Faculty Bibliography

Health experts in and out of government say that in adopting disciplinary measures for AIDS-infected health care workers who perform invasive procedures without informing patients that they are infected, the Senate is taking the wrong approach

An earlier study found that women who took multivitamins containing folic acid reduced the risk of having babies with the neurological problem, which includes a wide range of birth defects. The new study found that folic acid, a B vitamin, had a 72 percent protective effect in preventing neural tube defects among nearly 1,200 pregnant women who already had given birth to a child with such a birth defect

Pregnant women who take the vitamin folic acid from the time of conception vastly reduce the risk of having babies with a serious and common type of neurological defect, a new international study has found

An earlier study found that women who took multivitamins containing folic acid reduced the risk of having babies with so-called neural tube defects, which include a wide range of birth defects. The new study, conducted by a team headed by Dr. Nicholas Wald from the Medical College of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, found that folic acid, a B vitamin, had a 72 percent protective effect in preventing neural tube defects among nearly 1,200 pregnant women who already had given birth to a child with such a birth defect. The benefits of folic acid were so clear-cut that Wald's team stopped the study ahead of schedule. The study showed that only folic acid, and not other vitamins, was protective

The CDC, in guidelines released on Jul 15, 1991, recommended that health-care workers who perform certain surgical procedures should voluntarily have tests for the viruses that cause AIDS and hepatitis B, and those infected should stop the procedures unless they get permission from a panel of experts and inform their patients. The guidelines drew angry responses from advocates of mandatory testing

Federal health officials recommended Monday that doctors and dentists performing surgery or pulling teeth get AIDS tests and stop such procedures if they're infected. The guidelines were issued by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which documented the only known transmission of the AIDS virus from a health-care worker to patients nearly a year ago. Benjamin Schatz of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights said the guidelines could lead hospitals and malpractice-insurance companies to institute mandatory AIDS testing in the hope of avoiding lawsuits if infected workers were allowed to continue practicing

Only in recent weeks has the modern generation of doctors begun to appreciate that the new use derives from observations made by Dr. Lawrence L. Craven, a general practitioner in Glendale, Calif., more than 40 years ago. Dr. Craven noted an unusual incidence of bleeding complications among children who chewed gum containing aspirin to relieve the pain from a tonsillectomy. Aspirin, which is acetyl salicylic acid, was first synthesized in the 19th century, but it lay dormant on the shelves of the Bayer Company in Germany until it began to be used in a few patients just before the turn of the century. But no one seems to have seen aspirin's potential against heart attacks and strokes until Dr. Craven began his studies in the late 1940's, according to an article in the June issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine by the journal's editor, Dr. James E. Dalen, of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Although that process appears to have been at play in the recognition of aspirin as a treatment against heart attacks and strokes, the lack of credit to Dr. Craven is striking. A spot check of several pioneering studies of the aspirin link found none that credited Dr. Craven, although his papers were included in the standard international index of medical reports

Many scientists believe that Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a virus that they have not discovered. Others believe the cause might be a virus that only functions in the presence of HIV. But Dr. Robert Gallo, the AIDS pioneer at the National Cancer Institute, said seven years of futile searching have led him to discount the viral theory. Dr. Gallo said he now believed that Kaposi's sarcoma somehow resulted from abnormalities of cell growth substances in the body, not a virus. Most laboratory research on AIDS is based on a single strain of virus known as HIV-1 Lai. The strain is used to explore immune reactions to HIV, to understand the function of the anatomy of the virus's genes and inner core, to screen for candidate drugs and to develop vaccines. All experimental AIDS vaccines use components of the protein in the cover of the HIV-1 Lai virus, said Dr. Simon Wain-Hobson, a leading AIDS researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In pointing out the limitations of a research system based largely on one strain of virus, Dr. Wain-Hobson drew an analogy to the extent of knowledge about Italians that could be gained by studying the daily routine of a resident of Florence. 'Much can be learned, but not everything,' Dr. Wain-Hobson said in an article in the daily bulletin of the meeting. 'Yet that is akin to what scientists do when they study HIV in the laboratory.'

The immune responses that most recipients developed to the Bristol Myers-Squibb vaccine were weak, although they usually persisted for longer than one year, Graham said. The immune responses were a measure of antibodies reacting to the vaccine. The booster is a subunit vaccine of purified gp160 made by MicroGeneSys Inc. The volunteers were given the booster 11 to 27 months after the first vaccine. After receiving the vaccine with the booster dose, the volunteers showed strong enough immune responses to gp160 to be in the range that would be expected for an effective vaccine, Graham said

Scientists at the seventh international AIDS meeting in Florence Italy reported surprisingly encouraging results on Jun 21, 1991 from tests in the US of a combination of two experimental AIDS vaccines in a small number of uninfected human volunteers