Faculty Bibliography

For the first time, researchers have shown that nonsmoking adults who grew up in households with smokers have an increased risk of lung cancer

Chronic fatigue syndrome has become become a major public health concern since it was first described in 1985 as chronic mononucleosis and chronic Epstein-Barr virus syndrome. It is also known as ''yuppie flu'' because it tends to strike well-educated people in their 30's. No one is sure how many people suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome because its symptoms vary and mimic many other ailments. Doctors have no laboratory test to detect chronic fatigue syndrome. The severe fatigue can last six months or longer. ''No one feels this is a fatal condition,'' said Dr. Walter J. Gunn, principal investigator of the chronic fatigue syndrome program at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta

Scientists reported finding a possible link between a virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, a dehabilitating illness that can cause extreme weakness and other symptoms lasting for months or even years

The authors, a team headed by Dr. Ann E. Wakefield of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said the findings cast serious doubt as to whether PCP ''necessarily results'' from reactivation of a silent infection as a child. The results were reported in the Aug. 25 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal. The Oxford team plans to explore the significance of possible geographical variations in the distribution of the microbe. AIDS researchers, for instance, have been puzzled as to why PCP seems to be less of a problem among AIDS patients in Africa. Preliminary findings suggest that PCP is common among Africans but that other microbes kill African AIDS patients because they are more aggressive than P. carinii, Dr. [Julian M. Hopkin] said. The Oxford scientists said the new test's ''improved diagnostic power may be particularly valuable in trials to determine the efficacy of novel therapies for PCP.''

Scientists said they had found no convincing evidence that the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 had caused a rise in cancer rates

Scientists said Friday that they had found no convincing evidence that the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 had caused a rise in cancer rates. While rates for certain cancers rose among the 160,000 people within a 10-mile radius of the power plant near Harrisburg, the researchers said the increases were not statistically significant. Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a member of the Three Mile Island Public Health Fund Science Advisory Board, said: 'There is an understandable emotional appeal to look at the cluster, go talk to those people, examine them, and follow that up

Dermatologists say that razor bumps are found only in those who shave, the condition gets worse for those who continue to shave and remission invariably occurs after people affected by the condition stop shaving for about a month. The condition, pseudofolliculitis barbae, 'is a disorder that is really generated by societal pressures to force individuals with coarse, curly hair to shave,' said Dr. Stanford I. Lamberg, a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. A Maryland hearing examiner ruled that a ban on beards that allowed no exceptions for medical reasons was discriminatory under Maryland's civil rights laws. But courts in other states have held that there is no constitutional right to grow a beard and that companies can require employees to be clean-shaven. Because accurate surveys have not been conducted, it is not known how many men with the problem have been forced to shave to get or keep a job

The second advance was the development of an animal model for the disorder. Researchers at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., reproduced features of the disorder in rats. #1,500 Cases Reported Federal health officials said they did not yet know whether the contaminant itself was the cause of the disorder or whether it was a ''marker'' for another substance that was. Nor do investigators know how the chemical contaminated the of L-tryptophan, an amino acid, in the manufacturing process

The infant mortality rate in the US reached the lowest level ever in 1989, 9.7 per 1,000 live births, but it remains higher than those in many industrialized nations