Faculty Bibliography

Whatever therapy Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani chooses for his early prostate cancer, it will probably interrupt his campaigning temporarily but should not prevent him from running for the Senate, cancer experts said yesterday. The two basic choices are surgery to remove the prostate and radiation. Some patients choose to wait for a much longer period while the cancer is monitored. But Mr. Giuliani indicated at a news conference yesterday that he was unlikely to wait long before initiating treatment. Dr. David G. McLeod, the chief urologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, who operated on former Senator Bob Dole for prostate cancer in 1991 and is not involved in Mr. Giuliani's case, said that if Mr. Giuliani were treated ''this early in the campaign schedule, by midsummer he should be able to hit his stride.''

A sound public health plan is in place nationally to combat further spread of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, which caused an outbreak of encephalitis in New York City last year, federal health officials said here today. ''We may see some cases here and there this year,'' but no one knows when and where the West Nile virus will strike, said Dr. Stephen Ostroff, who is coordinating the West Nile effort for the Department of Health and Human Services. When the West Nile virus was first detected in the New York City outbreak last fall, ''there were a variety of federal agencies that were very concerned about bioterrorism, and some conducted investigations at that time,'' said Dr. Ostroff, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta

The drug is Plavix, which helps prevent blood clots. Three million people have taken Plavix, which is also known as clopidogrel, since Bristol-Myers Squibb first marketed it two years ago. Doctors have been prescribing Plavix in the belief that it is safer than a pharmacologically related drug, ticlopidine or Ticlid. Ticlid can reduce the number of infection-fighting white blood cells to dangerously low levels in about 1 percent of users and apparently produces TTP in about 1 of every 1,600 to 5,000 patients. Now a team led by Dr. Charles L. Bennett of the Veterans Administration Healthcare System in Chicago has linked Plavix to 13 cases of TTP. Eleven of the cases are scheduled to be reported in the June 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Two probable cases were identified after the report was submitted, said a co-author, Dr. Charles J. Davidson of Northwestern University

Recent work has revealed correlations between bacterial or viral infections and atherosclerotic disease. One particular bacterium, Chlamydia pneumoniae, has been observed at high frequency in human atherosclerotic lesions, prompting the hypothesis that infectious agents may be necessary for the initiation or progression of atherosclerosis. To determine if responses to gram-negative bacteria are necessary for atherogenesis, we first bred atherosclerosis-prone apolipoprotein (apo) E(-/)- (deficient) mice with animals incapable of responding to bacterial lipopolysaccharide. Atherogenesis was unaffected in doubly deficient animals. We further tested the role of infectious agents by creating a colony of germ-free apo E(-/)- mice. These animals are free of all microbial agents (bacterial, viral, and fungal). Atherosclerosis in germ-free animals was not measurably different from that in animals raised with ambient levels of microbial challenge. These studies show that infection is not necessary for murine atherosclerosis and that, unlike peptic ulcer, Koch's postulates cannot be fulfilled for any infectious agent in atherosclerosis.

By cultivating marijuana and testing the most promising of its more than 100 ingredients, a British pharmaceutical company hopes to develop drugs for a variety of ailments, a company official said at the first national conference for health professionals about the medical uses of marijuana. The privately owned company, GW Pharmaceuticals Ltd. of Salisbury, England, is ''trying to turn an illegal plant into a pharmaceutically regulated product'' by developing cannabis-based medicines that are not smoked, said Dr. David C. Hadorn, the company's North American medical director. Melanie C. Dreher, the nursing school's dean, said the conference was needed because thousands of Americans use marijuana medically even though it is illegal in most states. Voters in at least seven states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington) have approved initiatives intended to make marijuana legal for medical purposes. But many doctors are afraid to recommend it because the federal government has threatened to prosecute them

By cultivating marijuana and testing the most promising of its more than 100 ingredients, a British pharmaceutical company hopes to develop drugs for a variety of ailments, a company official told the first national conference for health professionals about the medical uses of marijuana. The privately owned company, GW Pharmaceuticals Ltd. of Salisbury, England, is 'trying to turn an illegal plant into a pharmaceutically regulated product' by developing cannabis-based medicines that are not smoked, Dr. David C. Hadorn, the company's North American medical director, said. Melanie C. Dreher, the nursing school's dean, said the conference was needed because thousands of Americans use marijuana medically even though it is illegal in most states. Voters in at least seven states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington) have approved initiatives intended to make marijuana legal for medical purposes. But many doctors are afraid to recommend it because the federal government has threatened to prosecute them

This paper uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to address the black-white difference in propensities toward low birth weight (LBW). We determine that socioeconomic conditions account for some variation in low birth weight across race. Further, while race differences in the risk of low birth weight cannot be explained entirely, we find that the inheritance of parental birth weight status dramatically reduces the black-white gap in low birth weight. Intergenerational legacies of poor infant health explain the largest share of racial disparities in filial birth weight. We then try to assess whether this intergenerational transmission of low birth weight is indeed genetic by using grandparent-fixed effects models to factor out, to a great extent, family socioeconomic circumstances. We find that even within this framework, both father's and mother's birth weight status have an important impact on filial outcomes. However, the degree of inheritance is weaker for African Americans than for other races. Finally, we theorize that the importance of paternal birth weight status implies a genetic association that does not work through the uterine environment but rather through the fetus itself.