Faculty Bibliography

To do that, health officials are relying principally on rumors of clusters of cases from local inhabitants who are most likely to know when something is wrong. But many rumors, even those from doctors, turn out to be false alarms. Rashes suspected to be measles have turned out to be mumps and chicken pox. Dr. Brenton T. Burkholder, a WHO epidemiologist sent to Sri Lanka, said a false alarm about cholera came from foreign volunteer doctors 'who probably never saw cholera in their lives.' WHO wants to avoid using definitions so vague that people report cases of hemorrhagic fever that are measles while other people report measles as hemorrhagic fever. Doctors usually send stool, sputum and other samples to laboratories for tests to confirm their clinical impressions. But many laboratories in affected countries were damaged, if not destroyed, in the tsunami. So health teams are relying on a variety of portable laboratories that can be set up quickly to provide rapid results of tests under field conditions. In earlier disasters, doctors were frustrated because it took a week or more to receive test results from laboratories out of the affected countries. Malaysia, Singapore and the U.S. Navy are providing large mobile laboratories to affected areas in Indonesia, [Tom Grien] said. One frustration for public health workers is that they can seldom prove that they prevented an outbreak. Still, [Mike Ryan] said, 'success in all this will be to have no epidemics.'

In 2004, the number of African children paralyzed by polio more than doubled, to 1,037 from 447 in 2003, as the virus began spreading again in five countries that had been free of polio: Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast and Sudan. Three other countries -- Egypt, Niger and Nigeria -- have never stopped transmission of polio. The disease now threatens the Horn of Africa, Congo and the Arabian Peninsula, said Dr. David L. Heymann, the official in charge of the World Health Organization's polio eradication program. A year ago, polio transmission was limited to Egypt, Niger and Nigeria. The health organization, a United Nations agency, attributes the recent spread to the political and religious opposition in northern Nigeria that halted polio immunizations for a year, until last summer. The interruption led to the spread of the disease to 12 formerly polio-free African countries; these are the five where polio is now spreading and the seven where sustained secondary transmission has not been detected

The risk from waterborne diseases like cholera and dysentery is easing, Dr. [Bjorn Melgaard] said yesterday. But as rains dilute the salt water and create stagnant pools that could serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes, fears have arisen about a surge in viral diseases like dengue fever and parasitic diseases like malaria and filariasis. By detecting even a slight upturn in the number of cases, health officials hope to head off outbreaks of serious diseases. Health officials are also alert to reports of fevers that could signal meningitis, dengue and malaria. So far no significant outbreaks have been detected in any of the seven countries -- India, Indonesia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Thailand -- on the W.H.O.'s tsunami list. The agency has distributed well-accepted definitions for many communicable diseases. However, the W.H.O. wants to avoid using definitions so vague that people report cases of hemorrhagic fever that are measles while other people report measles as hemorrhagic fever. Doctors usually send samples to laboratories for tests to confirm their clinical impressions. But many laboratories in affected countries were damaged, if not destroyed, in the tsunami. So health teams are relying on a variety of portable laboratories that can be set up quickly

Tests indicated that an 18-year-old woman is infected with the A(H5N1) strain of avian influenza, and if further tests confirm the finding today, she will become the country's fourth human..

Until the team's findings, published in 1944 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, scientists believed that genes must be made of protein, [Maclyn McCarty] said. Although DNA had been identified in the mid-19th century, little was known about its biological activity, and most scientists believed that DNA lacked the necessary complexity to carry hereditary information. The findings fell mostly on deaf ears for about a decade before playing a pivotal role in the determination in 1953 by Dr. James Watson and Dr. Francis H.C. Crick that the structure of DNA was a double helix, a discovery for which the two shared a Nobel Prize. On the 50th anniversary of the Watson-Crick discovery, McCarty wrote in the scientific journal Nature that while he was 'pleased to see such illuminating results,' he was 'not so pleased that they failed to cite our work as one reason for pursuing the structure of DNA.' McCarty spent a year doing research on sulfonamide drugs at New York University before he moved to Rockefeller. There, he unexpectedly joined [Oswald T. Avery] when [Colin MacLeod] left to become chairman of microbiology at New York University. From 1942 to 1946, McCarty was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, working with the Naval Medical Research Unit based at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital

