Faculty Bibliography

Yesterday Dr. [Robert Cooksey] did not directly address the question of what he would have done under the same circumstances. ''I wasn't in that situation,'' Dr. Cooksey said on the ABC program ''Good Morning America,'' ''but I probably would have done the very same thing.'' The Fulton County health officials said they ''preferred'' that Andrew Speaker not travel but did not cite a specific reason. Ted Speaker said that he asked a health official whether he was ''just saying this to cover yourself'' and that the official replied, ''Yes.'' Dr. [Julie L. Gerberding] also said that at several times ''he helped us facilitate communication with his son-in-law and the wife,'' Sarah. Dr. Cooksey's ''assistance was actually extremely helpful in getting us in cellphone'' contact with Andrew Speaker in Europe, Dr. Gerberding said, ''to help us determine how to help him get into a safer health care environment.''

'If I sat next to a passenger with drug resistant tuberculosis, I would not be happy if I caught it, because I'd be getting a serious disease and need to take toxic drugs for two years and still face death,' [Mario Raviglione] said. 'They did the right thing.' While Speaker's case was unusual in many aspects, it followed the standard ways doctors detect and treat tuberculosis. Doctors detect TB largely through skin tests, X-rays and laboratory tests. After taking sputum and lung secretions from a suspect, doctors smear a portion of the specimen on a glass slide. They add chemical stains to help detect TB bacteria (often nicknamed red snappers) when they look through a microscope. [Frank Plummer], who also directs the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said the discordance between the two laboratories in this case 'doesn't make sense' and that he hoped a review would 'solve the mystery.'

The survey's senior author, Dr. Martin A. Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, said in an interview that surgeons had made ''little progress in the last 20 years'' in preventing needle stick injuries. And hospitals, he said, ''are not doing what they should to care for their own providers, their families and patients.'' Such an experience among surgeons in training ''traumatizes their psyche on top of the stress of residency,'' Dr. Makary said. ''They do not know whether to tell their significant other,'' he said, ''and if they do report it to hospital officials, they worry about being stigmatized.''

That chilling forecast is based in part on analyses by the organization that show that, on average, a patient infected with drug-resistant tuberculosis in 2004 was resistant to more drugs than a similar patient with that diagnosis in 1994, Dr. Paul Nunn, a TB expert for the organization, said Tuesday. About 420,000, or 5 percent, of the estimated 8.8 million new cases of tuberculosis in the world are resistant to many standard anti-tuberculosis drugs, Dr. Mario Raviglione, who directs the WHO's tuberculosis department, said in an interview. 'It is possible that in some settings drug-resistant tuberculosis could completely replace standard tuberculosis,' Raviglione said

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 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.''

The new reports create even more scientific confusion about how to develop a vaccine to stop the global HIV pandemic, which has infected an estimated 39 million people and killed 25 million more. 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 HIV genes is a new and evolving way to make an AIDS vaccine. The Merck vaccine included three synthetic HIV genes

The increased risk was principally among a group of people who had pre-existing levels of immunity to a common cold virus known as adenovirus type 5, which was modified to become a critical part of the vaccine. Researchers emphasized that the vaccine itself could not cause AIDS, but one theory is that the cold virus may have activated the immune system in some way to make certain recipients more susceptible to becoming HIV-infected when exposed to the AIDS virus. The vaccine was being tested among 3,000 volunteers at high risk of developing AIDS in nine countries, including those at immunization centers organized by the National Institutes of Health in the United States. Merck's was seen as one of the most promising experimental AIDS vaccines to have been tested on people. Many scientists and AIDS advocates have called the failure of the experimental vaccine a major setback

''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

The Journal of Biological Chemistry initially rejected Dr. Kornberg's two classic papers. He said the journal told him that a peer, the noted scientist Erwin Chargaff, had written ''an exceedingly sarcastic letter'' in assessing his findings. In 1967, Dr. Kornberg and his team became the first to produce the active inner core of a virus in a laboratory. President Lyndon B. Johnson hailed the report of the feat as ''one of the most important stories you ever read'' because it ''opens a wide door to new discoveries in fighting disease and building healthier lives.'' He complained bitterly, however, that too few scientists studied polyphosphate, largely, he said, because of science's proclivity to work ''in a clannish way.'' With more scientists struggling for grants in an era of tight budgets, he said, ''nobody is going to propose doing anything that is bold or creative,'' like working on polyphosphate