious diseases including leptospirosis, typhus, salmonella, hantavirus, and even the plague. The incubation period for these diseases in humans is usually a couple of weeks or months, and symptoms are often similar to those of a common flu. According to Ostfeld, “In the coming weeks and months, health-care providers should have rat-borne diseases on their radars and potentially test for them.”

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Hurricane’s death toll rises to 65 in Caribbean

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — As Americans braced Sunday for Hurricane Sandy, Haiti was still suffering.

Officials raised the storm-related death toll across the Caribbean to 65, with 51 of those coming in Haiti, which was pelted by three days of constant rains that ended only on Friday.

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

The country’s ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides are especially vulnerable to flooding. The bulk of the deaths were in the southern part of the country and the area around Port-au-Prince, the capital, which holds most of the 370,000 Haitians who are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Santos Alexis, mayor of the southern city of Leogane, said Sunday that the rivers were receding and that people were beginning to dry their belongings in the sun.

“Things are back to being a little quiet,” Alexis said by telephone. “We have seen the end.”

Sandy also killed 11 in Cuba, where officials said it destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of houses. Deaths were also reported in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. Authorities in the Dominican Republic said the storm destroyed several bridges and isolated at least 130 communities while damaging an estimated 3,500 homes.

Jamaica’s emergency management office on Sunday was airlifting supplies to marooned communities in remote areas of four badly impacted parishes.

In the Bahamas, Wolf Seyfert, operations director at local airline Western Air, said the domestic terminal of Grand Bahamas‘ airport received “substantial damage” from Sandy’s battering storm surge and would need to be rebuilt.

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Storm knocks down some web sites, but most stay online

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Despite outages at a few well-known web sites and ripple effects that occasionally slowed communications around the country, the Internet came through the massive storm that swamped New York and New Jersey with relatively minor problems.

Built for resiliency and buttressed by the adoption of cloud computing, the Internet functioned largely as it was supposed to, industry experts said, routing around major disruptions in one of its central network locations, New York City.

“You don’t hear about big content providers going offline anymore,” said Jeffrey Young, a spokesman for major delivery network Akamai Technologies Inc, which has servers spread among some 1,100 communications set-ups. “We can route around issues that are occurring.”

New York has two major exchange centers where U.S. backbone telecommunication providers meet data from undersea cables, said Doug Madory, senior analyst at Renesys Corp, which monitors Internet response times. A number of network addresses were inaccessible on Tuesday afternoon, including many in the New York area, and connection times for others were slower than normal, he said, but the disruptions were limited.

Still, a handful of popular web sites, including Google‘s YouTube, AOL Inc’s Huffington Post, and the network of sites owned by Gawker Media, did experience outages.

Social news site BuzzFeed and News Corp’s financial site MarketWatch were also reduced to bare-bones versions as they regrouped on Tuesday.

At least some of the problems were the direct result of data centers losing power and being unable to fuel their own generators because of flooding.

Most web sites use commercial data centers rather than running their own computer servers, in part to ensure security and stability in emergencies. Many of those data centers offer back-up services elsewhere.

But New York data centers, including Internap and Datagram, went down due to the power and flooding problems. BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Gawker all crashed because of Datagram.

“How dumb to locate datacenter in a flood zone. And how dumb to host Gawker servers there,” Gawker founder Nick Denton wrote on Twitter. The company moved to blog platform Tumblr for a while, one of a number of creative workarounds made easier by more advanced web offerings. BuzzFeed moved everything onto Akamai and Amazon’s web services arm.

An AOL spokeswoman said after Huffington Post’s main data center went under that it had shifted to a backup data system in Newark. That worked until all three telecom firms serving that location went down.

“At approximately 3:30 a.m., network connectivity failed at the backup datacenter when all three of its providers each separately failed,” said AOL’s Erin Kurtz.

Huffington Post switched to a skeletal blog platform until it recovered at eight hours later.

Dow Jones and Datagram could not be reached immediately for comment. YouTube refused to say why it became unavailable, but Google’s New York headquarters was closed by the storm. The company said the video site was available, if slow, for most users by Tuesday evening.

Many large and mid-sized companies adopted disaster planning for data after the September 11, 2001, attacks, making sure to have duplicates of core data in different locations. Smaller firms have taken the same route by moving to cloud computing, which generally spreads data across multiple facilities.

“The whole point of the cloud is that companies are insulated from outages really of any sort, absent a giant nuclear disaster,” said Bernard Golden, vice president at enStratus Networks, a cloud software company. “You want your provider to have facilities in disparate-enough locations so that even if you have problems in a particular region, your service is still available.”

(Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic and Alistair Barr in SAN FRANCISCO and Jennifer Saba in NEW YORK; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Paul Tait)

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‘Homeland’ hits series high, Showtime sets record

LOS ANGELES, Oct 30 (TheWrap.com) – Showtime‘s “Homeland” hit a series high with its Sunday episode — and it helped to deliver a first-time honor for the network, Showtime said Tuesday.

