The dreaded bird flu virus is developing resistance to the main drug the United States and many other countries are relying on to combat a possible worldwide flu epidemic, a UW- Madison researcher reports.
The discovery of a Vietnamese girl with a Tamiflu-resistant strain of the avian flu has raised concern about sole reliance on the anti-viral drug being stockpiled globally to fight a possible pandemic.
The report by an international team of researchers, including a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist, will be published next week in the journal Nature.
Even Bill Gates’ harshest detractors concede that he’s doing good in the world.
The $26.8 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses primarily on global health and the U.S. education system, and Gates does more than just give away his money: He gets involved, traveling to places like Africa, where AIDS is killing millions, and to the nation’s top universities, where he pumps computer science as a great career.
In a session with state media after his appearance at UW-Madison on Wednesday, Gates said his foundation has been getting involved in Avian flu, which some experts fear has the potential to become a pandemic similar to the flu of 1918 that killed 50 million people.
After a decade of preparation, the UW Medical School is poised to become the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Despite the concerns of UW-Milwaukee officials and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the change in name – deserved recognition of a school-wide effort to incorporate more public health initiatives – is important for all of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Craig Roberts, UHS epidemiologist
This is the first part of a series profiling members of the Board of Regents, the governing board for the University of Wisconsin System.
Mark Bradley sat quietly at the Board of Regents meetings in Madison last week, listening intently to university administrators, deans, professors, a state senator and a mayor express their concerns about a plethora of issues facing the state�s public higher education system.
As vice president of the Board of Regents, Bradley is immersed in public education. Three of his children are enrolled in public universities and he himself benefited from a public education and a University of Wisconsin law degree.
New research from Stanley Dodson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that minute concentrations of antibiotics and other drugs, in a variety of combinations, can kill, disrupt, alter and disfigure the bodies and reproductive abilities of Daphnia, a small invertebrate considered a keystone of freshwater food chains.
Local leaders must do a better job leveraging government dollars to boost development such as the fast-growing biomedical research and business cluster at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Milwaukee County Research Park, an economic development advocate said Monday.
The UW Board of Regents in November will change the name of UW Medical School to make it the official home of a new school of public health for the University of Wisconsin System, rejecting UW- Milwaukee’s bid to have the school on that campus.
A high-tech business group is to meet this week in Oconomowoc. The location, between Madison and Milwaukee, is symbolic.
The goal is to emphasize the importance of linking the academic brainpower, entrepreneurial energy and industrial might of the state’s two largest cities to generate economic growth.
But the promise of synergy between Madison and Milwaukee has been long discussed and mostly unfulfilled. Last week, at a Board of Regents meeting, officials from Milwaukee demonstrated one of the reasons: petty rivalry.
UW-Milwaukee made an impassioned bid to be the site of a school of public health Thursday, while UW-Madison officials argued that it made more sense to integrate the offering within its School of Medicine and change the school’s name to reflect that growing focus.
“We have the buildings and we have the funds,” Medical School Dean Philip Farrell told the UW Board of Regents, adding later, “We have worked for a decade preparing for this.”
We and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have preferred that the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents had decided Friday to simply put aside plans by the UW Medical School to establish a school of public health in Madison and explore the idea of creating such a school in Milwaukee.
Instead, the regents settled on compromise. But by so doing, they not only applied some badly needed brake pressure to the UW Medical School proposal to rename itself the School of Medicine and Public Health but gave Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee a month to make their case that they need more resources to deal with Milwaukee’s pressing public health problems. And they should take that month to again try to convince the regents that one of those resources should be a school of public health in Milwaukee.
The UW System Board of Regents passed a controversial proposal Friday to rename the UW-Madison Medical School to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Representatives from UW-Milwaukee as well as Tom Barrett, Milwaukee mayor, contested the proposal on the grounds that the Milwaukee campus is better suited for a school of public health.
Most people who live in Wisconsin will tell you that Milwaukee is not exactly a shining beacon on a hill. While its condition cannot quite be described as abysmal, Milwaukee is simply a city that has been left behind. Sadly, if the University of Wisconsin successfully receives something it is currently seeking, Milwaukee will be left behind once more.
Recently, UW requested to rename its medical school the ââ?¬Å?UW School of Medicine & Public Health.ââ?¬Â One could easily dismiss this plan as attempting little more than a rearrangement of the medical schoolââ?¬â?¢s title. However, to do so would be to ignore the impending changes such a shift would bring.
Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law stands in his way.
Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.
Gov. Jim Doyle and several state lawmakers want to change that by exempting UW System researchers from that law, which is designed to discourage state workers from privately benefiting at taxpayers’ expense.
