Health care officials and aid workers attempting to trace the progression of the Ebola virus disease outbreak have come to rely heavily on a handful of disease-monitoring Web sites that act as pivotal hubs for processing information. John Brownstein, HealthMap co-founder and associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, is mentioned.
New research suggests that emergency room waiting times at larger urban hospitals are longer than those at smaller or more rural facilities. Jeremiah Schuur, assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
Millions of people suffer from undiagnosed or untreated chronic conditions. The Harvard Center for Integrated Approaches to Undiagnosed Diseases, which combines the resources of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with a coordinating center at Harvard Medical School, are mentioned. Harvard Medical School’s Center for Biomedical Informatics, under the leadership of center director Isaac Kohane, Lawrence J. Henderson Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, will coordinate the national network.
The Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science at Harvard Medical School was recently awarded $30 million in funding from government agencies in response to proposals from the program’s principal researchers. Laura Maliszewski, lecturer on systems biology and executive director of the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, is quoted.
The Ebola virus could potentially infect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, is quoted.
Photos of the Boston-based charity’s trip in response to the Ebola crisis. Joia Mukherjee, associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is featured.
While tending to the needs of elderly patients in the emergency room, doctors and nurses may miss an important health issue hiding in plain sight: many older patients are apparently malnourished. Shan Woo Liu, assistant professor of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
Some of the most important occupants of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center live in cages in a gleaming tower near Longwood Avenue. They are furry little mice, in varieties of white and brown and black, with long pink tails. And they could play a vital role in the search for cures for cancer. Beth Israel Deaconess has been studying cancer in the thousands of rodents housed in its facilities, and now the medical center is poised to expand that research, using a new type of lab mouse that can host human cancer cells. Jeffrey E. Saffitz, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology and head of the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Pier Paolo Pandolfi, the George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine, are quoted.
Suzanne Koven, assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, authored this article about the role primary care physicians can play in preventing suicide.
Research continues to mount that the “freshman 15”—a theory that college freshmen gain 15 pounds during their first year—may be false. I-Min Lee, professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
