Faculty Bibliography

Potent combinations of antiviral medications that brought patients off their deathbeds and back to life, viral load testing and H.I.V. genotyping that helped tailor treatment regimens, screening of the blood supply, aggressive public health campaigns, prevention of maternal-fetal transmission -- we could hardly have envisioned the pace of development. The apparent H.I.V. cure as a result of a bone-marrow transplant in a man known as the "Berlin patient" has stimulated tantalizing gene therapy research

[...]a new Health Care Cost Institute study found that these bloated charges are, in part, the reason health care costs have risen at double the rate of inflation during the recession, even as patients used less medical care than before

(The leader of the team, Can Ince, a physiologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, says he has a financial interest in the company that manufactures the technology, which is used to monitor reactions to various drugs and therapies among critically ill human patients.)

By traveling to the Arctic and using video-microscope and thermal imaging technology, the scientists showed that the glow is from tiny blood vessels that are more abundant in the noses of reindeer than in humans'. Alongside Rudolph on the cover of this year's holiday issue is Cliff, a 2-year-old beagle who was trained by another Dutch team to accurately sniff out the sometimes fatal bacterial bowel infection Clostridium difficile and make the diagnosis in minutes -- days faster than standard laboratory tests

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

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