February 2012
95 posts
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A Charm Offensive Against AIDS
SOWETO, South Africa — Shortly after Michel Sidibé became executive director of the United Nations’ AIDS prevention agency, a court in Senegal sentenced nine gay men, all AIDS educators, to eight years in prison for “unnatural acts.”
In one of his first moves as the new chief of U.N.AIDS, Mr. Sidibe flew to Senegal to ask its aging president, Abdoulaye Wade, to pardon the men.
Mr....
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Military Deaths Spike After End of Vaccine Program
After a vaccination program was phased out, deaths from adenovirus among military personnel — mostly recruits — resurged, military researchers reported.
From 1999 to 2010, eight military personnel — seven of them recruits — died of disease caused by an adenovirus, according to Robert Potter, DVM, of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, and colleagues.
But during...
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Fish Oil May Fix Heart Risk Tiny Babies Face
By Crystal Phend, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Published: February 20, 2012
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
Fish oil supplements might erase the long-term cardiovascular impact of being born small, a clinical trial suggested.
Infants kept on a regimen of supplements and omega-3-rich oils for most of...
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Reward or punishment in medical training
Like many of my colleagues, I teach and supervise students, residents, nurses, and respiratory therapists. I’m also the medical director of a PICU. Overall, I’ve been teaching and doing administration for over 30 years. And, like most of my colleagues, I never received any formal instruction at all in how to do these things. To some extent I got help from my own mentors, primarily by watching...
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Cooling May Reduce Mortality in Sepsis
By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Published: February 20, 2012
Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston.
A trial of external cooling for septic shock failed to meet its primary endpoint, but febrile patients had almost a 50% lower mortality with cooling, French investigators reported.
The proportion of...
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Wayfaring MD's Ramblings: Hard Boiled. →
wayfaringmd:
One morning on psych I went to see my favorite aphasic patient, Gus.
Usually he was pleasantly confused and was always alert and interacting (as best he could) with other patients. That morning I found him slumped over in his chair, face almost in his plate of eggs.
I called his name and…
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Washington Week: SGR Fix Passed
WASHINGTON — Congress passed a bill to delay a scheduled 27% cut in Medicare payments by 10 months, and the president released his 2013 proposed budget, which requests a slight increase for health programs.
Congress Passes SGR Deal
The House of Representatives voted 293-132 late Friday morning to pass a compromise bill that would delay the Medicare rate cut, and the Senate passed it by a...
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A diagnosis of stomach cancer profoundly changes...
I was jogging one day while on a business trip in LA and collapsed during the run. Within hours, I was at the hospital at UCLA Medical Center on a gurney headed for a CT scan of my abdominal cavity. I remember telling the ER physicians that I was a doctor and recommending my own course of action. As my advice to the ER doctors went largely ignored, I realized, at that moment, that being a...
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1 + 1 = 3: Pica →
jinavie:
Occasionally, there are news stories about a man who eats steel or a girl who likes to eat plastic. Such a condition where the person develops an appetite for a non-food substance is called pica. Pica is more common than one would think. The most common cases are those of dirt, clay and chalk,…
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Picture Your Life After Cancer →
For the estimated 12 million cancer survivors in the U.S., some of life’s biggest challenges and successes begin after treatment ends. Here are your photos and insights about life after cancer. (Join the discussion here.) Add your photo to the collage here.
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Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a...
Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.
The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University, said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than...
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Johnson & Johnson Recalls Infants' Tylenol
Johnson & Johnson, the health care giant, said on Friday that it was recalling its entire United States supply of Infants’ Tylenol after parents complained about problems with a new dosing system. It was the latest in a string of recalls for the company.
The recall involves about 574,000 bottles of grape-flavored liquid Tylenol for children younger than 2. After earlier recalls, Johnson...
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Pediatric Infectious Disease Case (True Life... →
missmd2be:
16 year old male presents to ED with new-onset severe jaundice, transient rash, fatigue, nausea, vomiting and decreased appetite. Patient’s girlfriend had mono 2 months ago, but monospot test at primary care physician was negative 2 days prior to presentation. No lymphadenopathy or sore throat….
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Colombian time
Boyfriend: What time do you want to leave for dinner?
Me: 5:30. But the American 5:30, not the Colombian 5:30.
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