Faculty Bibliography

The AIDS virus is more prevalent in the blood of infected people than scientists believed, and there is no period of infection when the virus is dormant, new research shows. In the second and larger study, a team headed by Dr. Robert W. Coombs at the University of Washington and Children's Hospital in Seattle showed that the virus was always found in the blood once it was detected, challenging the contention that it is dormant at times. But the amount of the viruse found varied widely in the tests, which involved 213 people who were infected and 71 who were not. Linked to Stage of Disease In an editorial in the journal, Dr. David Baltimore and Dr. Mark B. Feinberg of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., said the new ''data should dispel any lingering doubts about whether HIV is the true culprit in AIDS.''

Experts in medicine have predicted that surgeons will take even bolder steps to come up with a more complex array of operations which will create even more patchwork patients

Scientists have found a deficiency of glutathione in a small study of people infected with the AIDS virus, raising the question of whether a deficiency of the substance leads to the collapse of the immune system

An increased risk of heart attack from taking cocaine can persist for at least two weeks after the start of a program, according to a study in The Annals of Internal Medicine

''It sure was suspicious that both were taking this product and that they have the same weird syndrome,'' Dr. [Phillip A. Hertzman] said. He called the New Mexico health department to alert officials and to ask if they knew of other unusual cases. They did not. ''Two patients taking L-tryptophan with the same syndrome? Is that a link?'' Dr. [Gerald J. Gleich] asked. ''Maybe. But three? Come on! I've seen hundreds of people with eosinophilia and never heard this L-tryptophan story.'' When Mayo doctors diagnosed two additional cases in patients who did not live in New Mexico, Dr. Gleich said he called Dr. [Edwin M. Kilbourne] again, telling him that it had gone beyond New Mexico, ''and it is serious.''

Federal health officials investigating a nationwide outbreak of a serious illness linked to a dietary supplement, L-tryptophan, say they are focusing on the way it was manufactured in Japan. The health officials said last week that two new studies had pointed to some unidentified factor, possibly a contaminant, in the manufacturing process as the cause of the syndrome, making them less suspicious that it was a result of pure L-tryptophan itself. The Food and Drug Administration has asked stores to remove all products containing L-tryptophan from their shelves to prevent more cases of the illness, eosinophilic-myalgia syndrome

Federal officials investigating a nationwide outbreak of a serious illness associated with the drug L-tryptophan say they are looking to the way the drug was manufactured in Japan as a probable cause for the epidemic

Animal experiments show that a drug derived from a Chinese tree is a potent agent against colon cancer

A drug derived from a Chinese tree has proved to be the most potent agent against colon cancer in experiments on animals, scientists are reporting in a medical journal. The drug, 9-AC, caused rapid and dramatic shrinking of human colon cancers that had been transplanted into mice and did not show any evidence of major adverse effects, scientists from four institutes say in the journal Science. Dr. Robert Silber of New York University Medical Center, one of the authors of the report, said the team was reluctant to describe the long remissions as cures because the cancers could recur sometime before the mice die

A research team led by Dr Annlia Paganini-Hill of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles reported in the Nov 18, 1989 issue of the British Medical Journal their new study of elderly people which concluded that taking daily doses of aspirin increases the risk of kidney and heart disease