H1N1 Virus Scare Prompts One Hospital To Change Access Policies

Visiting Kansas any time soon?

To protect workers and patients, the Mercy Regional Health Center in Topeka, KA temporarily changed its visitor policy. No one under the age of 12 can visit patients and only one visitor is allowed into the Birth and Women's Center.

"They're in a category that's high-risk for the H1N1 influenza," Couchman said.

The hospital and doctor's offices in the county have seen an increase in H1N1 cases this month, but emergency services says unless you have a chronic illness or are high-risk, you shouldn't go to the doctor.

A Warning to Couch Potatoes

Physiologists analyzing obesity, heart disease, and diabetes found that the act of sitting shuts down the circulation of a fat-absorbing enzyme called lipase. They found that standing up engages muscles and promotes the distribution of lipase, which prompts the body to process fat and cholesterol, independent of the amount of time spent exercising. They also found that standing up uses blood glucose and may discourage the development of diabetes.

Another Warning for Couch Potatoes:Physiologists And Microbiologists Find Link Between Sitting And Poor Health

Physiologists analyzing obesity, heart disease, and diabetes found that the act of sitting shuts down the circulation of a fat-absorbing enzyme called lipase. They found that standing up engages muscles and promotes the distribution of lipase, which prompts the body to process fat and cholesterol, independent of the amount of time spent exercising. They also found that standing up uses blood glucose and may discourage the development of diabetes.

Read more.

Pre-Doctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Methods for Field-based Research in Education

The University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education offers a Pre-Doctoral Training Program designed to support and enhance the Ph.D. training of students in different disciplines who are committed to careers in applied, field-based education research. The initiative involves six University of Pennsylvania schools and multiple school districts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and it is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education. Fellows receive financial support, access to specialized resources and experts in the field of study and become part of an emerging national network of students, faculty and practitioners conducting interdisciplinary research in the education sciences.



Current fellows are students presently enrolled in PhD programs at the Graduate School of Education, the Wharton School of Business, and the School of Arts and Sciences in fields such as education, sociology, economics, and business and public policy. We encourage current students from any discipline within the University of Pennsylvania who are interested in developing expertise in rigorous scientific interdisciplinary education research to apply.

Rice University: Negotiating the Ideal faculty Position

At Rice University we are strongly committed to increasing the diversity of science and engineering faculty and students. As part of this goal we are sponsoring an exciting workshop for senior women graduate students and post-docs who are interested in pursuing an academic career. The workshop, Negotiating the Ideal Faculty Position, (October 18-19, 2009), is designed to provide participants hands-on experience to enhance their knowledge of and ability to find the right faculty position. Through support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award, all travel, meals, and lodging costs will be provided for workshop participants. Applications are due August 13. The online application can be found at

Job Alert: Certified Science Teachers in Newark, NJ

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Highly rated TeacherNex, a recruiting company based in Newark, NJ works with local charter schools and a select group of NPS district schools to fill open faculty positions with high quality candidates. One application to TeacherNex can connect you to over 20 Newark area school leaders.

Learn more.

New and aspiring teachers go into Twitter.com's chat room.

PAST PANDEMICS PROVIDE CLUES TO CURRENT KILLER

POLLY WANT A CRACKER?

It was a classic medical scare story: Parrots died. A few people got sick. Newspapers went wild. Then, well after the outbreak of "parrot fever" was declared dormant, researchers who dealt with the birds began to mysteriously die themselves. Historian Jill Lepore talks to host Jacki Lyden about the great parrot fever outbreak of 1929. Lepore chronicles the episode in the June 1 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Listen on NPR.

ONE LITTLE PIGGY

Like hurricane watchers, public health officials must try to predict the velocity and course of the influenza A virus causing the swine flu outbreak, a novel H1N1, because they have to make complicated and expensive decisions about how aggressively they should pursue vaccines, antivirals, and mitigation strategies like school closings.

For additional breaking news search H1N1 on Technorati.com

Given the fuzziness of the data about this new virus's behavior, researchers are looking to the past for clues about the seasonality and geography of pandemic flu, the relationship between the new viruses and existing ones, and the behavior of this new H1N1's parent viruses in swine.

Read the full story on Science Magazine's website.

Ovarian stimulation with letrozole does not raise breast cancer recurrence risk
Will Boggs, MD
Reuters Health
Last Modified: June 16, 2008

Last Updated: 2008-06-16 13:51:56 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Fertility preservation using ovarian stimulation with letrozole and gonadotropins does not seem to increase the risk of recurrence in women with breast cancer, according to a report in the June 1st Journal of Clinical Oncology.

"Women with breast cancer can preserve their fertility by egg and embryo freezing in a relatively safe manner," Dr. Kutluk Oktay from the Institute for Fertility Preservation, New York, told Reuters Health. "Fertility drugs can be used for this purpose in conjunction with letrozole without significant exposure to estrogen."

Dr. Oktay and colleagues investigated whether ovarian stimulation with concurrent use of gonadotropins and letrozole before chemotherapy affects breast cancer recurrence rates and prognosis. Two hundred fifteen women were enrolled in the study; 79 underwent the procedure and the remaining 136, who did not undergo a procedure to preserve fertility, served as controls.

Ovarian stimulation increased the median time between surgery and chemotherapy from 33.46 days to 45.06 days, the report indicates.

There were 3 (3.8%) recurrences or contralateral breast cancers during a median 23.4 months of follow-up in the study group, compared with 11 (8.1%) during a median 33.05 months of follow-up in the control group.

Relapse-free survival did not differ between the treatment and control groups, the authors report.

The influence of tumor size, grade, number of lymph nodes, estrogen- and progesterone-receptor status, and other variables on outcomes did not differ between the study group and the control group.

Ten women in the ovarian stimulation group eventually underwent embryo replacement to their own uterus (4 patients) or to a gestational carrier (6 patients) after breast cancer treatment, resulting in 8 pregnancies and 5 deliveries. There was also 1 spontaneous pregnancy (ongoing) in the study group.

In the control group, there were 3 spontaneous pregnancies resulting in

Linking the Limbic Brain to Krispy Kreme Donuts

ScienceDaily asks ... What makes you suddenly dart into the bakery when you spy chocolate- frosted donuts in the window, though you certainly hadn't planned on indulging? As you lick the frosting off your fingers, don't blame a lack of self-control,blame...

Is There A “Brain Signature” for Cigarette Craving?

Researchers at Penn think so.

A brain imaging study conducted at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania shows that cigarette cravings in smokers who are deprived of nicotine are linked with increased activation in specific regions of the brain. Using a novel method of measuring brain blood flow developed by John Detre, MD, associate professor of Neurology at Penn, this study is the first to ...

October 2nd, 2007
Posted by Dan Farber @ 4:10 pm

Peter Zencke, a member of SAP’s Executive Board and head of R&D, spent the last four years developing Business ByDesign, a new foundation for SAP’s ERP software. I caught up with him during SAP TechEd ‘07 and asked about the origins of the product and what will differentiate it in the marketplace. (See earlier coverage of Zencke’s TechEd ‘07 keynote and more SAP coverage here.)

DF: What was the genesis behind Business ByDesign?

PZ: “Four years ago, in 2003–exactly 10 years after R3 was introduced–we decided to go for new architecture, which we called “Ether” and then later “Enterprise SOA.” The first year we were figuring out how to do enterprise SOA. We built a prototype but decided not to productize it. We were just working on some principles during the first year. Early on we made a decision for a more rigid approach figure, one that we could not let flow to our ERP product SAP Business Suite.