Category: Health

SAN FRANCISCO — When the coughing stops is probably a better sign of when a swine flu patient is no longer contagious, experts said after seeing new research that suggests the virus can still spread many days after a fever goes away.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been telling people to stay home from work and school and avoid contact with others until a day after their fever breaks. The new research suggests they may need to be careful for longer — especially at home where the risk of spreading the germ is highest.

Swine flu also appears to be contagious longer than ordinary seasonal flu, several experts said.

Doctors told Nolan “Whiz” Beck in July that he would have to stay in the hospital for a few days after his surgery to remove a tumor. They were surprised when Beckâ??s health was good enough to send him home 30 hours after he was admitted.

“It was the fabulous care and the will to get on with my life,” Beck, 52, said of his short stay. Beck is battling advanced-stage kidney cancer. Although he had a kidney removed after a 2002 diagnosis, the cancer last year spread to his brain, lungs and bones.

While he undergoes monthly sessions of chemotherapy, Beck continues work as the University of Wisconsin Marathon Countyâ??s associate campus dean and director of student services.

A slight majority of Wisconsin doctors who responded to a survey last summer supported national health insurance or achieving universal coverage through incremental reform, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Medical Society. The survey of 948 doctors found that more than 54% support legislation for national health insurance and 55% support incremental reform toward universal coverage. That compared with 37% of the doctors who opposed national health insurance and 26% who oppose incremental reform.

Dear Editor: Regarding the Aug. 19 Cap Times article about me, “Saving Donna Murphyâ??s brain,” I mailed a personal thank you letter to my surgeon, Dr. Beverly Aagaard-Kienitz, after recovering from the stroke, but my gratitude was not mentioned in the article. I (and my mom) would like to thank Dr. Kienitz again, along with Dr. Matthew Jensen, Nurse Janean Blabaum, Chris Whelley, and the UW Hospital staff. I was very fortunate to be under your care.

Noted: Statistics show that more than two-thirds of fatal and serious alcohol crashes in Wisconsin are committed by people with no prior conviction for operating while intoxicated, said Lisa Maroney, spokeswoman for two coalitions: AWARE, composed of nearly 40 health and medical, law enforcement and insurance groups pushing for a stronger response to drunken driving; and UW Health, made up of University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, its physicians and the UW Medical Foundation.

A new study out from the University of Wisconsin shows driving with a cast on your foot is dangerous.Dr. Kurt Rongstad, assistant professor of orthopedic surery at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health did the study after answering the seemingly obvious question 300 to 400 times a year from people who found themselves in a cast.

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is welcoming its largest class in school history. A total of 168 students began classes this year, according to the university.

Surveyors will begin knocking on doors this month to update the stateâ??s health report card.

The program continues the work of the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin, or SHOW, which began collecting health data in 2008. SHOW is conducted through UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.

The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday urged the federal government to impose stricter controls on emergency helicopter operators – an issue that has gained attention since three people died in a UW Hospital Med Flight crash in May 2008.

The NTSB recommendations urge the Federal Aviation Administration to, among other things, require medical helicopter operators to install flight data recorders, autopilot systems that can help solo pilots and night-vision systems that help navigate in the dark – something the Med Flight helicopter that crashed in La Crosse last year didn’t have.

MADISON — On the surface, Madison fire station number 12 looks like any new building in town. Solar panels, cisterns, and a green roof highlight the buildingâ??s appearance. The buildingâ??s coming out party on Monday, however, was less about the environment, more about emotion and honor.

This station, in effect a home to those who save lives, was dedicated to the late Dr. Darren Bean. Bean, along with nurse Mark Coyne and pilot Steve Lipperer, were killed in the May 2008 crash of a UW MedFlight helicopter near LaCrosse.

When doctors asked how it started, all Donna Murphy could remember was that she went out to have a morning smoke in her pickup truck and that sheâ??d had a strange headache. It was around 9 — early enough to catch another hour or two of sleep before she had to get to her job captioning phone calls for the deaf and hard of hearing. So she went back to bed. Suddenly, she had to go to the bathroom again. Only she couldnâ??t get up. She couldnâ??t even roll her body from one side to the other.

