Faculty Bibliography

Peter Banko, the Texas hospital's emergency department medical director, said doctors there did an ultrasound, a CT scan and a cardiac catheterization, which provide two-dimensional images. Banko said the hospital had a 64-slice CT scan that could provide three- dimensional images, but he did not say that the doctors performed the more sophisticated one on [Harry Whittington], or if so, when. Doctors try to synchronize such CT X-rays with the heartbeat to avoid blurring from motion, said Jeffrey Goldman, a specialist in heart CT scans at Manhattan Diagnostic Radiology. But, Goldman said, doctors cannot synchronize a CT scan in patients with atrial fibrillation. Metal in a pellet can cause a different kind of blurring in CT scans. But the Texas doctors did not say that they performed a 64- slice CT scan after they learned Whittington had a pellet near his heart and before he developed the abnormal heart rhythm

Dr. Peter Banko, the Texas hospital's emergency department medical director, said doctors there did an ultrasound, a CT scan and a cardiac catheterization, which provide two-dimensional images. Dr. Banko said the hospital had a 64-slice CT scan that could provide three-dimensional images, but he did not say that the doctors performed the more sophisticated one on Mr. [Harry M. Whittington], or if so, when. Doctors try to synchronize such CT X-rays with the heartbeat to avoid blurring from motion, said Dr. Jeffrey P. Goldman, a specialist in heart CT scans at Manhattan Diagnostic Radiology. But, Dr. Goldman said, doctors cannot synchronize a CT scan in patients with atrial fibrillation. Metal in a pellet can cause a different kind of blurring in CT scans. But the Texas doctors did not say that they performed a 64-slice CT scan after they learned Mr. Whittington had a pellet near his heart and before he developed the abnormal rhythm

The lethal A(H5N1) bird flu virus has been detected in wild birds in Italy and Greece, European officials announced yesterday, the first time its presence has been detected in the European Union. It was also detected in Bulgaria. Only about 160 people have become infected with the disease, mostly through close contact with sick birds, and about half of them have died. In Italy, police officers near Messina, in Sicily, found two dead swans on Thursday and performed rapid screening tests on them in the wild, which suggested that the swans had a flu virus, according to ANSA, the official Italian news agency. Such simple tests are not specific enough to indicate a particular virus or strain, like A(H5N1). The variant strain of the A(H5N1) flu found in Turkey and confirmed in Africa last week is identical to one found last year in dead migratory birds in a nature reserve in northern China, and later in Siberia. It is different from strains circulating among poultry in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Two species of ducks, the northern pintail and the garganey, migrate in a southwesterly direction each fall from Siberia to Turkey and the Black Sea coast, and in some cases to central Africa, according to a recent article in New Scientist. Other species that share the same African wetlands migrate north in the spring, which raises the threat that the disease will be spread more widely around Western Europe later this year

On Dec. 6, 1967, three days after Dr. [Christiaan N. Barnard] gave Louis Washkansky a new heart, Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, who had relied on Dr. Shumway's technique while experimenting on dogs, performed a heart transplant on an infant at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. The infant died six and a half hours later, and Dr. Kantrowitz declared the operation a failure. On Jan. 2, 1968, Dr. Barnard carried out his second heart transplant on Dr. Philip Blaiberg, who lived 19 months. Mr. Washkansky survived 18 days. In the late 1960's, Dr. John Hauser, the coroner of Santa Clara County, Calif., which included Stanford, sought criminal charges against Dr. Shumway for transplanting organs without an autopsy on the donor, an act that would have made transplantation impossible. The two men shouted at each other over the issue in Dr. Shumway's office, recalled Dr. Eugene Dong, then a transplant surgeon at Stanford and now a lawyer. Dr. Shumway's group began to test the drug independently after a member of the Cambridge team gave a lecture about its findings at Stanford and achieved good long-term results in dogs. ''The animal experiments kept us going while everyone else, who did not have that experimental background, dropped out,'' Dr. Shumway said

The turnaround owes largely to what Shumway called his 'radical perseverance.' He rescued heart transplants with a new immunosuppressant drug, cyclosporin, that helped keep the body from rejecting its new organ, and with a heart biopsy technique to detect and treat rejection before it became lethal. Shumway reshaped the way chest surgeons learn their craft, and he trained many who now perform heart transplants. The transplant revolution he helped set in motion extended far beyond medicine, upsetting the traditional definition of death as the moment the heart stops beating. Instead, an organ donor can now be considered dead as soon as electrical activity of the brain has ceased, allowing transplantation of a living heart or other organ. For a decade starting in 1958, and supported by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, Shumway experimented on dogs to create what is now the standard technique to remove a patient's heart and replace it with a stranger's. By the time Shumway performed his first human heart transplant on Jan. 6, 1968, it was the world's fourth. But those early transplants seldom achieved long-term success. It was easy enough to transplant a heart, as Shumway once said, 'but it's what happens later with regard to the containment of rejection that makes the real difference.'

Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 by Edward J. Blum, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White--The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs by David R. Roediger, and When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson are reviewed

The World Health Organization declared two more nations free of indigenous polio, leaving only four -- an all-time low -- where a reservoir of the paralytic disease remains

There is a new help-you-sleep kid on the block -- Lunesta. Like its older cousins, Ambien and Sonata, Lunesta is a hypnotic sleep drug that is not addictive and does not require larger and larger doses. Ambien and Sonata revolutionized the treatment of insomnia because they can be taken without fear of physical dependence, though they may be somewhat habit forming. Lunesta may have an advantage for people who have trouble maintaining sleep, because it has a six-hour half-life. Two other sleeping pills are in late-stage clinical trials

Despite an observed decrease in overall cancer death rates in the USA, immigrant minorities continue to experience disproportionately higher cancer incidence and mortality rates. Thirteen focus groups were conducted in the Haitian, English-Speaking Caribbean, Latino, Korean, and Chinese communities of New York City to better understand their health-seeking behaviors with respect to cancer prevention, screening, and treatment. Focus groups addressed the degree to which cultural, linguistic, and systematic barriers impact these behaviors and explored methods to support salutary behaviors. Findings underscored that, while there are many similarities across immigrant groups, there are significant variations between the immigrant groups to necessitate a tailored community-based approach. The prevalent misinformation observed among all groups warrants the prompt development of culturally competent programs for cancer control with immigrant minorities