Faculty Bibliography

Dr. [Richard Doll] said he believed that an important factor in the gap was that the male body was bigger and had more cells, providing a greater chance for something in a cell to go wrong. 'Lung cancer mortality in nonsmokers, for example, is about 20 percent higher in males than females, and one can easily account for that by the greater number of cells' in the airways, Dr. Doll said. The data analyzed by Dr. [Eileen Crimmins] are not nearly as bleak as is commonly believed. 'The difference in death rates makes women look less healthy in old age,' Dr. Crimmins said. 'The males have died off before they become disabled.' 'It is not that women have a greater tendency to get health problems,' Dr. Crimmins said, 'but that they live long enough' to fall into the most vulnerable period of life for disabling illness. And, she said, 'they live longer once they have them.'

Lawrence K. Altman reviews the book 'Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century' by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles

WHEN men are infected with H.I.V. and another sexually transmitted disease, like gonorrhea, their semen contains about eight times as much AIDS virus as is found in semen of men who who do not have dual infections, a new study has found. The findings indicate that control measures used in some countries to battle AIDS are worthwhile and suggest that widespread detection and treatment programs for sexually transmitted diseases could help prevent many new H.I.V. infections, said the study's authors, from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. The findings are relevant for the United States and other developed countries, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of a number of Federal agencies that paid for the study along with the World Health Organization. Family Health International conducted the study along with the University of North Carolina researchers

The overall decline was attributed to greater access to medical care and to development of newer drug therapies for both the AIDS virus and for the myriad opportunistic infections that can occur as fatal complications of AIDS, itself a potentially fatal disease. The decline in the United States began before the first protease inhibitor drug was marketed in December 1995, said Dr. Helene Gayle, who heads the AIDS programs of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta. The number of people living with AIDS has increased 10 percent since mid-1995, Dr. Gayle said. But she and speakers from the AIDS Action Council, a Washington-based national advocacy organization that says it represents 1,400 service organizations, expressed deep concern about the disproportionate rates of decline in AIDS deaths among men, women and minority groups

Consider two outbreaks that were initially attributed to an unusual natural accident and a hereditary disorder. Later they were found to have been caused by criminal acts, something that doctors generally have little reason to consider in most cases of disease, as opposed to cases of physical violence, long recognized as a public health problem. And even when doctors do find a criminal cause for a medical problem, they have tended not to report the cases in medical journals, partly, they say, to avoid further incidents. That attitude has begun to change, albeit slowly. Last week Federal health officials focused new attention on one such criminal outbreak 13 years after it happened. They published a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association about 751 cases of salmonella infection that occurred in 1984 among the 10,500 residents of The Dalles, Ore., because followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had deliberately contaminated restaurant salad bars there. ''The possibility of deliberate contamination has been on every investigator's list since the Rajneesh incident and it has greatly influenced how we approach outbreaks of illness,'' said Dr. Thomas J. Torok, an epidemiologist at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta who participated in the Oregon investigation

The [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh] outbreak and the multiple murders are likely to raise suspicions among public-health investigators. The idea that criminal activity is responsible 'needs to be in the back of our mind in an investigation when things do not add up,' says Dr. [Thomas J. Torok]. 'But usually it should be at the bottom of the list.'