Until the team's findings, published in 1944 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, scientists believed that genes must be made of protein, [Maclyn McCarty] said. Although DNA had been identified in the mid-19th century, little was known about its biological activity, and most scientists believed that DNA lacked the necessary complexity to carry hereditary information

The authorities reported two fatal human cases of avian influenza to the World Health Organization, in 6- and 9-year-old boys. They brought the total number of deaths from the disease in Vietnam to 22 in the past year

What isn't clear to the public is that drugs like Celebrex are largely safe when taken for shorter periods at lower doses, which is the way they're generally intended to be used for common joint inflammation. The increased risk to the heart is a result of taking them at high doses over a prolonged period of time. Celebrex diminishes an enzyme that prevents clotting, which is associated with heart attacks. The prolonged use of Aleve, and perhaps all non- steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, can lead to fluid retention and elevated blood pressure, itself a risk factor to the heart. Yet these drugs are being overprescribed by doctors and overused by patients who consider them safe and effective. Public expectation regarding Celebrex and Vioxx was ramped up by direct-to-consumer advertising, a process not adequately overseen by the Food and Drug Administration. The public was told these Cox 2 inhibitors protect the stomach in a way that other non-steroidal drugs, all of which can cause bleeding ulcers or gastritis, don't. Thinking of Celebrex as a wonder drug, the public feels betrayed now that it understands that the stomach-sparing qualities were not proven, and now that it knows about the elevated heart risk, which FDA scientists suspected from the outset. The FDA that engages in that analysis will have to be a much stronger and more effective agency than the one in place now. In an editorial in the Nov. 30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, deputy executive editor Phil Fontanarosa discussed the creation of a new office of drug safety to ensure a more independent and extensive evaluation of drugs than the FDA can provide. It would seem that a better first step would be to try to strengthen the FDA itself, to make it a more effective regulatory agency less dependent on drug company money and political appointments

Until the team's findings, published in 1944 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, scientists believed that genes must be made of protein, Dr. [Maclyn McCarty] said. Although DNA had been identified in the mid-19th century, little was known about its biological activity, and most scientists believed that DNA lacked the necessary complexity to carry hereditary information. Dr. McCarty spent a year doing research on sulfonamide drugs at New York University before he moved to Rockefeller. There, he unexpectedly joined Dr. Avery when Dr. [Colin MacLeod] left to become chairman of microbiology at New York University. From 1942 to 1946, Dr. McCarty was a lieutenant commander in the Navy Medical Corps, working with the Naval Medical Research Unit based at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital. Dr. McCarty applied his biochemical skills to use enzymes to purify the transforming factor and to degrade different classes of molecules to identify the factor as DNA. He went on to purify and crystallize for the first time an enzyme that degrades DNA, to verify that the genetic material was DNA and to lay to rest the doubts that it was of protein origin

The W.H.O. is the lead agency in advising countries about the health risks and coordinating the health response to one of history's worst disasters.Dr. [Maire Connolly]'s team is responsible for preventing outbreaks of waterborne, respiratory and other diseases that can surge after conflicts, civil unrest and natural disasters. Studies have shown that in countries affected by such adversity, death rates among children are up to four times as great as those of neighboring countries. In the past, natural disasters and civil unrest have taken Dr. Connolly to countries like Afghanistan, East Timor, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and the former Yugoslavia. Disaster relief work, she said, can be emotionally wrenching. She is sometimes awakened by nightmares about the ''where-are-the-kids kind of thing.'' But emotions, Dr. Connolly said, have to be put aside so that team members can coolly assess the scientific issues. When the tsunami hit, only a skeleton W.H.O. staff was on duty. Like Dr. Connolly, many other workers had returned to their home countries over the holidays. Fortunately, Dr. Connolly's team had just finished writing a field manual on dealing with the health consequences of disasters. ''We had researched exactly the questions that arose after the tsunami, so we were confident that we had the most up-to-date scientific information,'' she said