Aside from these prohibited substances, more than $10,000 cash, drug utensils and some explosives were also found in his home.

The 44-year-old Wide Bay president was charged with three counts of dangerous drug possession. He appeared before the Hervey Bay Magistrates Court on November 17.

There were 14 witness statements and several drug analysis certificates tendered by prosecutor Sergeant Michael Quirk.

On April 22, six other drug and weapons offenses were suspended for mention at the Hervey Bay Magistrates Court.

McCrea is currently on bail until his Supreme Court trial. So far, he has not entered into any pleas to any of the charges.

McCrea previously faced charges for common assault, rape, supplying drugs and drug spiking. However, charges were dropped by prosecution due to insufficient evidence.

He was recently reported to have committed a grievous bodily harm to his former girlfriend, Georgia Anderson. Ms. Anderson suffered a punctured lung, ribs, and pneumothorax.

From Fraser Coast Chronicle:

MORE THAN 100 ecstasy tablets, half a litre of steroids and 24 grams of cannabis were allegedly found during a search of Adam Warwick McCrea’s Takura property on March 4.

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He also won eleven times for the Eclipse Award with ten horses.

Frankel was born in Brooklyn and trained thousands of horses where he won around 3,654 races.

He was the second highest earner trainer next to Hall of Famer Wayne Lucas.

According to fellow Hall of Famer Bob Baffert, Frankel was a great, fierce competitor but has always been a good person. He said he was a big loss in sport and that he is definitely going to be missed.

Frankel was one of the many to have claimed that he never used steroids in his horses. He was a critic of the synthetic substances, especially during the height of the steroids scandal in the 2008 Triple Crown Series with the horse Big Brown.

He may seem to be tough outside but he is an animal lover who always put the welfare of the horses first. He would never hurt the horses by using steroids on them.

From NY Daily News:

During the Big Brown steroid scandal in the 2008 Triple Crown Series, Frankel was one of the few trainers to say he never used steroids on his horses.

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Sudden sensorineural hearing loss is a severe hearing impairment condition that involves a loss of hearing at least 30 decibels of hearing over a minimum of three test frequencies in three days.

From News-Medical.Net:

For the systematic review, 21 trials were identified and evaluated, all of which used measures from hearing tests to define treatment outcomes. “Only two studies used identical criteria to define sudden sensorineural hearing loss,” the authors write. “The method of randomization was described in two studies. Validity scores ranged from two to eight (of nine). Positive results were reported favoring systemic steroids, intratympanic [inside the inner ear] steroids, batroxobin, magnesium, vitamin E and hyperbaric oxygen, although there were serious limitations in each study with a positive finding.”

This includes the article cited as the landmark study for the use of steroids, which was not described as a randomized trial and therefore may have produced exaggerated treatment effects, the authors note. The authors suggest that this study also used inconsistent doses of steroids and did not measure outcomes at the same time for all participants. “The study therefore does not inform the otolaryngologist of what dose of steroids to use, nor at what time after treatment to expect improvement,” the authors write.

Anne Elizabeth Conlin, B.A. & Sc., M.D., of the University of Ottawa, Ontario, and Lorne S. Parnes, M.D., F.R.C.S.C., of the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, made efforts for searching all randomized clinical trials concerned with evaluating sudden hearing loss treatments published between 1966 and 2006.

It was remarked that systemic steroids cannot be believed to be the gold treatment standard when it comes to sudden sensorineural hearing loss due to the severe complications of the landmark study supporting their use.

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University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) athletes are also subject to testing by the university and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

According to Roy Rudewick, UTA’s athletic trainer, their policy involves up to three offenses only. Steroids may be a problem in baseball but recreational drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and the likes are more rampant.

A 2008 study conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse showed that about 1.5 percent of high school seniors have used steroids but more than 30 percent of the respondents have used marijuana.

Out of the 16,000 respondents, 192 admitted to steroids use and 4,800 admitted to marijuana use.

Rudewick said athletes are selected once a month for random steroid testing. That means an individual will get to be tested six times in one school year. Although their drug testing focuses more on recreational drugs, performance-enhancing drugs are also included.

NCAA on the other hand, tests for more drugs and substances that are not included in UTA’s drug testing.

From The Shorthorn:

Steroid use in baseball has shaken the foundation of professional sports. Testing is now mandatory in nearly every level of competition, and UTA is no exception.

UTA athletes are subject to testing from the university and the NCAA.

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Make-a-Wish foundation

Lalime Wilson, 12, is from New Kensington. He suffers from a severe steroid-dependent asthma. Recently, he and two of his four siblings got trips to Disney World from the foundation. Meanwhile, his sister Idalis suffers from urticaria, a condition that causes respiratory problems, swelling and hive-like welts.

As a way of thanking the foundation, Lalime and his 14-year-old sister entered a card-making contest this summer. The event was sponsored by the Make-a-Wish foundation.

According to the foundation’s spokesperson Dana Antkowiak, there were 30 entries where four winners were chosen. Lalime’s drawing of a snowman was one of them. Children from Scottdale, Irwin and York sent their designs to the Make-a-Wish foundation in Greater Pennsylvania and Southern West Virginia. The contest was exclusive to kids who are beneficiaries of the foundation.

Lalime likes drawing both by hand and by computer. Aside from this, one of his interests is hockey and football. However, according to his father Charles Durand, his asthma has triggered bouts of pneumonia. Severe scar tissues have built up in his lungs. His condition prevented Lalime from actually participating in sports.

