Category: Health

The ability to pay attention may not have a fixed capacity, as many people believe, says a UW-Madison study suggesting that meditation can improve people’s knack for focusing their minds.

Dalai Lama good, mad cow disease bad.

In a nutshell, that’s the way Dunn Town Chairman Ed Minihan described his day on Thursday, welcoming the Tibetan spiritual and political leader to the Deer Park Buddhist Center before following the Dane County Board’s vote against locating a $400 million national biological and agricultural defense facility at the University of Wisconsin’s Kegonsa Research Facility.

Dear Editor: I recently learned about the University of Wisconsin’s plan to commit $11.4 million to building a laboratory for Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a UW faculty member and one of the world’s leading viral researchers. Dr. Kawaoka intends to study the 1918 Spanish flu, which essentially was extinct before he and his colleagues revived it, and the Ebola virus, in his new state-of-the-art facility.

Perusing the minutes of the 2005 UW Biosafety Committee meetings, in which Dr. Kawaoka was granted approval to study these two deadly diseases in his current lab, I see that the committee expressed substantial safety concerns.

Don Hedberg, retired co-owner of Lab Safety Supply Co., has made a $2 million gift that will name UW-Madison’s new HealthEmotions Research Institute building.

The medical research company hired by the federal government four years ago to update its list of carcinogens moved quickly to add a virus to the list while two of its clients were developing vaccines to combat that same virus.

MADISON, Wis. — Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said they are excited about an inflection-fighting breakthrough that shows promise in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Dr. Helen Blackwell, assistant professor of chemistry at UW-Madison, and her graduate students have been working to find a new way to fight bacteria that are becoming increasingly resistant to drugs.

“There is an urgent need to develop new anti-bacterial agents,” Blackwell said.

A prominent retired Wisconsin businessman donated $2 million toward a new research facility, the University of Wisconsin announced Wednesday.

More women could someday decide whether to learn even more about their genetic risk for breast cancer, thanks to new research at UW-Madison.

More women could someday decide whether to learn even more about their genetic risk for breast cancer, thanks to new research at UW-Madison.

WASHINGTON — University of Wisconsin scientists are strongly backing a measure set for Senate debate next week that would override President Bush’s restrictions on stem cell research funding.

It would allow researchers to use embryos that would otherwise be discarded from fertility clinics.

“We feel that (the bill) will open up new avenues of this research,” said Andy Cohn, spokesman for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Work as a scientific researcher means living a life that is full of questions, and being spurred by discoveries that reveal themselves in small increments.

The adventure is about knowing when to change directions, because the plotted route will be full of surprises and often in need of revisions. The reward is finding an answer to something that no one else knows, and being able to prove it, perhaps after years of experiments in uncharted territory.

Flu viruses with reduced sensitivity to drugs intended to prevent or limit infection have been found in patients not previously treated with these drugs, according to an international research team led by a UW-Madison researcher.

The emergence of drug-resistant influenza spreading by human-to-human contact was documented in a study of Japanese patients. University of Wisconsin virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka was the lead author of a report on the findings in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

Feeding chocolate to a bunch of middle-age, overweight people for weeks on end might not be as unhealthy as it seems.

Researchers found that six weeks of daily consumption of a dark chocolate cocoa mix significantly improved the blood vessel health of those who participated in the study. The study is the latest in a growing number that link reduced heart disease risk to flavonoids in dark chocolate and other food and beverages, such as red wine, green tea and dark-colored fruits and vegetables.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of flavonoids in every plant substance we eat,” said James Stein, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “This is a very hot area. This study confirms what other investigators have found.”

It’s a tantalizing thought: injecting stem cells isolated from a person’s own blood into an ailing heart in hopes of repairing years of accumulated decay. But so far, human trials testing cell therapies for heart attacks have yielded mixed results, creating controversy over various aspects of the treatment: the types of cells that are used, the way they are delivered, and when in the course of the disease they are given. With the next round of trials, scientists hope to nail down the precise set of conditions needed to effectively heal a sickly heart.

“If it works, it could revolutionize cardiology,” says Amish Raval, a cardiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is running a stem-cell trial for heart failure.