Mayo Clinic in Arizona has received Medicare certification for heart transplantation, the highest quality indicator for a transplant program. Since the program opened in October 2005, Mayo surgeons have completed 24 heart transplants – exceeding the Medicare requirement that a transplant center perform 12 or more heart transplants over a 12-month period and have one-year survival rates of at least 73 percent.
A new article in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics calls for a change in the regulations surrounding xenotransplantation, the transplanting of animal cells, tissues or organs into humans. Although few xenotransplantation procedures have been done to this time, there appears to be a lack of awareness among potential xenotransplant patients about the risk of the procedures, and the required lifetime of infectious disease monitoring that come with it.
Chancellor Larry Hollier, MD, announced that the Louisiana Board of Regents voted to award LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans a $3.3 million grant and an equal share of a $5.9 million grant from their Research Commercialization and Education Enhancement Program.
The American Medical Association (AMA), the nation’s largest physician group, voted at its Annual Meeting to adopt the following new policies.
A survey of nearly 700 surgical residents in 17 U.S. medical centers finds that more than half failed to report needle-stick injuries involving patients whose blood could be a source of HIV, hepatitis and other infections.
Echinacea, a medicinal herb, and other herbal echinacea supplements can reduce the risk of catching a coomon cold by 58 percent and the duration of colds by a day-and-a-half, confirmed by researchers.
A major obstacle in the treatment of infections and other diseases of the brain is the blood-brain barrier, which prevents systemically delivered therapeutic drugs from reaching the brain.
A new study suggests patients hospitalized with pneumonia may be at serious risk of new or worsening heart problems. The study is published in the July 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, currently available online.
A comparison of three parasite species that cause Leishmaniasis has identified a small number of genes, many new to biology, that will provide a framework to target the search for new treatments. Leishmaniasis is a devastating disease that affects about two million people each year and threatens one-fifth of the world’s population and new treatments are desperately needed.
St. Louis researchers have identified common DNA variations that underlie susceptibility to fever after smallpox vaccination. Their finding is the first to link individual differences written into the genetic code with a vaccine-related complication ? albeit a mild one.