The Viagra pill which was developed by accident.

TEN years ago this month, the lives of millions of men andwomen were changed almost overnight by the advent of a little blue pill - the first oral treatment for impotence.

Viagra, developed by accident by scientists at Pfizer Laboratories, was first approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration on March 27, 1998.

“Originally, we were testing sildenafil, the active drug in Viagra, as a cardiovascular drug and for its ability to lower blood pressure,” said Dr Brian Klee, senior medical director at Pfizer.

“But one thing that was found during those trials is that people didn’twant to give the medication back because of the side effect of having erections that were harder, firmer and lasted longer.” Since Viagra went on the market, it has been used by 35 million men around the globe, and it took impotence off the taboo list, making it infinitely easier to treat.

Urologists’waiting rooms became busier as news got round that the condition, which was rechristened with a new, scientific name -erectile dysfunction, or ED -could be treated with a triangular blue pill.

Previous treatments had involved surgically inserting a prosthesis into the penis, injecting a substance into the male sex organ or using urethral suppositories.

“Viagra brought a lot more people into the office because of the ease of treatment,”Dr Irwin Shuman, a urologist of 40 years’ experience in Washington, said.

“In the old days, when we didn’t have much in the way of treatment, we would do a lot more evaluation, looking for answers as to why somebody had the problem.” In one test, men would be observed while sleeping to see if erections occurred. Men who failed to get the usual five to six erections per night were deemed to have a physical problem, and those who did get nocturnal erections were said to have a psychological problem and were sent to see a sex counsellor.

So Viagra helped move impotence out of the psychological realm and into the world of physical illnesses.

“What we have come to understand in the past 10 years is that ED is a vascular disease,”said Klee.

“What happens is veins and arteries that deliver and remove blood from the penis are not working the way they should, and Viagra allows those vessels to dilate and increase blood flow to the penis,”he said.

Dr Abraham Morgentaler, director of Men’s Health Boston, and associate clinical professor of urology at Harvard Medical School, hailed Viagra as a “benefit to medicine”.

But, he added, the drug has not delighted all those who took it.

“There are two truths to Viagra: for those who refill (get a new prescription), it’swonderful and they’re happy,”Morgentaler said.

“But a lot of people look to Viagra for personal happiness, thinking a hard penis can resolve relationship issues,”and they end up disappointed, added the doctor and author of the book The Viagra Myth.

Viagra works best on an empty stomach or after eating a low-fat meal. It kicks in about 30 minutes after being taken and works for four hours.

Morgentaler is concerned over the use of Viagra by healthy young men who don’t need it.

“These young men take a pill whenever they go out.

“Maybe because they are inexperienced or shy and Viagra makes them more confident, or maybe because they have inflated ideas about what sex is supposed to be like from seeing Internet porn, and they want to heighten their feelings of masculinity.” - AFP

New Straits Times

MANILA : The Philippines will get its own edition of Playboy magazine — only without the nudity that made the US version famous, the editor-in-chief of the local edition said Thursday.

The Philippine edition will be launched on April 2 as a “mature lifestyle magazine”, said veteran journalist Beting Laygo Dolor.

While the magazine will offer pictorials of beautiful women, it will not include nudity. “It will be tamer than the US edition but not as tame as the Indonesian edition,” Lagyo Dolor said in a television interview.

He said it would be aimed at a more mature, affluent readership than “lad magazines” such as FHM and Maxim which already have Philippine editions.

It will be the 25th international edition of the US-based magazine which was launched more than 50 years ago.

The local edition will have serious articles and fiction by some of the country’s best-known writers but will also include such staples as a “playmate of the month”, Lagyo Dolor said

Movies and publications showing nudity have run into strong opposition in the conservative, largely Roman Catholic Philippines with watchdog groups sometimes filing criminal charges against those who distribute such materials.

- AFP/sf

Channel News Asia

ANTHROPOLOGISTS have fired another salvo in a feud about diminutive “hobbit” people whose fossilised remains were found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island four years ago.

Combating a bid to have the hobbits enshrined as a separate branch of the human family tree, they argue the tiny cave-dwellers were simply Homo sapiens who became stunted and retarded as a result of iodine deficiency in pregnancy.

Dubbed after the wee folk in J.R.R. Tolkien’s tale, the hominids -just a metre tall and with a chimp-sized brain - lived around 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores.

The Australian-Indonesian team which announced the discovery in 2004 honoured the cave-dwellers with the name of “Homo floresiensis,” or “Manof Flores”, to bolster their claim that the hobbits were a new species of human.

They theorised that the little people may have been descendants of prehistoric hominids, Homo erectus,whoreached Flores nearly a million years ago.

Marooned from the rest of the world, the hominids evolved a small stature to cope with the available supplies of food.

Indeed, the species was so successful, went the argument, that for many years the hobbits lived side-by-side with the bigger-brained H. sapiens -an idea that implies the two hominids may have been more than kissing cousins.

The theory has ignited one of the fiercest rows in years in the outwardly placid discipline of anthropology, a dispute fuelled by wrangles over access to the site and the remains themselves.

In the latest foray, Australian scientists writing in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, say the hobbits are H. sapiens who were born without a functioning thyroid, a condition that doomed them to “dwarf cretinism”.

As a result, the hobbits would have been severely restricted in growth and mental and motor skills, although not as badly as individuals with microcephaly -an abnormally tiny brain -or other neurological disabilities.

“Dwarf cretinism is the result of severe iodine deficiency in pregnancy, in combination with a number of other environmental factors,”explains co-author Peter Obdendorf of RMIT University.

“Dwarf cretins grow not much more than one metre and their bones have distinctive characteristics very similar to those of the Flores hobbits.

“Our research suggests these fossils are not a new species, but rather the remains of human hunter-gatherers that suffered from this condition.” The study focuses on a dimple in the skeleton called the pituitary fossa which houses the pituitary gland.

In the hobbit skeletons, this depression is unusually enlarged and is a hallmark of socalled myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, whose brain size is roughly half that of normal, says Obdendorf.

Other telltales of ME cretinism are a double-rooted premolar teeth, primitive wristbones and a poorly-developed chin, which the H. floresiensis camp claim as signs that the hominids are separate species.

Previous assaults on the hobbit hypothesis have said the hominids were dwarf H. sapiens, but this is the first to suggest that the dwarfism resulted from diet rather than inbreeding.

“Almost all the people who have looked at these fossils have been coming from an evolutionary perspective,”said fellow author Charles Oxnard, a professor at the University of Western Australia. “Our idea is that this was an environmentally- caused problem.” The Nage people of central Flores tell tales of ancestors called “ebu gogo”who lived in caves, were short, roughlybuilt, hairy, pot-bellied and stupid, who stole food, could not cook and had an imperfect language. - AFP

New Straits Times