The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new drug to combat melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. The drug Zelboraf, also known as vemurafenib, is the second cleared for the disease this year. Zelboraf may help patients with advanced melanoma, an aggressive skin cancer blamed for 8,700 U.S. deaths last year. The drug -- from Roche of Basel, Switzerland, and Tokyo-based Daiichi Sankyo Co. -- will compete with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s Yervoy, cleared in March as the first treatment proven to extend lives of advanced melanoma patients.
KILLER MOSQUITOES
By a wide margin, the mosquito is the most deadly nonhuman animal on the planet. Malaria, largely spread by mosquitoes, infected 225 million people in 2009 and killed 781,000 of them, the World Health Organization says. To put that into perspective, predators such as lions and crocodiles cause only a few hundred human deaths a year. Malaria was largely eradicated from the United States in the 1950s. There are still outbreaks, but they are usually localized and come from an international traveler whose blood is spread by a mosquito or two.
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