Faculty Bibliography

An Australian man who received a transplanted hand and forearm in France seven weeks ago has begun moving each finger of the donor hand and is gaining function with surprising swiftness, his doctors said last week. They said that so far the man, Clint Hallam, had not shown any signs of rejection and had escaped adverse effects of potent immune-suppressing drugs. Mr. Hallam, 48, is ''far ahead of schedule, doing superbly and better than any of us ever would have hoped,'' said Dr. Earl Owen, an Australian microsurgeon who headed the international team that performed the transplant. Much of Mr. Hallam's early success is because of the prescribed intense exercise program he performed on the muscles of his handless right arm in the year preceding the operation. The muscles of both forearms were equally strong when the transplant was performed at Edouard Herriot Hospital in Lyons on Sept. 23, and they remain strong with twice-a-day physical therapy, Dr. Owen said

The eye infection trachoma dims the vision of six million people, making it the world's leading cause of preventable blindness

The leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide can be effectively treated by a single dose of an antibiotic once a year, health workers said Tuesday, and they announced a major push to distribute the drug in five countries. The World Health Organization set up a new strategy earlier this year in an effort to eliminate trachoma as a major cause of blindness by the year 2020. Tuesday, officials of Pfizer Inc., which sells a long-acting antibiotic against the disease, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a leading charity organization in New York, announced that they were starting a $66 million program to help carry out WHO's strategy in Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Tanzania and Vietnam

The disease, trachoma, is caused by strains of the chlamydia bacterium. An estimated six million people worldwide are blind because of trachoma, ranking it only behind cataracts as a cause of blindness. The World Health Organization set up a new strategy earlier this year in an effort to eliminate trachoma as a major cause of blindness by 2020. Yesterday officials of Pfizer Inc., which sells a long-acting antibiotic against the disease, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a leading organization in New York, announced that they were starting a $66 million program to help carry out W.H.O.'s strategy in Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Tanzania and Vietnam. In the hardest-hit areas, trachoma has created a common, disturbing scene of a child leading a blind parent, said Dr. Joseph Cook, an official of the Clark Foundation. The aim of the campaign is to help make such scenes a part of history

Tuesday, officials of Pfizer Inc., which sells a long-acting antibiotic against the disease, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a leading charity organization in New York, announced they were starting a $66 million program to help carry out WHO's strategy in Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Tanzania and Vietnam. Women are two to three times more likely to be blinded by the disease than men, presumably because women have more contact with children. Children are the prime source of spreading the trachoma bacterium, Chlamydia trachomatis

The history of American anti-Communism is being rewritten as we speak. The impetus is the emergence of recently declassified files in Russia and the United States that were secret for decades. These documents have confirmed that Soviet intelligence gained a foothold in the American Government in the 1930's and 40's, and that Russian spy masters could count on their comrades in the United States for support. In the wake of these disclosures, there is baseless concern that dangerous anti-Communists, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, will be rehabilitated. In fact, historians have long been aware of Communist spying. The files are a treasure trove for researchers, but the overall effect of the new information is not surprising. Furthermore, McCarthy, who was censured by the Senate in 1954 and died of alcoholism three years later, had no part in the great espionage dramas of his time. What set him apart was his enthusiasm for lying on a grand scale

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery spent much of day seven of its nine-day flight speaking jocularly to journalists, students and Vice President Al Gore. The crew members said they were healthy, sleeping well and meeting a rigorous schedule for scientific experiments. On a television linkup to the space shuttle from Washington, Mr. Gore called the shuttle flight ''an unqualified success.'' Dr. Scott E. Parazynski, a medical doctor, said he and the six other Discovery crew members had been ''exceptionally healthy.'' The evaluation applied to John Glenn, who at 77 is the oldest person to fly in space

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery spent much of day seven of its nine-day flight speaking jocularly to journalists, students and Vice President Al Gore. The crew members said yesterday they were healthy, sleeping well and meeting a rigorous schedule for scientific experiments. Dr. Scott Parazynski, a medical doctor, said he and the six other Discovery crew members had been 'exceptionally healthy.' The evaluation applied to John Glenn, who at 77 is the oldest person to fly in space

OBJECTIVES: We investigated the role of three-dimensional echocardiography in assessing mitral valve anatomy in greater detail in patients immediately before and after balloon mitral valvuloplasty (BMV). BACKGROUND: Three-dimensional echocardiography is a recently developed, evolving imaging technique that allows visualization of intracardiac structures from any perspective. METHODS: We studied 19 patients undergoing BMV using transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) (Chicago, Illinois) to image the mitral valve. The TEE was interfaced to a TomTec three-dimensional workstation that allows electrocardiographic and respiratory cycle gated image acquisition. The acquired images are digitized, and after postprocessing a three-dimensional image is reconstructed. The mitral valve was viewed 'en-face' as if looking up from the left ventricle. RESULTS: The mean mitral valve area (by pressure half-time from the Doppler of the two-dimensional echocardiogram) increased after BMV from 0.86+/-0.06 cm2 to 2.07+/-0.10 cm2, p < 0.0001. This was similar to the mitral valve areas obtained by planimetry from the three-dimensional images. The three-dimensional reconstructions showed a complete commissural split in 10 patients and partial splitting in 9 patients. In three of the eight patients who had an increase in the amount of mitral regurgitation secondary to BMV, the three-dimensional reconstructions were able to detect tears within the valve leaflet. One leaflet tear actually extended up to the mitral valve annulus and was associated with the only case of severe mitral regurgitation. CONCLUSIONS: The three-dimensional echocardiographic reconstruction enabled visualization of the mitral valve so that commissural splitting and leaflet tears not seen on the two-dimensional echocardiogram became visible

Forty years ago this month, Mr. (Arne H. W.) Larsson, now 83, became the world's first recipient of an implanted cardiac pacemaker, a battery powered device that electrically stimulated and regulated his dangerous heart rhythms. Since then, Mr. Larsson has undergone 25 operations and procedures to replace pacemakers that failed for one reason or another. Over those four decades, pacemakers have become smaller, smarter, safer, more durable and versatile. And implanting the device no longer requires chest surgery. I met Mr. Larsson and his wife, Else-Marie, in 1973, when he came for a checkup at a hospital in Stockholm and I renewed their acquaintance during their recent visit to New York. Mr. Larsson, who looks much the same, has sold his engineering business yet remains active and often strolls along Stockholm's rocky shore. As a frequent traveler, he often speaks out about how pacemaker users can lead normal lives. ''I forget I have a pacemaker,'' he said. Dr. (Ake) Senning and Dr. (Rune) Elmquist rigged a device about the size of a thin hockey puck, and Dr. Senning cut open Mr. Larsson's chest to implant it. Eight hours later, it failed. In the middle of the night, Mr. Larsson went back to the operating room where Dr. Senning put in the only backup. The batteries had to be recharged every few hours, but the pacemaker worked, on and off, for three years. ''He was lucky that he had few attacks when the pacemaker didn't work,'' Dr. Olof K. Edhag, a pacemaker expert who was one of Mr. Larsson's doctors, said in a recent interview in Stockholm