From Pittsburgh Live:

Lalime Wilson hopes his holiday card design for the Make-A-Wish Foundation will help the organization that has greatly helped his family.

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Anabolic steroids

Zheng Ouyang, R. Graham Cooks and colleagues, developed the new method, which can identify seven different anabolic steroids in a few seconds using a urine sample.

One of the growing problems in sports is the use of banned substances, particularly anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs by professional athletes to hasten muscle growth and gain advantage in their athletic performance. Some of the sports affected by these banned substances are track and field, baseball, football and cycling.

Some of the famous personalities involved in steroids controversies were track and field players Marion Jones and Ben Johnson; baseball stars Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, and many more. American cyclist Floyd Landis was stripped of his championship in the 2006 Tour de France. Professional and college football players alike use steroids to help them in their performance.

The method was described in Analytical Chemistry. It involves no time-consuming sample preparation and takes only a few seconds.

Current methods involves time-consuming processes and complicated preparation steps. In addition, results take longer to determine.

From Science Daily:

Amid growing concerns about sports “doping,” researchers in Indiana and China report development of a faster and more efficient method for detecting the presence of illegal anabolic steroids in urine.

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RPL554

The drug, which is hailed by some as nothing short of a miracle drug, may prove beneficial to 1.5 million people in the United States alone suffering from asthma and hay fever. This drug is expected to be available in the market in the coming three to four years pending to the success of initial trials for efficacy and safety.

From News-Medical.Net:

Current treatments for asthma and hay fever sufferers are beta-agonists, which open up the airways, and inhaled steroids, which dampen down the inflammation that causes irritation - they are either taken together or singly.

But they have serious side effects, including possible harm to the cardiovascular system and the ’shakes’ reported by many patients from excess use.

Experts say little progress has been made recently with alternative, effective and practical treatment options for a wide range of people with asthma and hay fever and by combining anti-inflammatory properties and the ability to overcome airway narrowing in a single long-lasting dose via the nose, RPL554 could offer real hope of a significant breakthrough.

Some researchers are of the view that this once-a-day asthma treatment option would act as a potential first-line therapy for curing patients suffering from asthma and hay fever. This will also mean that patients with asthma would now require only a single needle puff from their “lifesaving” inhalers to stop the symptoms.

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This multicenter study, which was conducted by the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), found out that steroid therapy was unable to prevent hospitalization or improve respiratory symptoms for bronchiolitis.

It is worth nothing that some of the bronchiolitis symptoms include coughing, fever, wheezing, and runny nose.

From News-Medical.Net:

“Our study shows that treating bronchiolitis with steroids doesn’t work. We hope this study will resolve some of the uncertainty for physicians and families, as we move forward in developing better means of preventing and treating the infection,” says Dr. Bregstein, site principal investigator and emergency medicine pediatrician at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian and assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Current recommendations suggest that simple supportive care is the best available treatment for bronchiolitis. Researchers note that steroid-based medications still play an important role in other respiratory illnesses of childhood such as asthma and croup. They point out these medications are not the androgenic steroids sometimes abused by athletes, and that the side effects seen with long-term steroid use are not a risk in the short-course treatments used for croup and asthma attacks.

This study on bronchiolitis was led for PECARN by the University of Utah’s Department of Pediatrics and Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City.

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This call for caution came after evidence suggested that inhaled corticosteroids, one of the most widely used anti-inflammatory medications, increase the risk of pneumonia by a full third.

From News-Medical.Net:

“Physicians really need to strongly evaluate a patient’s individual characteristics before prescribing these steroid medications, and patients, in turn, should weigh the risks and benefits of taking the drugs, despite their proven record in providing symptomatic relief,” he says.

According to pulmonologist M. Brad Drummond, M.D., M.H.S., who led the study, “catching this bacterial infection can seriously disrupt quality of life, making it harder for COPD patients to breathe and possibly leading to hospitalization.”

Drummond says the new findings should serve as a reminder to people with the severe lung disease to take steps that reduce the chance of getting pneumonia, which doubles their risk of dying when compared to people with healthy lungs. He also advises COPD sufferers, in addition to weighing the benefits and harms of steroids, to get the pneumonia vaccination every five years and an annual flu vaccination because these shots reduce the chance of getting a lung infection.

Drummond suggested that people suffering from lung disease must take additional precautions such as frequent hand washing to ensure that they lead a normal and healthy life. It was also remarked that further research is a must for providing greater relief to COPD sufferers.

This study is expected to provide a great relief to existing 120,000 Americans suffering from COPD, which is expected to become the nation’s third leading cause of death in the United States by the year 2020.

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The researchers considered many factors such as: which steroids were administered, whether or not a local anesthetic was mixed with the steroid, and the amount of steroid used.

From News-Medical.Net:

“Epidural steroid injections are an important and common option for the treatment of back pain. However, we found that a great variety of techniques are being used. There is no gold standard,” said Dr. Patel, lead author of the study and resident at the University of California at San Diego. “Guidelines may need to be explored with regard to this procedure to increase the effectiveness and decrease risk when using this approach to treat pain.”

Dr. Patel’s study found there were differences from institution to institution regarding which steroid was preferred for these injections. The most common steroids identified for this procedure and respective dose ranges were: depomedrol (dose range 40-120 mg), celestone (dose range 6-15 mg), decadron (dose range 4-12 mg), and kenalog (dose range 10-80 mg).

Yogesh Patel, MD, and his colleagues at UCSD, remarked that these technique variations can possible give an insight as to how and why some patients get better results from ESI than others and suggested that this fact needs to be explored further.

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