The University of Wisconsin Medical School got its wish Friday as the Board of Regents unanimously agreed to approve the renaming of the school to the ââ?¬Å?University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health,ââ?¬Â effective Nov. 11 this year.
The name change is not without conditions, however. As part of the resolution the regents directed the medical school to immediately commence a ââ?¬Å?good faith dialogueââ?¬Â with the City of Milwaukee and the chancellor of UW-Milwaukee on specific strategies to address the public health issues facing portions of the impoverished city.
Wisconsin’s disaster planning doesn’t cover moving people, sheltering them or saving their pets in a catastrophe, according to a report by the state’s homeland security adviser.
Adj. Gen. Albert Wilkening, who heads the Wisconsin National Guard, called on Wisconsin Emergency Management to help county officials revise their emergency plans by Sept. 30, 2006.
Despite impassioned pleas from Milwaukee officials, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved changing the name of its Madison-based medical school to also reflect its status as the state’s public health school.
Mayor Tom Barrett visited the regents on Thursday, imploring them to hold off on the name change. Milwaukee, with its rampant health problems, needs a public health school, he said, and the Madison designation would effectively kill any prospects of that happening.
….The name change, from the UW Medical School to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, will take effect Nov. 11.
Remember middle school gym class?
If you were a little overweight, not very coordinated and perhaps shy, it was a pretty miserable experience. But a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers at River Bluff Middle School in Stoughton could change all that.
….”Even a small change in the amount of physical activity showed beneficial effects on body composition, fitness and insulin levels in children,” the authors wrote in a study that was published this week in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved a compromise Friday that could lead to the UW Medical School, the City of Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee collaborating on more public health projects.
The resolution directs the UW Medical School to work with the City of Milwaukee and the UW-Milwaukee to find ways to increase their collaboration. Those options are to include establishing a “branch campus” at UW-Milwaukee.
UW-Milwaukee made an impassioned bid to be the site of a school of public health Thursday, while UW-Madison officials argued that it made more sense to integrate the offering within its School of Medicine and change the school’s name to reflect that growing focus.
“We have the buildings and we have the funds,” Medical School Dean Philip Farrell told the UW Board of Regents, adding later, “We have worked for a decade preparing for this.”
If Americans learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, it’s the importance of a public health network in impoverished urban areas, Milwaukee Mayor Tom
Barrett told the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.
He implored the board to stop a fast-tracked, little-publicized plan to designate the UW-Madison Medical School as the state’s public health college. But the argument failed to win over the board’s Education Committee, which voted without dissent to recommend the designation to the full board, which planned to vote today.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and the city may have won a victory of sorts Thursday before the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents in the campaign to establish a school of public health where it most appropriately belongs – in Milwaukee. We certainly hope so.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett made an impassioned plea to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents for the state’s first school of public health to be placed in Milwaukee Thursday, but the effort clearly faces significant institutional and financial obstacles.
What the University of Wisconsin Medical School had hoped would be a simple name change has set off another debate between Milwaukee and Madison, and the roles of their respective state universities.
Physicians have been prescribing emergency contraception for decades. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration, the drugs – commonly referred to as the morning-after pill – are approved “for use in preventing pregnancy after intercourse when standard contraceptives have failed, or when no contraceptives were used at all.” Clinical trials have found emergency contraception is safe and effective. But scientists, policy makers and the public disagree on the issue of improving access to this drug.
While the Wisconsin legislature continues to bungle its way through narrow-minded and politically-motivated debates over stem cell research, it’s important to note the National Institute of Health’s establishment of the first and only National Stem Cell Bank here at Wisconsin’s WiCell Research Institute.
(WISC-TV Editorial)
ALMATY, Kazakhstan – More than a decade’s worth of work to improve public health by Madison doctors has earned heartfelt thanks half a world away. A banquet honoring Madison’s Dr. John Doyle and others was held Saturday at the Hotel Dostyk in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Doyle is a professor in the surgery department at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and chief of dentistry and medical director for dental services at University Hospital and Clinics. In the past 10 years he has traveled to Kazakhstan 25 times to supervise Prime Kare Kazakhstan, a humanitarian aid program. The central Asian country is located south of Siberia and is home to about 17 million people.
New mothers who are experiencing the signs of either the postpartum blues or postpartum depression are encouraged to seek help from their personal support system of family and friends as well as trained professionals.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents will be asked Thursday to rename the UW School of Medicine in Madison to the School of Medicine and Public Health. The regents, meeting in Madison, must say no or at the very least postpone a decision until they have explored the issue much more thoroughly.