Murphy was puzzled. She was 49 and had been in fine health. “Why am I too weak to get out of bed?” she remembers thinking.

A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nationâ??s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies â?? articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.

Quoted: â??Just three days ago, I got a request to be the author of a ghostwritten article about the effectiveness of a cholesterol-lowering drug,â? Dr. James H. Stein, professor of cardiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, said this month. â??This happens all the time.â? He declined to attach his name to the paper.

As fears were growing about the link between hormone therapy and breast cancer, a drug company paid the University of Wisconsin to sponsor ghostwritten medical education articles that downplayed the risks, records obtained by the Journal Sentinel show.

The five articles were funded by Wyeth, the company that made the top-selling hormone therapy products. The articles, published in 2001, appeared under the names of doctors who specialized in diseases common to menopausal women, but actually were written by professional writers paid by the company.

Catching up on a couple higher education-related items from the past couple days …

*** The University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health has taken a number of significant public relations hits over the past year. On Saturday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel added to that tally when it reported that the UW is tied to male hormone marketing — touting the benefits of testosterone and downplaying the risks.

A rash of television commercials in recent months have told millions of middle-age men that their diminished sex life and somber mood may be the result of low levels of testosterone.

Setting the stage for the ads was a series of medical journal articles that first appeared four years ago. The articles, which were sponsored by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, read more like promotions than rigorous research, touting the benefits of testosterone and downplaying the risks.

While the TV commercials were intended for consumers, the medical articles were written for thousands of doctors who could earn continuing medical education credit by reading them. Presumably, they also would write more testosterone prescriptions.

Both the ads and the articles were paid for by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, the company that dominates the testosterone therapy field and which allegedly conspired to pay off generic drug makers to keep their testosterone products off the market.

MADISON, Wis. — A new study by the Emergency Nurses Association finds workplace violence is all too common in the nursing profession, but it’s patients and their families — not co-workers — that the violence typically stems from.

According to the survey of more than 3,000 nurses, more than half said that they have experienced physically violence on the job. Even more alarming, one in four of those nurses said they have been physically assaulted more than 20 times in the last three years.

A rare U.S. heart transplant replaced the defective heart on the right side of a man’s chest with a re-engineered normal left-side donor heart, doctors
said.

The six-hour operation at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison is believed to be Wisconsin’s first, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The procedure is probably done only once every four or five years in the United States, the newspaper said.

Wisconsin researchers have released a free software tool that could help Web surfers susceptible to certain seizures.

An estimated one in 4,000 people has photosensitive epilepsy and could suffer a seizure when exposed to bright colors and rapidly flashing images. The condition gained prominence in 1997 when more than 800 Japanese children were hospitalized after viewing a cartoon. Since then, television directors, video-game makers and others have tested their content to make sure it doesn’t reach seizure-inducing thresholds.

Web developers, though, didn’t have simple ways to run such tests. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison set out to change that.

Wisconsin advocates for domestic violence victims are blasting a joke in last month’s Reader’s Digest magazine that makes light of a man who killed a woman with a golf club.

Police find the man in an apartment holding a 5-iron over the woman’s “lifeless body.” When a detective asks the man how many times he hit her, the man replies, “I don’t know. Five … maybe six … Put me down for a five.”

The joke, which was submitted to the magazine, doesn’t explain the relationship between the man and woman. But at least two domestic violence victim advocates have written e-mails to the magazine criticizing the decision to print the joke. University Health Services, which provides medical services to University of Wisconsin-Madison students, has sent e-mail to its listserv members alerting them to the joke, too.

Marathon County Health Officer Julie Willems Van Dijk has resigned to take a job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her resignation was announced this morning in a press release from Marathon County Administrator Brad Karger.

Van Dijk, who has been the health officer since Feb. 4, 2002, has accepted a job as an associate scientist with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

MADISON (WKOW) — In the event of a widespread and severe outbreak of the H1N1 swine flu virus, a pandemic committee has doubled its efforts this summer to prepare the UW-Madison campus for any and all effects.

The University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics has warned 53 patients that they have an “extremely small” risk of contracting a rare, fatal brain disorder because of the instruments that were used in their operations.