Faculty Bibliography

Dr. Ruge was lauded for insisting that Mr. Reagan be treated by the hospital's trauma team, instead of taking charge himself or summoning high-powered surgeons from other medical centers, as has occurred in many cases involving other dignitaries. Dr. Ruge instructed staff members at George Washington to make the same medical and surgical decisions for the president that they would make for any patient in the same condition. Dr. Ruge said he had studied the Constitution during the 10 weeks that Mr. Reagan had been in office and carried a copy of the 25th Amendment in his bag. Section 3 of the amendment should have been invoked to transfer executive powers to Mr. [George Bush] for at least a day or two, Dr. Ruge said, ''because Mr. Reagan could not communicate with the people a president is supposed to communicate with.'' As a neurosurgeon, Dr. Ruge was well qualified to observe Mr. Reagan closely. After Mr. Reagan disclosed in 1994 that he had Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Ruge said he had never detected any signs of Alzheimer's in talking with him almost daily from 1981 to 1985

An international health organization has reported that it has suspended more than $150 million in grants to Uganda because of serious mismanagement. Officials of the agency, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said Wednesday that they had taken the action to warn Uganda and other countries that they needed to manage the fund's grants properly. The fund had awarded Uganda $201 million in five grants and had already paid out $45.4 million of that. Two grants were made to help fight AIDS and two for malaria. The fifth grant was for tuberculosis control. Some started in 2003, and some this year. Payment will resume 'as soon as Uganda comes up with a proper plan to rectify the issues of mismanagement,' said Jon Liden, a spokesman for the fund. It has given Uganda until Oct. 24 to improve management of the grants

Dr. Chan, 58, who is both affable and media-savvy, first drew public attention when, as director of the Hong Kong department of health, she boldly directed the territory's response to two major disease outbreaks that threatened the world's health and economy. In 1997, she ordered 1.4 million chickens and ducks slaughtered to control the first cases of the A(H5N1) strain of avian influenza. In 2003, she led the investigation of SARS, a new virus that emerged in China. Indeed, Dr. Chan faced such complaints after the first cases of A(H5N1) avian influenza appeared in Hong Kong in 1997. No vaccine was effective against the strain. But the virus was susceptible to a drug, amantadine, and Dr. Chan authorized the equivalent of US$1.3- million to buy a large supply of it in case a large outbreak occurred. Black & White Photo: Peter Parks, AFP, Getty Images / A woman cleans at a Hong Kong poultry market in an effort to combat the spread of a deadly strain of avian flu.; Black & White Photo: Carol T. Powers / the New York Times / Dr. [Margaret Chan] was instrumental in containing the virus when it struck in 2003. Chan is now the World Health Organization's chief of pandemic influenza

Officials have been racing to develop a vaccine because they worry that if that strain mutated and combined with a human influenza virus to create a new virus, it could spread rapidly. Tens of millions of birds have died from infection with the virus and from culling to prevent the spread of the virus. About 100 people have been infected, and about 50 have died from this strain of the avian influenza virus, called A(H5N1). So far there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission, but that is what health officials fear, because it could cause a pandemic. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that while the vaccine that has undergone preliminary tests could be used on an emergency basis if a pandemic developed, it would still be several months before that vaccine was tested further and, if licensed, offered to the public. In Taiwan, Dr. Kuo Hsu-sung, director general of the Center for Disease Control, said that the authorities in Taiwan were so concerned about the long-term risks of an influenza pandemic, as well as the annual harm from more routine outbreaks of human influenza, that the island planned to build its own human influenza vaccine factory. But building a factory and putting it into production will take four years, Kuo warned. For now, Taiwan has a supply of Tamiflu, the only medicine known to work against bird flu, adequate to treat 1 percent of its population

Influenza viruses are grown in chicken eggs, and the vaccine industry has difficulty obtaining enough of them to produce the standard influenza shots each year. That is among the reasons that the industry can currently produce only an estimated 450 million doses of standard influenza vaccine for the human strains, Dr. [Anthony S. Fauci] said. Dr. Kou Hsu-sung, the director general of Taiwan's Center for Disease Control, said the island was so concerned about the long-term risks of routine influenza outbreaks and an influenza pandemic that it plans to build its own human influenza vaccine factory. In years past, standard influenza vaccine has had to be discarded because too few people wanted it. In the case of the human avian influenza vaccine, said Dr. [William Schaffner], the Vanderbilt expert, ''how many people will show up and present their arms?''

The bacteria are commonly found where pigs are raised. Animals without symptoms carry the bacteria in their tonsils and noses. Sichuan Province has one of the largest pig populations in China, and news organizations have reported a concurrent outbreak among pigs in that area. There is no evidence that the illness has been transmitted from one person to another in the outbreak, the health agency said. There was no immediate evidence that China, which came under fire for covering up the outbreak of SARS, or sudden acute respiratory syndrome, in 2002 and 2003, was hiding information about the Streptococcus suis outbreak. Health officials say more laboratory tests are needed to determine why the Sichuan outbreak is so large and the death rate so high. Among the questions infectious disease specialists have raised is whether Streptococcus suis has mutated to become more virulent. Scientists say China should search for other factors that might explain the high death rate. Another unusual feature of the outbreak is that many patients have developed bleeding under the skin, and some have developed toxic shock syndrome

It was the second time in less than a month that [William Rehnquist], 80, went to Virginia Hospital Center because of a fever. He spent two nights at the same hospital in Arlington, Va., after being admitted July 12. The cause of the fever in July was not disclosed. Rehnquist has released only sketchy information about his thyroid cancer, which he disclosed in October. He said he is being treated with radiation and chemotherapy and that surgeons had created a hole in his windpipe, a procedure known as a tracheotomy, to ease his breathing

About 1947, the Medical Research Council, the British equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, asked Sir Austin, a professor of medical statistics at the London School of Hygiene, to investigate the causes of lung cancer. Sir [Austin Bradford Hill], who was not a medical doctor. asked Sir Richard to join him. Initially, Sir Richard said that he and most other physicians did not see a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. In fact, Sir Richard said in an interview with this reporter that at first he suspected that the tar used to pave the growing number of roads, or possibly automobile exhaust, were at the root of the lung cancer epidemic. Sir [Harold Himsworth], a physician, was also concerned because the findings were so critically important and unexpected. He demanded that Sir Austin and Sir Richard confirm them in studies elsewhere in England. They did

On April 5, 1951, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Dennis performed the world's first open-heart operation to be done with a heart-lung bypass machine. The apparatus worked well, but the patient, a six-year-old girl, died because her heart defect, far more complicated than the surgical team had realized, was beyond any repair then possible. In 1945, when Dennis began his research into such an apparatus, surgeons' ability to repair a damaged heart was very limited. Given its dangers, the leading surgeons of the late 19th century had virtually banned efforts at heart surgery. Yet along the way, a few defiant leaders repaired certain types of heart defects in procedures that, Dennis said, 'fired the imaginations of surgeons.'

Chief Justice [William Rehnquist] leaves his home in Arlington, Va., on Friday. Rehnquist remained at work in his chambers at the court Friday, as he has every day since the court finished its term and began its summer recess. J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS