Faculty Bibliography

Dr. [Marion A. Kainer]'s investigation progressed in steps similar to peeling the layers of an onion. Within two days of receiving Dr. [April C. Pettit]'s e-mail, Dr. Kainer learned that the steroid had come from the New England Compounding Center. Then Dr. Kainer learned of three additional suspect cases of meningitis and stroke linked to the clinic. But fungi had not yet been identified in those patients' spinal fluid. Also, her team could find no correlations in factors like time of day or week when the patients received the injections. One patient had a particular kind of stroke known as posterior circulation, which attracted Dr. Kainer's attention because she had learned in neurology that fungal infections can cause such strokes. "What didn't make sense was that two patients appeared to be improving without antifungal treatment, and that didn't fit the clinical picture," Dr. Kainer said. As a result of their actions, they determined that the first case in the outbreak apparently had occurred in July in Florida. But a perplexing aspect of the outbreak is why the fungus Aspergillus was identified in Dr. Pettit's case but a different one, Exserohilum, in an overwhelming majority of the remaining cases. "I just don't understand it," Dr. Kainer said. The near-miss discovery of the fungal meningitis outbreak raises questions about other outbreaks that possibly were not detected. "Surely things have gone by, but I don't know how often, and as good as our surveillance system is, it is not as good as it could be," Dr. Kainer said

[...]usually only health departments and other government agencies have the ability and authority to track down additional cases to document disease outbreaks and warn those at risk. The national surveillance system for outbreaks of infectious and other communicable diseases relies on reports that physicians are required to send to local and state health departments and that are then relayed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Medicine has advanced more in the last century than in all of previous history, and technology's fingerprints can be found on most of the gains -- from new ways to teach medical students to care of patients in hospitals with the most sophisticated equipment to everyday practice in offices. Inappropriate use of antibiotics has led to the spread of drug-resistant microbes that threaten to undo many of the gains the antibiotics have achieved. [...]recently, "see one, do one, teach one" was a mantra of medical education

Mr. Romney takes a low-dose aspirin daily (81 milligrams, often called baby aspirin) to help prevent heart attacks, and a statin drug, Lipitor, to lower his cholesterol, which is 169 with the treatment, a level considered normal, Dr. Gaz said

Among those gains: antiretroviral drug combinations for women to prevent infection of their newborns; drugs to treat and prevent infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, among adults; and evidence that voluntary male circumcision can reduce the risk of female-to-male transmission by 50 to 60 percent. [...]defining the word "epidemic" is difficult

Scott Lilly was a young member of Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign staff in the summer of 1972, and he remembers the satisfaction he felt when Mr. McGovern chose Mr. Lilly's home-state senator to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate

(Damage from attacks had long been detected in autopsies.) In time, doctors learned the myriad symptoms that can accompany a heart attack -- among them

Consider President Dwight D. Eisenhower's care in 1955, when at 64 he experienced chest pains at 2:30 a.m. while on vacation at his mother-in-law's home in Denver. The White House physician, Dr. Howard M. Snyder, a surgeon, ordered the president's wife, Mamie, to snuggle with her husband in bed to keep him warm. Not until the next afternoon did Snyder perform an electrocardiogram or call for an ambulance. A specialist in internal medicine told him to rest, exercise and stop smoking. [Dick Cheney] had smoked for nearly 20 years, often three or more packs a day. When he was President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff in the mid-1970s, he helped himself to the cartons of cigarettes in the White House provided free by tobacco companies. Cheney's doctor had a limited arsenal of drugs; for example, statins had yet to be widely prescribed for high cholesterol, and clot-busting drugs were not routinely used. Cheney, who said he took the doctor's advice, resumed campaigning and won election to Congress, mindful that leaders like Eisenhower and President Lyndon B. Johnson had served productively in office despite serious heart attacks

Altman revisits the 1982 AIDS Epidemic. Thirty years after scientists gave a frightening new disease its name, AIDS still afflicts millions of men and women around the world. AIDS has infected more than 60 million people worldwide and has killed at least half that number in one of the worst epidemics in history

The issues Mr. Cheney considered included his risk of infection from the pump line to his heart, the risk of blood clots that can cause strokes and the