A winter storm a year ago in the Midwest paralyzed blood exports to Alabama. For several weeks, local patients' access to the potential lifesaver was threatened because the state didn't receive other donations to boost the supply. That's when UAB Health System, the state's largest consumer of blood products, decided to take action. Since then, a task force has devised a strategy to increase local donations and to decrease the system's use of blood. UAB Hospital is the country's fourth-highest user of red blood cells.
Autism, which affects one in about 150 children, covers a broad spectrum of developmental disorders. Children with the less severe diagnoses often are educated in "regular" public or private schools. But in Northeast Ohio, parents of children who are most severely affected have two choices nearby, the Monarch and Clinic schools.
With technology that can now scan each of an individual's 46 chromosomes for minute aberrations, doctors are providing thousands of children lumped together as "autistic" or "developmentally delayed" with distinct genetic diagnoses. The symptoms, they are finding, can be traced to one of dozens of deletions or duplications of DNA that were previously hard or impossible to detect.
Purdue Pharma of Stamford, CT, hired Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, in 2002 to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Giuliani's missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him.
Nemours Children's Clinic in Orlando, FL, announced that its new division of orthopedics will be led by Suzanne Jaffe Walters, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in pediatric and adolescent sports medicine.
Scientists blamed Alzheimer's on misfolded proteins, broken neural pathways, misprinted gene maps, and much more. For years they have laid plans to fight the disease with all of the Big Pharma firepower they could muster. But they also talked about inhaling insulin, eating turmeric, fixing vitamin deficiencies, injecting stem cells and inventing neuro-protective vaccines.