Faculty Bibliography

The leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide can be effectively treated by a single dose of an antibiotic once a year, health workers said Tuesday, and they announced a major push to distribute the drug in five countries. The World Health Organization set up a new strategy earlier this year in an effort to eliminate trachoma as a major cause of blindness by the year 2020. Tuesday, officials of Pfizer Inc., which sells a long-acting antibiotic against the disease, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a leading charity organization in New York, announced that they were starting a $66 million program to help carry out WHO's strategy in Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Tanzania and Vietnam

The eye infection trachoma dims the vision of six million people, making it the world's leading cause of preventable blindness

An Australian man who received a transplanted hand and forearm in France seven weeks ago has begun moving each finger of the donor hand and is gaining function with surprising swiftness, his doctors said last week. They said that so far the man, Clint Hallam, had not shown any signs of rejection and had escaped adverse effects of potent immune-suppressing drugs. Mr. Hallam, 48, is ''far ahead of schedule, doing superbly and better than any of us ever would have hoped,'' said Dr. Earl Owen, an Australian microsurgeon who headed the international team that performed the transplant. Much of Mr. Hallam's early success is because of the prescribed intense exercise program he performed on the muscles of his handless right arm in the year preceding the operation. The muscles of both forearms were equally strong when the transplant was performed at Edouard Herriot Hospital in Lyons on Sept. 23, and they remain strong with twice-a-day physical therapy, Dr. Owen said

For one, Lymerix, which will be available in January, does not protect everyone who takes it against Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted through tick bites. For maximum protection, three injections of the vaccine must be taken over a year. Studies have shown that taking three injections provides 78 percent protection against Lyme disease, while taking two injections provides only 50 percent protection

The coronary gene therapy research, led by Dr. Jeffrey M. Isner of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Mass., and Tufts University, is reported in today's issue of Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association. The protein therapy is being developed by Dr. Thomas-Joseph Stegmann of Fulda, Germany, a leading figure in the field, who discussed his work in interviews. But the researchers said in interviews that they were struck by the improvements reported by more than 20 participants in these early trials, even patients whose pain could not be controlled by other drug therapy or bypass surgery. And the editor of the journal decided that Dr. Isner's results, though preliminary, were significant enough to warrant publication. St. Elizabeth's Hospital, with which Dr. Isner is affiliated, has formed a company to test his therapy in larger trials. As for Dr. Stegmann, he is a co-founder of Cardio-Vascular Genetic Engineering Inc. of Irvine, Calif., which aims to develop angiogenesis treatment for coronary artery disease

The Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved the marketing of a vaccine against Lyme disease for the first time. But the Federal agency was unusually cautious in recommending use of the vaccine, known as Lymerix, which is manufactured by SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals of Philadelphia. For one, Lymerix, which will be available in January, does not protect everyone who takes it against Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted through tick bites. For maximum protection, three injections of the vaccine must be taken over a year. Studies have shown that taking three injections provides 78 percent protection against Lyme disease, while two injections provides only 50 percent protection. Lymerix is made from a genetically engineered protein known as OspA, located on the outer surface of the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease. The manufacturer said that protection seemed to result from the vaccine stimulating the body's immune system to produce antibodies against the spiral bacteria. When a vaccinated person is bitten by an infected tick, the antibody is taken up into the tick's intestine where it kills the bacteria, preventing infection

The importance of death certificates has grown in recent years as the autopsy rate has plummeted to about 10 percent from about 50 percent in the 1960's. Without autopsies, death certificates become official declarations of why people have died. Still, death certificate information is often flawed, and that misinformation can affect policy. New evidence of flawed death certificate information comes from researchers at the federally financed Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts. The study, begun in 1948 and involving some 10,000 people, suggests that doctors overstate coronary artery disease as a cause of death on death certificates, particularly among the elderly. Apparently, coronary artery disease is the default diagnosis for the death certificate when doctors are not sure of the cause of death. The situation, however, is complicated: Many cases are so medically complex that assigning a single cause, particularly in older people with multiple ailments, can be virtually impossible, but doctors still must cite a primary cause and can add secondary causes. In such cases, doctors may differ about the main cause

The coronary gene therapy research, led by Dr. Jeffrey Isner of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Mass., and Tufts University, is reported in today's issue of Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association. The protein therapy is being developed by Dr. Thomas-Joseph Stegmann of Fulda, Germany, a leading figure in the field. The researchers said they were struck by the improvements reported by more than 20 participants in these early trials, even patients whose pain couldn't be controlled by other drug therapy or bypass surgery. And the editor of the journal decided that Isner's results, though preliminary, were significant enough to warrant publication. St. Elizabeth's Hospital, with which Isner is affiliated, has formed a company to test his therapy in larger trials. As for Stegmann, he's a co-founder of Cardio-Vascular Genetic Engineering Inc. of Irvine, Calif., which aims to develop angiogenesis treatment for coronary artery disease

Two small studies have shown that over the course of just a few weeks, one dose of experimental drugs injected directly into the heart can greatly relieve, or even eliminate, the chest pain of coronary artery disease by encouraging the growth of new blood vessels to bypass clogged arteries, according to researchers in the United States and Germany. One of the treatments under study is gene therapy to produce a protein called vegF, for vascular endothelial growth factor. The other entails injection of a protein called FGF-1, for fibroblast growth factor. The coronary gene therapy research, led by Dr. Jeffrey Isner of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Mass., and Tufts University, is reported in today's issue of Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association. The protein therapy is being developed by Dr. Thomas-Joseph Stegmann of Fulda, Germany, a leading figure in the field, who discussed his work in interviews

Two small studies have shown that, in just a few weeks, one dose of experimental drugs injected directly into the heart can greatly relieve, or even eliminate, the chest pain of coronary artery disease by encouraging the growth of new blood vessels to bypass clogged arteries, according to researchers in the United States and Germany. One of the treatments under study is gene therapy to produce a protein called vegF, for vascular endothelial growth factor. The other entails injection of a protein called FGF-1, for fibroblast growth factor. The coronary gene therapy research, led by Dr. Jeffrey Isner of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Mass., and Tufts University, is reported in today's issue of Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association. The protein therapy is being developed by Dr. Thomas-Joseph Stegmann of Fulda, Germany, a leader in the field, who discussed his work in interviews