Health and Medicine

A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have designed a vaccine that might be used to protect against the pernicious consequences of severe sepsis, an acute and often deadly disease that is estimated to strike 700,000 Americans a year and millions more worldwide.

Though the new vaccine has not yet been applied to clinical trials in humans, it has worked well in preclinical studies, the results of which the team reports in the latest issue of the journal Angewandte

Paper published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences

Below is an advisory distributed today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper can be found in the online early edition of PNAS at www.pnas.org.

The study, conducted by Dr. Cassian Yee, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, involved 10 people diagnosed with advanced melanoma. For each patient immune system cells able to identify and target melanoma wer

Danish authors of a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET provide reassurance to pregnant women—maternal fever in the early stages of pregnancy is probably not a risk factor for miscarriage or stillbirth.

Increased maternal body temperature can cause fetal death in some animals, which has lead to the suspicion that maternal fever early in pregnancy (when embryonic development is at a critical stage) could have a similar effect in the human population.

Anne-Marie Nybo Andersen an

A new study of elderly Americans shows a strong link between air pollution and higher costs of medical care, both inpatient and outpatient, and especially for respiratory ailments.

Millions of Medicare records of whites between the ages of 65 and 84 from 1989 to 1991 provided a study sample for researchers Victor R. Fuchs, professor emeritus at Stanford University, and Sarah Rosen Franks, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. They write in the November/December issue

Researchers from Midwestern University in Illinois, Curtin University of Technology in Australia, and Illinois State University have found that when bacteria become resistant to pine oil cleaners (POC), a common household disinfectant, they may also be resistant to some antibiotics. Their findings appear in the November 2002 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

In the study, POC-resistant Staphylococcus aureus were found to also be resistant to the antibiotics, vancomycin and ox

Radioactive spheres delivered via blood flow to tumor

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is offering the latest advancement for treating inoperable liver tumors.

Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT) targets a very high radiation dose to tumors within the liver, regardless of their cell of origin, number, size or location. The procedure uses biocompatible radioactive microspheres (SIR-Spheres®) that contain yttrium-90 and emit high energy beta radiation.

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