Faculty Bibliography

Since 1996, the widespread use of combinations of new and older drugs has changed the face of AIDS, promising to transform a fatal infection to a manageable chronic disease. But for an unknown number of AIDS victims, the drugs are failing

The death of former Sen Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts on Jan 18, 1997 from complications of treatment for cancer recalls how important it is for candidates for elected office to make full disclosure of their medical information

Adverse reactions to drugs and mistakes in prescribing them commonly cause illness and sometimes death among hospital patients in this country, three new studies have shown. One problem is an allergic reaction that cannot be predicted or prevented -- which can occur the first time an individual takes a drug. Another reaction can occur if a patient has a known drug allergy that doctors, nurses and pharmacists fail to note before the medication is administered. A reaction can also occur when a patient is given a combination of drugs, even when each drug presents no problems individually. The rates of adverse drug events varied widely in earlier studies, in part because of the way hospitals and those doing studies identify the rates. One study found that about 30 percent of hospital patients had adverse drug events and that 3 percent to 28 percent of hospital admissions were related to such events

Dr. David Ho, a leading AIDS scientist, said here today that he had pushed back by up to a year his plans to do crucial tests to determine whether infection with the AIDS virus can be cured in some people. Then Dr. Ho's team at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan would test the individual repeatedly to determine if H.I.V. could be detected again. Today, Dr. Ho said that ''we have never popped the question with our patients'' to stop therapy to test the theory that AIDS might be curable. He spoke at a news conference before opening an AIDS meeting here tonight with a talk entitled: ''Can H.I.V. Be Eradicated From an Infected Person?''

For the first time since the AIDS epidemic was recognized in 1981, deaths from the disease in New York City dropped sharply last year, declining by 30 percent, a City Health Department official said today. ''It's great news, and we haven't had a lot of that in the AIDS epidemic,'' Dr. Harold W. Jaffe, an AIDS expert at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said at a news conference on the New York City report. Dr. Lars O. Kallings of Stockholm, a leader in international AIDS research, said ''the data were very impressive and will have global importance because widespread publicity has focused attention on New York City's epidemic.'' He said that because so many of New York's AIDS cases are among the poor, the new statistics would offer hope to poor nations with intractable AIDS problems

In February 1996, George Shultz went to visit his old boss, Ronald Reagan, at the former president's home in Los Angeles. He drank tea with Reagan and his wife, Nancy, and talked a little politics. He stayed perhaps an hour. At one point in the visit, Reagan had left the room briefly with a nurse. When they came back, she went on, 'he said to the nurse: `Who is that man sitting with Nancy [Reagan] on the couch? I know him. He is a very famous man.' ' It has been almost three years since Reagan disclosed that he had Alzheimer's disease, the memory-destroying neurological illness. And if, at age 86, the old movie actor still looks the image of vigorous good health, the truth is that the man behind the firm handshake and barely gray hair is steadily, surely ebbing away

When former President Ronald Reagan disclosed in November 1994 that he had Alzheimer's disease, many people could not help suspecting that the illness had begun to rob him of memory while he was in the White House. Throughout his years in Washington, Reagan had been portrayed by many pundits and political opponents as absent-minded, inattentive, incurious even lazy. And his presidency was marked by a succession of very public mental stumbles -- most notably his dismal performance in the first debate of the 1984 campaign, and his confused and forgetful accounting of his role in the Iran-Contra affair. His mental competence in office, they said in a series of recent interviews, was never in doubt. Indeed, they pointed out, tests of his mental status did not begin to show evidence of the disease until the summer of 1993, more than four years after he left the White House. 'There was never anything that would raise a question about his ability to function as president,' said Dr. Lawrence C. Mohr, one of Reagan's physicians in his second term. 'Ronald Reagan's cognitive function, belief structure, judgment, ability to choose between options, behavior and ability to communicate were totally and completely intact.' Reagan's diagnosis raised questions not only about his mental competence in office but about how well his White House doctors had monitored it. Dr. John Hutton, the chief White House physician during Reagan's last two years in office and a close family friend, said he was speaking out with the permission of the former president's wife, Nancy, chiefly to rebut published statements questioning Reagan's mental status in office. The doctors said they had taken the unusual step of discussing their former patient's medical history publicly because neither they nor Reagan had covered up any illness, and because they did not want history to see them as having done so