Faculty Bibliography

Scientists in three laboratories in the United States and Europe are gearing up to test samples of an experimental polio vaccine stored for more than 40 years to determine whether it might have inadvertently been the spark that ignited the worldwide AIDS epidemic. The scientists will be testing a highly controversial and seemingly far-fetched theory that holds that an oral polio vaccine, used in vaccine trials in what was then the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, might have been made with chimpanzee tissue that might have been contaminated with an ancestor of the AIDS virus. The Wistar Institute, a research center in Philadelphia, made the vaccine and has kept a few drops of material used in its preparation frozen since 1957. After the AIDS and polio vaccine theory was first raised in 1992, Wistar appointed an independent committee of scientists to look into the questions. The committee recommended testing the vaccine. But Wistar never carried out the tests, it said, because of a lack of scientific interest

In less than four years, the euphoria over the success of new drug combinations to treat AIDS has yielded to the sobering challenge of dealing with the drugs' complications and failures. Death rates for what had been an invariably fatal disease have dropped significantly since the introduction of combinations of protease inhibitors and other drugs. Many people with HIV, the AIDS virus, including some who were near death when they began taking the drug combinations in 1996, continue to lead more or less normal lives, though they must take a number of pills at specified times throughout the day, at costs that can exceed $10,000 a year. But the unflagging optimism that AIDS scientists displayed at an international meeting on AIDS in Vancouver in 1996 was absent at the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, held in San Francisco

David M. Oshinsky reviews the book "How We Got Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse)" by David Frum

Dr. John C. Lungren, who was President Richard M. Nixon's longtime personal physician, died Feb. 28 in Long Beach Memorial Hospital Medical Center in California, where he guided Nixon's care during a near-fatal illness in 1974. Dr. Lungren was thrust into the national spotlight in 1974 when, shortly after Nixon resigned the presidency, the ex-president nearly died from complications of phlebitis, an inflammation of veins in his leg. Appearing at news conferences to give updates on Nixon's condition, Dr. Lungren was the man in the middle in a dispute over Nixon's ability to testify at the Watergate cover-up trial of his former aides, including H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell, the former attorney general

Doctors have amputated the wrong leg, killed patients with overdoses of medications and committed other serious errors for centuries. So why only now is a U.S. president calling for a national plan to reduce such errors? The reasons behind the new concern are as complex as medicine itself and as varied as recent changes in society, including medical advances, greater complexity of care, increasing challenge to medical authority and new techniques to pinpoint sources of errors in the maze of systems that doctors and hospital staffs use every day. In adopting most of the institute's recommendations, [President] Clinton has called for a new patient safety center in the government to conduct research on reducing medical errors. He also has called for mandatory reporting systems for deaths and serious injuries, and voluntary reporting for less serious injuries and close calls. The medical profession's problem with errors is partly a result of its successes. New therapies for heart disease, cancer and other ailments have raised public expectations while increasing enormously the complexity of medicine, and thus the risk of errors. And because many therapies are so powerful, tiny errors in doses can increase the risk of life-threatening complications

Doctors have amputated the wrong leg, killed patients with overdoses of medications and committed other serious errors for centuries. So why only now is a U.S. president calling for the first national plan to reduce such errors? The reasons behind the new concern are as complex as medicine itself: medical advances, greater complexity of care, and new techniques to pinpoint sources of errors in the maze of systems that doctors and hospital staffs use. Mounting complaints about managed care have put the spotlight on quality of care, and medical errors grab public attention in a way that other quality of care issues do not

Dr. Lungren was thrust into the national spotlight in 1974 when, shortly after Nixon resigned the presidency, Nixon nearly died from complications of phlebitis, an inflammation of veins in his leg. Appearing at news conferences to give updates on Nixon's condition, Dr. Lungren was the man in the middle in a dispute over Nixon's ability to testify at the Watergate cover-up trial of his former aides, including H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell, the former attorney general. Nixon's brush with death came about two months after his resignation. He had developed phlebitis many years earlier and in a common way -- after a long flight. The 1974 flareup occurred during the waning weeks of his presidency. When the phlebitis worsened after his return to California as a private citizen, Dr. Lungren said he twice advised Nixon to enter a hospital for treatment. But Nixon delayed, saying, ''If I go into the hospital, I'll never come out alive.''