Faculty Bibliography

A drug now used to treat breast cancer might be able to prevent prostate cancer in men with a precancerous condition, doctors said here Saturday. Another study suggested that the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins might stave off breast cancer. The prostate cancer study was a randomized clinical trial involving 514 men with precancerous lesions analogous to polyps for colon cancer. The condition is called prostate intraepithelial neoplasia, or P.I.N. After statistically controlling for a number of factors like age, smoking and diabetes, the researchers found a 51 percent lower risk of breast cancer among the statin users, Dr. [Vikas Khurana] said. He said data on the specific statins that were prescribed have not been analyzed yet

A drug now used to treat breast cancer might be able to prevent prostate cancer in men with a precancerous condition, doctors said yesterday. Another study suggested that the widely used cholesterol- lowering drugs called statins might stave off breast cancer. The prostate cancer study was a randomized clinical trial involving 514 men with precancerous lesions analogous to polyps for colon cancer. The condition is called prostate intraepithelial neoplasia, or PIN. After statistically controlling for a number of factors like age, smoking and diabetes, the researchers found a 51 percent lower risk of breast cancer among the statin users, [Vikas Khurana] said. He said data on the specific statins that were prescribed have not been analyzed yet

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A drug now used to treat breast cancer might be able to prevent prostate cancer in men with a precancerous condition, doctors said yesterday. Another study suggested that the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins might stave off breast cancer. The statin study analyzed medical records of 40,000 women in the database of the Veterans Affairs medical system. It found that women who used statins were half as likely to develop breast cancer as those who did not. But such studies looking back at medical records are not as reliable as clinical trials. There is evidence that estrogen, normally thought of as the female hormone, also helps fuel prostate-cancer growth. Dr. Mitchell Steiner, professor of urology at the University of Tennessee, theorized that blocking estrogen might provide a treatment or preventative with fewer side effects

All test kits containing a deadly influenza virus that were sent to 4,614 laboratories in 18 countries last fall and winter have been identified and destroyed, the Centers..

More than four months after the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 200,000 people, tens of thousands of people are listed as missing and thousands of the bodies that have been recovered have not been identified, experts said at a meeting sponsored by the World Health Organization in Phuket, Thailand...

Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who is serving as co-chairman of the effort with Mr. [Bill Clinton], said he ''got frightened to death'' after developing Type 2 diabetes. Mr. Huckabee, a Republican, told the students that he had lost 110 pounds in the past two years. Mr. Clinton said that while the national prevalence of childhood obesity was 16 percent, it was 20 percent in the Southeast and 25 percent in Alabama and Mississippi. One reason for the unfavorable statistics in the South, Mr. Huckabee said, was that ''we fry everything we eat and then smother it in gravy.'' Former President Bill Clinton and Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas promoted their anti-obesity drive yesterday at a Manhattan school. (Photo by Peter Foley/European Pressphotos Agency)

No cases of influenza from the strain known as A(H2N2), which caused the Asian flu pandemic in 1957, have been detected anywhere in the world, said the official, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, who directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Meridian Bioscience Inc., in Cincinnati, shipped the samples beginning last fall under contract with the College of American Pathologists as part of the group's proficiency testing program. Dr. Jared N. Schwartz, an official of the college, has said that when Meridian checked a United States government manual, its team found that the A(H2N2) strain could be sent to laboratories as a biosafety level 2 microbe, the second-lowest in a four-class danger rating system

Dr. [Maurice Ralph Hilleman] developed eight of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended: measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria (which brings on a variety of symptoms, including inflammation of the lining of the brain and deafness). He also produced the first generation of a vaccine against rubella, or German measles

The disease is named after Carlos Chagas, a Brazilian physician who first described it, in 1909. Chagas' usually spreads when someone is bitten by an insect, engorging itself with blood and passing the parasite in its feces onto the skin. The initial symptoms of Chagas' are usually mild or nonexistent. It generally takes decades for the Chagas parasite to cause death by slowly damaging heart muscle, the esophagus and the colon. By that time, drugs are ineffective in reversing the damage. The Santa Catarina outbreak is believed to be the largest known food-borne outbreak of Chagas' and the first that has led to an international warning, said Jennifer Marcone, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She also said that the C.D.C. was not participating in the investigation because Brazil has many experts on Chagas' disease

Dr. Hilleman developed 8 of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended: measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria (which brings on a variety of symptoms, including inflammation of the lining of the brain and deafness). He also developed the first generation of a vaccine against rubella or German measles. The vaccines have virtually vanquished many of the once common childhood diseases in developed countries. Luck played a major role in the discovery of adenoviruses. Dr. Hilleman flew a team to Missouri to collect specimens from troops suffering from influenza. But by the time his team arrived, influenza had died out. Dr. Hilleman, fearing that he would be fired for an expensive useless exercise, seized on his observation of the occurrence of a fresh outbreak of a different disease. His team discovered three new types of adenoviruses among the troops. Shifts can herald a large outbreak or pandemic of influenza, and Dr. Hilleman was the first to detect the shift that caused the 1957 Asian influenza pandemic. He read an article in The New York Times on April 17, 1957, about influenza among infants in Hong Kong -- cases that had escaped detection from the worldwide influenza surveillance systems