Faculty Bibliography

'It surprised me and my Mexican colleagues, because the textbooks say that in an influenza outbreak the predictive value of fever and cough is 90 percent,' Dr. [Richard P. Wenzel] said by telephone from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he is chairman of the department of internal medicine. Dr. Wenzel said he had urged his Mexican colleagues to test the stools for the presence of the swine virus, formally named A(H1N1). 'If the A(H1N1) virus goes from person to person, and there is virus in the stool, infection control will be much more difficult,' particularly if it spreads in poor countries, he said

The finding upsets a widely held scientific belief that chimpanzees, the closest relatives to people, can get the simian AIDS virus but without harm.

Fever is a hallmark of influenza, often rising abruptly to 104 degrees at the onset of illness. Because many infectious disease experts consider fever the most important sign of the disease, the presence of fever is a critical part of screening patients.

'Every prostate cancer patient knows his Gleason score,' said Dr. Bruce Roth, a professor of medicine and urological surgery at Vanderbilt University and an official of the American Society of Cancer Oncology. In 1962, Dr. George Mellinger, the hospital's chief of urology, who also led a cooperative urological research project involving 14 hospitals, asked Dr. Gleason to develop a standardized pathological testing system for prostate cancer

'[...] it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic,' Chan said to the world's gathered news media. Since her announcement, worry over the swine flu outbreak has eased.

The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school: Uppsala, Sweden's oldest university. The circumstances of Mr. Svensson's admission to Uppsala's first-year class - reported in January by Swedish news organizations - are unknown, because none of the officials involved will publicly discuss his case. He apparently uses an assumed name - a customary practice for Swedes seeking to remain anonymous because of a personal threat. Last week, Uppsala officials, responding to concerns about Mr. Svensson's admission, said he had not participated in class work, but did not say why. The Swedish medical licensing agency said that it would not allow Mr. Svensson to practice even if he earned his medical degree. But because the agency's jurisdiction excludes universities, questions arose about whether and how medical school officials should inform patients examined by Mr. Svensson about his criminal past, and what the patients' responses would be

[...] the number of beds in hospital intensive-care units and emergency rooms is limited, as is equipment like mechanical respirators to help patients breathe when the virus attacks the lungs

'The W.H.O. needs a mechanism to dial down the anxiety levels while educating us about the extent of the transmission,' said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the preventive medicine department at Vanderbilt University. All of this authority is packed into a diminutive woman with large glasses who does not drive, type or cook, is fond of sharp suits and silver pins, and may be among the most qualified people in the world to lead the global response to the threat of a pandemic flu

Although influenza typically strikes in colder months, the swine flu virus, A(H1N1), has swept through summer camps in North America and parts of Europe. That pattern has led to the belief that many more people will get swine flu than seasonal influenza this fall and winter, or that countries could face outbreaks of both strains, perhaps at different times. Dr. [Richard P. Wenzel] said he had observed a broad spectrum of illness from human swine influenza: people who experienced few or no symptoms to those who rapidly developed complications and died. An odd feature of the new virus is the lack of fever in a significant proportion of documented cases, even after some patients become seriously ill. In Chile, it was about half, in Mexico City about a third. Lack of fever has been noted by other observers in several Canadian cases. Absence of fever among substantial proportions of patients, when fever is specified in the definition of the flu virus, can cause serious underestimation of totals. Also, absence of fever limits the usefulness of thermal scans to identify people who have the virus, and thus control the pandemic. Mexican doctors found the swine influenza virus on the hands of workers, on tables next to patients' beds, on other hard surfaces and on a computer mouse, Dr. Wenzel said. So, he added, 'infection control in hospitals must be assiduous to prevent spread, particularly those with impaired immune systems.'

'Walt Stamm was a giant in the field of infectious diseases in general and made many seminal clinical research contributions over decades that have transformed the diagnosis and treatment of urinary tract infections and pelvic inflammatory disease,' said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a federal agency that paid for many of Dr. Stamm's studies