Faculty Bibliography

''This technique has a big potential in the vascular surgical field,'' said Dr. Toshiharu Shinoka, who directs pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Yale and who plans to conduct studies with Cytograft on the new vessel. He called the technique an advance over one he used in operations on children in Japan, in which vessels were grown from cells on a scaffold that then degraded and was absorbed into the body. Doctors not connected with the company agreed on the importance of the new technique. ''A potential benefit may be for infants and children with congenital heart defects,'' said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco. Unlike grafts from cadavers, he added, ''the Cytograft vessels should be able to grow as the child does.'' Dr. Sergio A. Garrido, a vascular surgeon in Buenos Aires, said he implanted the Cytograft vessels in the forearm or upper arm under general anesthesia, in a different area from the malfunctioning shunt. The procedure took 60 to 90 minutes. Through surgical gloves, the Cytograft vessel, 5 1/2 to 11 * inches long, felt a little more delicate than a regular vein, he said

The overwhelming majority of tuberculosis cases are caused by bacterial strains that yield to the standard, or first-line, anti-TB drugs. Newer, second-line drugs are used if a strain of tuberculosis is MDR or XDR, which are resistant to the first-line drugs. If tuberculosis strains are not tested for drug resistance as soon as they are found in a patient, the problem may be detected too late to permit a cure. ''But no laboratory test for any disease is 100 percent,'' said one member of the panel, Dr. Karin Weyer of the South African Medical Research Council. ''Labs often have problems and can and do make mistakes,'' Dr. Weyer said. The panel also recommended using molecular tests to detect rifampicin resistance as a proxy for MDR tuberculosis. Use of such tests could reliably determine XDR in less than two months, compared with the several months that are often needed now, Dr. Weyer said. Standard tests take weeks to complete because tuberculosis bacteria grow slowly

After Mr. Speaker arrived at National Jewish on May 31 following his widely publicized journey, his doctors were unanimous in recommending surgery in July. A major factor is that a review in 2004 of 15 years' experience in treating resistant tuberculosis at National Jewish found that ''the most important single variable we had associated with favorable outcome was resectional surgery.'' In discussions among the doctors, surgery was ''a gray zone call,'' Dr. [Michael D. Iseman] said in an interview. ''One day I could go argue for it, the next day against it,'' he said. In the best of circumstances, Mr. Speaker could go home to Atlanta as soon as in two to three weeks, Dr. Iseman said. But, he added, ''his situation is so public health delicate that he and we and the authorities in Georgia may wish to treat him here a little bit longer, just so we can assure everyone in the community that he does not have positive cultures.''

'I would recommend taking medication,' [Gregory L. Barkley] said. 'The intervals tend to get shorter and shorter, and people tend to have recurrent seizures.' He explained: 'The brain learns from practice. The more you practice, the better you get, whether you're playing the piano or having seizures. The more you have, the more you're going to have. Most neurologists feel that the best way to intervene is to get the seizures under control as quickly as possible.' Dr. Robert S. Fisher, director of Stanford University's epilepsy center and a past president of the American Epilepsy Society, said: 'In my view, it would be reasonable not to treat. It sounds like he went 14 years between seizures, and that's a lot of pills to take to prevent the next seizure 14 years from now. The new ones are better than the old ones in terms of side effects, but they all have potential side effects and risks.'

Dr. [Moses Sinkala] said health officials ''should strongly encourage breast-feeding into the second year of life for infants found to be HIV-infected.'' The reason was that infected infants had a lower death rate the longer they were breast-fed, said Dr. Donald M. Thea of Boston University, a co-author of the Zambian study. In a main address to the conference, Dr. Hoosen Coovadia, an AIDS expert from Durban, South Africa, pointed out the many well-documented advantages of breast-feeding. Dr. Coovadia pleaded with pediatricians and health officials not to lose sight of the fact that breast-feeding provided one of nature's greatest health benefits. United Nations AIDS estimates that 300,000 infants die each year from becoming infected through breast-feeding. Unicef estimates that 1.5 million infants die each year from mothers who avoided breast-feeding

The combination - taking one inexpensive antibiotic pill each day and sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net - reduced the incidence of malaria by 97 percent compared with a control group, Dr. Anne Gasasira, an AIDS researcher at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, said Wednesday at a medical conference in Los Angeles. She said the findings had already changed medical practice in Uganda. But scientists said they had not yet determined whether the treatment would be as effective in HIV-negative children with malaria

Epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have linked the acanthamoeba keratitis outbreak to AMO Complete Moisture Plus Multi-Purpose Solution. Advanced Medical Optics of Santa Ana, Calif., manufactures the solution, used to clean and store soft contact lenses

''You're getting pretty old!'' she said, after praising his long service to the country. ''And it's such a hard job!'' Sometimes he can come across on television as subdued, or old-looking, analysts said. Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who once worked for [Rudolph W. Giuliani], a [John McCain] rival for the nomination, has conducted Fox News focus groups gauging people's reactions to the debates. Some people in his groups used words like ''tired'' and ''old'' to describe Mr. McCain, Mr. Luntz said. So, faced with rivals who are younger, but also have put in far less time in elected office, Mr. McCain tries to make a virtue of his age. ''I'm not the youngest candidate,'' he said in his campaign-kickoff speech. ''But I am the most experienced.''

''The new analyses are both disappointing and puzzling'' because they offer no explanation for the vaccine's failure, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a partner in the vaccine trial. The findings raise questions about whether adenovirus can ever be used as a crucial ingredient in an AIDS vaccine and whether new tacks will be needed. Use of a modified virus as a vector to deliver H.I.V. genes is a new and evolving way to make an AIDS vaccine. The Merck vaccine included three synthetic H.I.V. genes. ''We did a beautiful experiment, but it definitely was a disappointment,'' Dr. Larry Corey of the University of Washington, who led the investigators, said in an interview. ''One lesson is that scientists will have to look at vector-based immunity more thoroughly than we have in the past.''

''It was not watered down in terms of its science,'' Ms. [Dana Perino] said. ''It wasn't watered down in terms of the concerns that climate change raises for public health.'' The testimony that remained said, ''Climate change is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans and the nation's public health infrastructure.'' But a line saying ''the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed'' was gone, and the testimony focused on the ways health agencies were already prepared to tackle any problems