Faculty Bibliography

Health professionals have an essential role to play in protecting human rights. Beginning in April 1993, a team of Cambodians and international staff with health and human rights backgrounds developed a program to teach human rights to health professionals in Cambodia, a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In implementing this program, the team developed a 20-hour curriculum and an accompanying syllabus both in Khmer, the Cambodian language, and in English, providing an overview of human rights and a focus on the special role of health professionals in protecting human rights. Over 3,000 Cambodian health professionals received human rights training during the project's first year. This broadly based human rights education program for health professionals can serve as a model to be used in other countries

In a community hospital in Brooklyn, New York, over a 3-year period, 79 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates from five different case clusters were subtyped by Southern blot hybridization with two previously characterized gene probes, mec and Tn554. Together, the genotyping enabled the hospital infection control team to differentiate simultaneous MRSA clusters in the surgical intensive care unit (type I:A) and the open heart unit (type II:J), document the spread of one strain (type I:A) between roommates, identify an endemic strain (type II:J) from cardiac monitors and medical personnel, and identify an unrelated outbreak strain (type II:NH) in the labor and delivery unit. On the basis of this investigation it is clear that the routine DNA fingerprinting of MRSA in health care facilities, to monitor their spread and identify cases of nosocomial infections, is an important infection control measure

The publication of Derek Humphry's Final Exist in 1991 caused a large uproar. Although designed as a suicide manual for terminally ill persons, there has been considerable fear that the book's methods might be used by others, such as nonterminal elderly individuals who have made a "rational" decision to end their lives. This piece, a short story about an elderly couple that commits double suicide, explores rational suicide by using fiction, as opposed to a standard bioethical approach. Fiction does not provide answers, but rather highlights the ambiguities surrounding elder suicide, and reminds us to evaluate this issue in the context of individual life experiences.