With “Dexter,” in its seventh season, inching up 5 percent from last week to score 2.28 million total viewers, Sunday marked the first time that Showtime has aired two back-to-back episodes of original series that have drawn more than 2 million viewers each in a single night.

“Homeland” drew 2.07 million viewers with its 10 p.m. airing Sunday, jumping 19 percent from the previous week and delivering the highest viewership to date for the series, which cleaned up at the Emmy Awards earlier this year.

Between its 10 p.m. airing and an encore showing, “Homeland” brought in a total of 2.29 million viewers, making for the highest-rated night of the series, now in its second season.

Meanwhile, “Dexter” delivered its highest viewership since the seventh-season premiere with its 9 p.m. airing. Along with an encore airing, it drew a total of 2.81 million viewers.

(Editing By Zorianna Kit)

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U.S. regulator needs new authority over compounding pharmacies: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration‘s power to regulate compounded drugs similar to those linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak is legally nonbinding and lacks the authority of stringent standards imposed on drug manufacturers, according to a congressional report released on Sunday.

The report, compiled by the staff of U.S. Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, drew an immediate response from FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who said the agency is committed to working with Congress and others to garner “the authority we need to help prevent tragedies like this from happening again.”

“Over the years, there has been substantial debate within Congress about the appropriate amount of FDA oversight and regulation of compounding pharmacies. But unfortunately, there has been a lack of consensus and many challenges from industry,” Hamburg said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

“As pointed out in the report from Congressman Markey, FDA’s authority over compounding pharmacies is more limited by statute than with drug manufacturers,” she added.

The Markey report and Hamburg’s comments surfaced as Congress has begun preliminary discussions that could give the FDA new powers to oversee compounding pharmacies like the New England Compounding Center, which is at the heart of a fungal meningitis outbreak that has sickened 337 people, including 25 who have died, in 18 states.

But the public health crisis has also stirred debate about how much authority the FDA actually needs. Last week, the advocacy group Public Citizen called on the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the agency on grounds that it failed to exercise its existing authority to prevent the meningitis outbreak.

The FDA issued a warning letter to NECC in 2006 describing potential health risks including microbial contamination. But there has been little evidence of a follow-up. Congressional investigators also say there is evidence that the FDA and state regulators knew of potential problems at NECC in 2002.

Hamburg has had little to say publicly about the regulatory issue. “FDA’s primary focus right now is containing the immediate crisis, protecting patients and their families from any further harm and completing our investigation,” she said.

Compounding is a traditional pharmacy practice in which a pharmacist alters, mixes or recombines ingredients to make a drug that meets the special needs of a patient with a physician’s prescription. But in recent decades, officials say some compounding operations have grown to resemble full-scale manufacturing without meeting FDA standards.

DOZENS OF WARNING LETTERS

The congressman’s report, based partly on documents gathered by investigators in the House of Representatives, says state governments that are now the chief regulators of pharmacy compounding cannot perform the kind of safety oversight necessary to prevent more drug-related outbreaks from occurring.

The FDA has issued dozens of warning letters against compounding pharmacies since 2001. But the report said the agency has based its enforcement actions on relatively weak, nonbinding guidance documents since a 1997 law granting it oversight of “new drugs” was struck down in U.S. courts more than a decade ago in cases brought by compounders.

“Guidance documents do not establish legally enforceable rights or responsibilities and do not legally bind the public or the FDA,” said a Congressional Research Services report cited by Markey’s staff.

That gives the agency far less power over compounding operations than it has over conventional drug manufacturers, which must submit to stringent safety and efficacy standards.

“Absent clear new authority, FDA’s efforts will ultimately be constrained by gaps in regulatory authority and thwarted by an industry that has historically resisted a federal role for the oversight of its activities,” said Markey.

An aide to Markey, who is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee which is conducting one of two congressional investigations into the outbreak, said the report was compiled from staff research. The aide acknowledged that some of the documents also form part of the House panel’s probe.

Markey has said he will propose legislation to enhance FDA oversight when Congress returns after the November 6 election. The committee is expected to hold hearings by the end of the year.

The report cites FDA documents as saying that compounded drugs may have been responsible for at least 23 deaths and 86 other cases of disease or injury before the current outbreak, related to injectable steroid treatments for back and joint pain first drew public attention last month.

FDA records described by the report also show that 10 of 29 compounded products tested by the FDA in 2003 failed at least one of the regulatory agency’s safety or efficacy tests. Three years later, in 2006, one-third of 36 compounded drug samples failed FDA analytical testing.

“The risks of allowing the safety of compounding pharmacies to go largely unregulated have been recognized for years, and the devastating tragedies of this outbreak will be felt well beyond it,” Markey said.

(Editing by Christopher Wilson)

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