US Developing Radiation Sickness Drug Ex-Rad , page 1

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Evacuees are screened for radiation contamination at a testing center Tuesday, March 15, 2011, in Koriyama city, Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, four days after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the country's north east coast.

EX -RAD: Can be used before or after exposure

The serious radiation leaks at Japan's damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant have reawakened public fears about radiation sickness. But what if there were a drug that could not only protect people from dangerous levels of radiation exposure but also heal those actually exposed to damaging nuclear radiation?

Researchers say they are developing such a drug - one that can both prevent and repair human cell damage from all types of radiation exposure.

Such a healing medication has the potential to lessen panic and fear generated by catastrophic reactor accidents.

Ramesh Kumar, the CEO of a U.S. drug research firm called Onconova, says his company has just such a wonder drug in the works.

The company has been collaborating on the drug, called Ex-Rad, with scientists at a U.S. Defense Department research laboratory. Kumar says early animal trials have been promising..

“Ex-Rad is a drug which is effective in saving a cell damaged by radiation," he says, "and we have found that it can be given in advance of exposure to radiation up to a day ahead or it can be given up to a day after the exposure to radiation.”

The Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute has been leading the Pentagon's quest for a more effective antidote to radiation sickness, which has a wide range of symptoms.

“The symptoms of acute radiation sickness will be just exactly like a terrible flu," says Col. Andrew Huff, a spokesman for the research institute. "The person would have headache. They would feel very tired. They would have little bit of fever. They might have some vomiting at higher doses all of this and more but at survivable doses it would come on within 24 to 36 hours."

According to Huff, the body loses its platelet and neutrophil supply and people can eventually die of bleeding. He says the Pentagon's search for radiation sickness treatments is intensifying.

Sounds good so far right? But why if there are advances in this new medicine do they not attempt to use it on say the First 50? Or for those who were exposed to life threatening doses of radiation?

If you had the choice to try this new drug or face internal bleeding, and skin lesions until a slow painful death over takes you, would you try it?

Or would you think that if this was offered as a mass injection to the GP it could be part of a controversial conspiracy between the Department of defense and the pharmaceutical companies that offered the vaccines against such things as H1N1 or even the chip?

If this were a perfect world we would not have to question our authorities and their intent, but if Ex-RAD has proven effective, then why wait when lives are in jeopardy now?

What do you think?

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