Faculty Bibliography

Mr. (Clint) Hallam had been a patient of a major member of the team, Dr. Earl Owen, a microsurgeon in Sydney, Australia, for more than two years and had undergone extensive psychological evaluation in Australia and in France. But the hospital did not say that two days before the operation, the head of the surgical team, Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, learned from the patient that he had a criminal record. The West Australian, a newspaper in Perth, later reported that Mr. Hallam was due in court there in January to face seven fraud charges. But the operation proceeded because ''this man desperately wanted the graft,'' Dr. Dubernard said. ''As a doctor, I take care of everybody and did not change anything'' in his treatment, said Dr. Dubernard, who is not only a transplant surgeon but also a member of the French parliament and a deputy mayor of Lyons. ''It is a pity that the Australian newspapers revealed that he had been to jail.''

Surgeons in France announced yesterday that they had attached the right hand and forearm of an anonymous donor to the arm of a 48-year-old Australian man whose own hand was amputated after a logging accident in 1989. Nevertheless, the optimism voiced in France found support in a team of experts at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, who said they were about to embark on similar surgery at Jewish Hospital in Louisville. Dr. John Barker, a plastic surgeon in charge of the research for the Louisville project, said in an interview yesterday that his team had selected several patients from among 100 applicants to undergo hand transplants later this year. The surgical team was made up of doctors from France, Australia, England and Italy. Dr. (Jean-Michel) Dubernard led the team with Dr. Earl Owen, director of the Center for Microsurgery in Sydney, Australia; Dr. Marco Lanzetta of the University of Milan; Dr. Hari Kapila of Sydney, and Dr. Nadey Hakim of St. Mary's Hospital in London

Dr. Michael DeBakey moved like a dancer in a pas de deux, anticipating his surgical partner\'s every move during a quadruple bypass operation on a woman at the Methodist Hospital here recently. As DeBakey deftly manipulated scalpels, scissors and forceps for more than three hours, his hands never quivered. What made it an extraordinary operation is that DeBakey, the pioneering heart surgeon, turned 90 earlier this month. With bushy eyebrows, long dark hair combed back on a balding scalp and a tinge of gray on his sideburns, DeBakey looks 20 years younger. Though he takes fewer surgical cases these days, he maintains a whirlwind schedule of travel and consulting. He is celebrating his 50th year at Baylor College of Medicine, and only a disability would make him retire, DeBakey said

Countering decades of promoting 'breast is best' for infant nutrition, the United Nations is issuing recommendations intended to discourage women infected with the AIDS virus from breast-feeding. In its directive, the United Nations said it was deeply concerned that advising infected mothers not to breast-feed might lead many mothers who are not infected to stop breast-feeding. To reduce that possibility, it is advising governments to consider bulk purchases of formula and other milk substitutes and to dispense them mainly through prescriptions. In affected areas, some anxious women and families are beginning to demand that their governments provide information about HIV and breast-feeding and offer alternatives, the United Nations said. The rights of children to be born uninfected are also being invoked for personal and public health reasons because the overwhelming majority of infected children and adults in developing countries are doomed to die from the lack of anti-HIV drugs and standard health care

Dr. (Peter) Piot's team quickly showed that the Zairian patients had developed AIDS through heterosexual sex -- a finding that was initially met with disbelief by medical experts. But Dr. Piot (pronouced PEA-ott) knew his work was important. The leader, whom Dr. Piot declined to name, contended that his country's blood supply was safe. But Dr. Piot, fresh from a visit to a blood bank, knew better because the bank had no laboratory kits to screen blood before transfusions. The skeptical leader called the blood bank and learned that the blood was in fact dangerous. He summoned his health minister and ordered him to adopt the United Nations AIDS Program's recommendations. That country's program now works well, Dr. Piot said. ''Go to Zaire tonight,'' Dr. Piot was told. Earlier, the same Belgian officials had opposed sending a team to investigate the epidemic in Yambuku, Zaire, from which Dr. Piot's team in Antwerp had isolated the new virus. Suddenly, Dr. Piot's presence in Zaire was needed because American, French and South African scientists were there and the Belgians did not want to be embarrassed by not being represented

A series of reports about new problems with anti-AIDS drugs and setbacks in vaccine trials left many participants thinking that their best hope against the epidemic is the strategy they have had since it began - prevention. The mood was a sharp contrast to the euphoria at the last AIDS meeting, in Vancouver, B.C., two years ago. There, scientists reported that combinations of new drugs, called protease inhibitors, had allowed many people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, to leave their deathbeds, even to return to work. As Dr. Hoosen Coovadia, of Durban, South Africa, explained it, AIDS affects 40 percent of the children he treats in a large hospital there. Yet, Coovadia, who is chairman of the next World AIDS Conference in 2000 in Durban, said that he had never used any anti-HIV drugs. His hospital cannot afford them, he said

GENEVA - At the 12th World AIDS Conference, some scientists expressed cautious but renewed hope Tuesday of ultimately eliminating the HIV virus from the body and thus curing AIDS. 'Cure of HIV infection is not a myth; it is a problem we can tackle,' said Dr. Roberto Siliciano of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Two years ago, Dr. David Ho and his team from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City first discussed the possibility of eradicating HIV. At the World AIDS Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, they announced an experiment of purposely asking a patient to stop the medication to determine whether HIV returned

Responding to impassioned pleas from developing countries desperately seeking a vaccine to fight the AIDS epidemic, an ethics panel convened by the United Nations is recommending major changes in the way experimental vaccines are tested in people. Earlier guidelines, intended to prevent exploitation, called for testing any experimental AIDS vaccine in the country where it was made before testing it in a developing country

OBJECTIVES: To update the WHO global and regional estimates of the prevalence and incidence of syphilis, gonorrhoea, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis. METHODS: Prevalence estimates for syphilis, gonorrhoea, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis were generated for each of the nine UN regions for males and females between the ages of 15 and 49 in 1995 based on an extensive review of the published and unpublished medical literature since 1985. Incidence estimates were based on the prevalence figures and adjusted to take into account the estimated average duration of infection for each disease in a particular region. The latter was assumed to depend upon a number of factors including the duration of infection in the absence of treatment, the proportion of individuals who develop symptoms, the proportion of individuals treated, and the appropriateness of treatment. RESULTS: In 1995 there were over 333 million cases of the four major curable STDs in adults between the ages of 15 and 49--12 million cases of syphilis, 62 million cases of gonorrhoea, 89 million cases of chlamydia, and 170 million cases of trichomoniasis. Geographically, the vast majority of these cases were in the developing world reflecting the global population distribution. CONCLUSIONS: STDs are among the most common causes of illness in the world. Estimates of the global prevalence and incidence of these infections are limited by quantity and quality of data available from the different regions of the world. Improving global STD estimates will require more well designed epidemiological studies on the prevalence and duration of infection.