Overweight kids who were put into a fitness-enhanced gym class lost more body fat, increased their cardiovascular health and improved their insulin levels, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study that could serve as a model for America’s growing childhood obesity problem.
The siting of the nation’s first stem cell bank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a direct result of the university’s unparalleled infrastructure supporting embryonic research, said Chancellor John Wiley.
“In reality, few institutions have the right pieces and could actually deliver,” Wiley said this morning at a news conference at the WiCell Research Institute at the University Research Park.
Among the important entities identified by Wiley were the Waisman Center, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WiCell and the research park.
(From the 10/3/05 print edition of The Capital Times)
Milwaukee area legislators and the Milwaukee mayor are questioning a plan by UW-Madison for a University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health — saying that Milwaukee is the obvious location for a public health school.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents is scheduled to vote on the proposal this week, but four legislators have asked for a delay.
UW-Madison Provost Peter Spear says the matter to be considered by the regents Thursday and Friday is simply a name change, reflecting programs that have already been established.
(From the 10/3/05 print edition of The Capital Times)
Med Flight, the emergency response helicopter service, had its 20th anniversary Saturday.
A bill condoning the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes is pending introduction in the Wisconsin State Assembly, a state representative said Sunday.
WAUKESHA (AP) – Researchers will study Waukesha County children’s food, the air around them and even the dust in their homes as part of nationwide study of environmental influences on health.
The goal is to find ways to prevent and treat health problems such as autism, birth defects, diabetes and heart disease.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was named Thursday as one of six centers that will help complete the first phase of the study, led by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
ââ?¬Â¢ Announcement: University of Wisconsin-Madison will be the site for the nation’s first stem cell bank, which will house all stem cell lines available for federal funding.
ââ?¬Â¢ Goal: The bank’s goal is to reduce the costs researchers pay for the cells while monitoring their quality.
ââ?¬Â¢ Reaction: “Everybody has understood that banking is crucial to moving the field forward. This is a concrete step and we’re doing it first,” said UW-Madison bioethicist Alta Charo.
Wisconsin will soon house the nation’s first stem cell bank.
WiCell Research Institute, a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, has been awarded a $16.1 million, four-year National Institutes of Health contract to establish a national stem call bank at its facilities, according to contracting officer Lynn Furtaw.
The center will acquire, store, characterize and distribute the human embryonic stem cell lines currently approved for federal funding.
Gov. Jim Doyle has scheduled a news conference on Monday to announce the Wisconsin siting of the stem cell bank.
WASHINGTON — Researchers hoping to determine the causes of many common diseases like autism and diabetes will follow 100,000 US children from birth through adulthood in the largest ever study of its kind.
Six centers were named Thursday, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison will be home to the newly created National Stem Cell Bank, Gov. Jim Doyle’s office said Friday.
The nation’s first embryonic stem-cell bank, awarded in a competitive process by the National Institutes of Health, presumably will be at the WiCell Institute. WiCell is a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds a patent on stem-cell work by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson.
WARF controls five of the 22 available stem-cell lines eligible for federal funding under President Bush’s 2001 policy. According to the NIH, the new bank will consolidate the other lines in one location, maintain them and distribute them to researchers at a cost less than what researchers now pay to study them.
The other lines are housed in Athens, Ga.; San Francisco and labs in Australia, Israel, Korea and Sweden.
Quoted: David Van Ness, a health care economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What’s red and white and saves lives?
It’s not a bird, or a plane. Nor is it Superman flying in the sky. Actually, we’re talking about UW Hospital’s MedFlight program, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
“We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve had 20 years of safe operation,” says Mark Hanson, a registered nurse who specializes in critical care and directs the program.
The 20th anniversary of UW Hospital’s MedFlight program will be celebrated from 6:30 to 10 p.m. Saturday at Morey Field in Middleton.
The event is a fundraiser for construction of the hospital’s new emergency department.
Tickets are $50 per person, or $500 for a table of 10.
Wisconsin Right to Life wants to make it clear: Follow its directives or there will be consequences.
On Thursday the powerful anti-abortion lobby sent out a sharply worded news release taking aim at three “pro-life” state senators who supported an exemption to therapeutic cloning in the human cloning ban that passed the Republican-controlled Senate earlier this week.
A future generation of Waukesha County residents will be recruited as part of the largest study ever undertaken to monitor and assess environmental effects on children. The National Children’s Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency, announced Thursday that Waukesha County would become one of six pilot study centers awarded with the responsibility to kick off the study.
The principal investigators of the Waukesha site are from the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As we slip into deep sleep, higher regions of our brains take a vacation from each other, disconnecting so much that consciousness is snuffed out and a once highly integrated organ becomes separated, according to a groundbreaking experiment by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
With flu season officially beginning Saturday, health authorities in Wisconsin are optimistic that the panic- inducing vaccine shortages of the past two years won’t strike again.
But they’re fretting over another, increasingly worrisome, prospect: that bird flu in Asia might start infecting people more easily. That could enable the virus, which has killed 60 people in Southeast Asia so far, to explode into a worldwide flu outbreak worse than any seen since 1918, when as many as 50 million people died.
Stem cell research has the potential to treat ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, diabetes, heart disease, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Wisconsin leaders moved quickly to condemn the state Senate’s passage of a ban on reproductive and therapeutic cloning.
“The failure of the Wisconsin State Senate to amend Assembly Bill 499, which effectively criminalizes a promising area of biomedical research, sends a frightening message to Wisconsin’s research community,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said in a prepared statement Wednesday.
“Scientists in many fields view this with alarm,” Wiley added. “It is a message that special interests can close off legitimate avenues of scientific discovery.”
Gov. Jim Doyle also criticized the Senate’s action.
The Wisconsin State Senate approved a bill Tuesday allowing health-care providers and health-care facility employees to refuse to partake in medical procedures based on moral or religious beliefs without the risk of dismissal.
University of Wisconsin Interim Dean of Students Lori Berquam, detailing the university�s plans for the Halloween celebration, explained the reasoning and goal of the university�s parental involvement policy at a Policy Alternatives Community Education meeting Tuesday.
The Wisconsin Senate moved one step closer to banning cloning for reproductive and research purposes.
Senators on Tuesday night killed by one vote an amendment that would have exempted therapeutic cloning from the bill – amounting, in effect, to the body’s tentative approval of the cloning ban.
But Democrats objected to a final vote on the controversial measure, authored by Sen. Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, and Rep. Steve Kestell, R-Elkhart Lake, pushing the bill onto today’s Senate agenda.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced $2 million in new state funding for a Madison-based firm that applies stem cell research technology for drug development and screening.
Doyle said the state will provide a $1 million technology development grant and an additional $1 million in technology development loans to Cellular Dynamics International Inc., which was founded by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers James Thomson, Craig January and Timothy Kamp.
During an appearance at the firm’s headquarters Monday morning, Doyle vowed to veto a bill banning so-called human cloning, which is up for action in the state Senate today.
Pomegranates, the loneliest fruit in the produce section, could be a man’s best friend.
Revered in legend and ignored by most shoppers, the fruit inhibited the growth of prostate cancer cells in a laboratory dish and slowed the growth of human prostate cancer cells injected into mice, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study published today
When it comes to public health problems in Wisconsin, Milwaukee is ground zero. It is the biggest city in the state with the largest and most diverse population, including a large number of poor bridled with serious health problems and, in the case of minorities, glaring disparities in health care.
These are reasons enough for Wisconsin to establish a school of public health in Milwaukee to address these problems firsthand while also training the army of public health workers who many experts believe will be needed more than ever in the future, if only as a means to control health care spending. The most logical place for such a school is at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
But it’s the University of Wisconsin-Madison, not UWM, that has taken steps to establish a school of public health integrated with its medical school, despite being located in a city touted often as affluent and among the healthiest in the country.
very year, approximately 100 UW-Madison students are admitted to emergency detoxification. So far this semester, 14 students have been so admitted to university hospitals-most of them 18- or 19-years old. Beginning this week, university policy will direct the Office of the Chancellor to formally notify parents and guardians when “their son or daughter has been involved in a gravely serious situation,” including detox. This action is both inconsistent and dangerous for underage students.
Resistance to drugs commonly used to treat influenza has skyrocketed in the last 10 years, according to the most comprehensive study to date. The findings mean that it’ll be even harder to stop the spread of the flu, putting the elderly and those with chronic illnesses at greater risk for complications, including death, from the virus. And it highlights concerns about controlling a flu pandemic, were one to strike.
Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene report that viral resistance to a class of drugs called adamantanes, which includes amantadine and rimantadine, increased from 0.4% in 1994 to 12.3% in 2004.
Take a cursory glance at the health news on any given day and you’ll start seeing reoccuring buzzwords pop up again and again. Antioxidants, in particular, are a popular choice. In my mind, a typical viewer would likely make note these findings: “Oh, coffee has antioxidants? Sweet! And blueberries, too? That’s friggin’ awesome!” The news item proceeds to replicate in their head like a virus. During their next trip to the grocery store, these consumers may be stricken by a need to pick up said products.
Total U.S. spending on medical research has doubled in the past decade to nearly $95 billion a year, though whether the money is being well spent needs much better scrutiny, a study has found.
