Faculty Bibliography

AIDS virus infections have reached a record high in the world this year, and the number of women with HIV has risen in every region of the world, the United Nations said Tuesday. An estimated 39.4 million people are living with the virus, up from 38.1 million in 2003, the United Nations said in issuing its annual report on AIDS in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1. The report focused on women, who make up nearly half of infected adults. The steepest increases in this group over the past two years have occurred in East Asia, followed by Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Africa, the most heavily affected continent, women account for nearly 60 percent of infected people

The number of women infected with H.I.V. has risen in every region of the world over the last two years as the global AIDS epidemic continues to expand, the United Nations said yesterday. The increasingly female face of H.I.V. worldwide ''has profound implications'' because it means that treatment and prevention programs must focus on women if the world wants to stop the epidemic, said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the United Nations AIDS program in Geneva. Improving those programs, he said, requires major social changes to protect women's health. Russia, with 860,000 infected people at the end of 2003, has the largest H.I.V. epidemic in Eastern Europe. And in Britain, H.I.V. has become the country's fastest-growing serious health problem

[John Vane] shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 with Sune Bergstrom and Bengt Samuelsson, both of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Vane worked at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in England. The Nobel committee also cited Vane for identifying the secret of aspirin's ability to reduce fever, pain and inflammation and said he had made 'the fundamental discovery' that aspirin almost completely blocks the formation of prostaglandins and a related substance, thromboxane. When a professor asked if Vane wanted to go to Oxford to study pharmacology, Vane accepted. The exchange, he said, 'reshaped my whole career.'

Dr. John R. Vane, a British pharmacologist who shared a Nobel Prize for clarifying how aspirin works and helping to expand its use, died on Friday in Farnborough, England, the University of London reported. He was 77 and had been in failing health since he underwent heart surgery two years ago.Dr. Vane's research with aspirin, already the most widely used drug in the world, also helped advance new therapies for heart and blood vessel disease and contributed to the development of two classes of widely prescribed drugs, the cox-2 inhibitors for pain and inflammation and the ACE inhibitors in blood pressure. Dr. Vane shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 with Sune K. Bergstrom and Bengt I. Samuelsson, both of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Dr. Vane worked at the Wellcome Research Foundation in England. Dr. Vane helped organize conferences to further pharmacologic research until he had his heart surgery to repair his mitral valve, said Dr. [Ray N. DuBois], a friend of Dr. Vane. Dr. Vane had to be resuscitated twice; broke his hip; underwent hip replacement surgery; and broke his hip again, Dr. DuBois said

Embolization involves injecting pellets the size of grains of sand, made from plastic or gels, into uterine arteries to stop blood flow and shrink the tumors by starvation. The procedure is so named because the pellets are emboli, objects that lodge and stop blood flow. M.R.I. scans are often used to screen out fibroid patients who are not candidates for the embolization procedure. Dr. [Evan R. Myers] directs a registry that the Society of Interventional Radiology has created to monitor the outcome of 3,000 women who have undergone the embolization procedure. He said that the effectiveness and complication rates for embolization seem comparable to surgery. But there is insufficient information to draw conclusions about the procedure's safety for women who desire to become pregnant, according to Dr. Myers, the interventional society and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In very rare cases -- less than 1 percent -- fibroids are cancerous. The cancers usually develop among postmenopausal women and the embolization procedure is not recommended for that group. Biopsies are not routinely performed on fibroid patients before embolization, and even if they were done, biopsies would not be able to detect cancerous fibroids deep in the uterine muscle. So statistically, as more women undergo embolization procedures, the cancers are unlikely to be detected in the very few patients who have them

He left the hospital, where Dr. [Jonathan Reiner] is on the staff, shortly before 4:30 p.m. While there, he was subject to tests to determine if his heart problems had flared up or if he might have pneumonia or some other condition that would explain his breathing trouble. At the end of the day, Dr. Reiner issued a statement through the White House that essentially concluded that Mr. Cheney had a bad cold. Ms. [Mary Matalin] said Mr. Cheney was never sedated during the tests and remained in his street clothes. She said Mr. Cheney, who had a grueling travel schedule in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, contracted a cold while on a hunting trip in South Dakota after the election. Mr. Cheney's departure from the hospital and the statement from Dr. Reiner ended an afternoon of concern and speculation about the vice president's condition. Mr. Cheney has had four heart attacks, the first in 1978 and the most recent in November 2000, after Election Day but before it was clear that he and Mr. [Bush] had won. Doctors later implanted a wire mesh stent to keep a clogged coronary artery open

The agency's initial intent was to destroy the remaining stocks of smallpox virus after it stopped person-to-person transmission of the disease. But the agency's member states delayed destroying the virus, demanding additional research to find effective drugs, develop safer vaccines and improve diagnostic tests. Such research must be conducted in the highest biosecurity-level laboratories, with scientists wearing elaborate protective gear resembling space suits. The idea of conducting any genetic research on the virus has been a subject of controversy. At the meeting of the international advisory committee last week, its 20 members voted unanimously to allow insertion of the gene, known as GFP for green fluorescent marker protein, into variola virus at the two laboratories in Russia and the United States, said Dr. Daniel Lavanchy, a smallpox expert for the health organization. The U.S. laboratory is at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta

The drug industry would have to manufacture billions of doses of an influenza vaccine within weeks to counter an epidemic like the one that caused more than 20 million deaths in 1918 and 1919, the participants said. Right now the industry makes just 300 million doses a year for regular influenza seasons. Only two million doses of an experimental vaccine against the avian strain are being made; the first batches are about to undergo testing in the United States. But Dr. [Klaus Stohr] said that ''there is currently too little momentum in the development of influenza pandemic vaccine'' -- largely because companies would lose millions of dollars by producing a vaccine that became outdated or might never be needed. Also, a vaccine produced now might prove to be the wrong one if another strain of virus caused a pandemic. Dr. Luc Hessel, an executive of Aventis-Pasteur, one of two companies that are preparing the experimental vaccine, said the industry did not know how many doses it could produce. ''Production capacity cannot be doubled overnight,'' Dr. Hessel said, and ''you cannot switch from measles vaccine to a flu vaccine,'' because the production processes are so different

The proposed laboratory experiments would involve inserting a so- called marker gene into the smallpox virus that glows green under fluorescent light. The technique is a standard way to screen for potential antiviral drugs, and the manipulation would not change the virulence of the virus, said officials at the UN agency. The agency's initial intent was to destroy the remaining stocks of smallpox virus after it stopped person-to-person transmission of the disease. But the agency's member states delayed destroying the virus, demanding additional research to find effective drugs, develop safer vaccines and improve diagnostic tests. Such research must be conducted in the highest biosecurity-level laboratories, with scientists wearing elaborate protective gear resembling space suits. The idea of conducting any genetic research on the virus has been a subject of controversy. At the meeting of the international advisory committee last week, its 20 members voted unanimously to allow insertion of the gene, known as GFP for green fluorescent marker protein, into variola virus at the two laboratories in Russia and the United States, said Dr. Daniel Lavanchy, a smallpox expert for the health organization. The U.S. laboratory is at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta

At the meeting of the international advisory committee last week, its 20 members voted unanimously to allow insertion of the gene, known as GFP for green fluorescent marker protein, into variola virus at the two laboratories in Russia and the United States, said Dr. Daniel Lavanchy, a smallpox expert for the health organization. The U.S. laboratory is at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta