Category: Health

Despite an uncomfortable pregnancy, Lynn Rueckert had no indications anything was amiss.

But when her baby appeared, she and her doctors immediately knew something was wrong. Kate Rueckert had severe scoliosis: Her spine was rotated 30 degrees to the right. Her thumbs were stubbornly folded across her palms. And her left middle finger pointed down toward her wrist.

Kate’s symptoms were caused by arthrogryposis, a term used to describe muscle and nerve disorders that cause restricted joint mobility at birth. And while Kate eventually was able to move her fingers – “I’d straighten them out during diaper changes,” Rueckert said – the girl’s spine didn’t improve.

That was until this month, when Kate Rueckert became the first patient in Wisconsin to receive a titanium rib called the VEPTR, short for Vertical Expandable Prosthetic Titanium Rib, a device that promises to straighten her spine, allowing the 2-year-old to eat, breathe and move with ease.

“This is the most exciting thing in scoliosis surgery,” said Kenneth Noonan, an associate professor of pediatrics and orthopedic surgery at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

A tissue bank operating in Wisconsin offered coroners and medical examiners a free three- day trip to Las Vegas in April, and some charge that the outing appears to be an inducement for the referral of cadavers to the bank for the harvesting of donated tissue.

The offer raises questions about the operation of largely unregulated tissue banks in the state, especially their dealings with elected coroners and medical examiners who frequently refer the bodies of people who die outside of hospitals to the organizations for tissue donation.

The University of Wisconsin, St. Mary�s and Meriter hospitals compete on some fronts and cooperate on many others. And all three have embarked recently on major building efforts that will dramatically boost research and patient care.

Name: Julie Gamradt

Age: 46

Job: Outreach program manager/augmentative and alternative communication specialist at the Communication Aids and Systems Clinic (CASC) and Communication Development Program (CDP) at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center.

I became interested in speech-language pathology (SLP), or what’s also called “communicative disorders,” during college when my roommate was enrolled in SLP classes. I got my first real job as an SLP in a small school district in northern Minnesota. The principal of my school informed me that most of the children who would be on my caseload had severe disabilities and limited functional speaking skills. Oddly enough, in my training as an SLP, the issue of helping people who couldn’t communicate using speech barely came up – of course, this was over 25 years ago, and it’s different now. In a panic, I went to the library and found one book on adaptations for people who were “nonspeaking.”

A little more than a year and a half removed from a life-saving, double-lung transplant, Trey Schwab is turning his focus full-time to helping ensure others might someday receive that same chance.

Schwab will leave his job as special assistant for Marquette University’s men’s basketball program on Sept. 2 in order to become outreach coordinator for organ procurement at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison.

Interviewed: Lisa Peck, child life specialist at UW Hospital in the emergency room.

More than 80 white-coated doctors, clinicians and nurses gathered Tuesday to implore Madison to keep its smoking ban, while across town, a feisty crowd of 550 demanded its repeal as cigarette smoke wafted through the air.

The two events are only the latest in the intensifying debate since the smoking ban went into effect July 1.

Medical College of Wisconsin researchers deceived a Sun Prairie couple into participating in a cystic fibrosis research study and then lied to them about their baby’s health, the family’s attorney said Monday in Dane County Circuit Court. Among those on the witness list are two investigators on the project: Norman Fost, a University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethicist, and Philip Farrell, dean of the UW Medical School.

Nothing Meg Gaines endured had prepared her for this moment. Not the six rounds of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer that had metastasized to her liver. Not the doctor who told her, after Ms. Gaines was prepped for surgery, that he could not operate: a last-minute scan revealed too many tumors. “Go home and think about the quality, not the quantity, of your days,” he said.

Not the innumerable specialists whom Ms. Gaines, then 39 and the mother of two toddlers, had already mowed through in her terrified but unswerving effort to save her own life. Not the Internet research and clinical trial reports, all citing the grimmest of statistics. Not the fierce, frantic journey she made, leaving home in Wisconsin to visit cancer centers in Texas and California.

A regulatory agency has warned that a group of Wisconsin county coroners may be putting UW Hospital out of compliance with federal organ and tissue donation rules.

The UW Hospital Organ Procurement Organization is required by law to sign a contract with a single tissue bank; the UW Hospital OPO has signed a contract with the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation.

A University of Wisconsin Medical School professor was sentenced to eight years in prison and 10 years of supervision Friday for sexually assaulting three young girls over the past 10 years.

Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Nicks ordered the sentence for Roberto B. Coronado, 52, a professor of physiology on the UW campus since 1989. Referring to the crimes, she observed, “to say they are serious almost understates what happened.”

Coronado was charged and entered no contest pleas to assaulting two girls over a period of years and with assaulting a third girl on one occasion.

I’ll start with a warning.
The surgeon general says smoking causes cancer.

And another warning: Ira Sharenow and the rest of the anti-smoking crowd don’t want you to read one more negative word about Madison’s no- smoking ordinance.

“Your paper,” Sharenow writes, “has turned into a tool for smoking interests.”

Our crime is talking to Madison tavern owners about how their business has plunged since the smoking ban started July 1. We’ve been taken to task by UW-Madison cancer folks, and by the mayor’s spokesman George Twigg, who called our coverage “one-sided.”

Dr. Herbert Chen has a vision of changing the lives of those living with endocrine cancers.
The University of Wisconsin Medical School shares that vision, and Chen was a star surgeon that it had to have. David Mahvi, chief of surgical oncology, said that when the school recruited Chen in 2000 it didn’t even need another endocrine surgeon.

“We actually didn’t need anybody doing what he did, but he was the best person finishing training … in the country that year,” Mahvi said.

Attracting the best and the brightest has helped the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center earn its distinction throughout the Midwest and the nation as one of the leading innovators in cancer research. In July, for the 13th year in a row, U.S. News and World Report ranked University Hospital in the top 50, out of 2,000, of the nation’s major teaching hospitals in its 2005 edition of “America’s Best Hospitals.” It is the only comprehensive cancer center, as designated by the National Cancer Institute, in Wisconsin.

Hospitals that are trying to increase organ donations usually look up the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, whose organ-donation efforts cover the state except for the Milwaukee area. Last year, the system persuaded 78 percent of potential organ-donor families to donate their dying loved ones’ organs, tying for the nation’s highest rate with San Diego’s Lifesharing Community Organ Donation. The national average was 56 percent. If the U.S. rate equaled Wisconsin’s, almost no one who’s on the organ transplant-waiting list would die. Instead, 6,529 died last year.