Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon Bombings in this week's health news

At the end of Health news for the week of election day, I wrote "Look for one more installment next week."  I also wrote in Kepler findings and other space news "This one will be huge!"  I wasn't kidding.

Rutgers University has the honor of going first, with Rise in Falls and Fractures Among Elderly After Superstorm Sandy.
Rutgers researcher attributes increase in injuries in older New Jerseyans to power outages
By Lisa Intrabartola
Monday, November 11, 2013

Everyone knows Superstorm Sandy left many New Jersey homes and businesses battered and bruised.

But most are not aware of the considerable toll the storm and its aftermath took on our state’s residents.

“With disasters, there are things beyond the obvious,” said Rutgers’ Sue Shapses, a professor in the department of Nutrition and chair of the Interagency Council of Osteoporosis. “There are real health hazard risks, especially falling and fracturing.  And it’s especially a problem for our elderly population.”

Based on a report Shapses wrote using data from the New Jersey Hospital Association that showed state hospitals experienced an 18 percent increase in visits related to falls and a 13 percent increase in visits related to fractures, during the week following the storm in comparison to the week prior. Of those who sought medical attention for falls and fractures after the hurricane, there was a 40 percent rise in falls and fractures in those who were 65 or older.

I couldn't resist putting a health story about Hurricane Sandy first, especially after four retrospectives last week.

Speaking of stories I've covered before, and being the exception to the rule that "if it bleeds, it doesn't necessarily lead" here at Crazy Eddie's Motie News, Boston University has a four-part video series about the university hospital's response to the Boston Marathon Bombings accompanied by a feature story in its magazine Bostonia.  Videos first.

Trauma Part 1: The Trauma Algorithm


Trauma Part 2: The Clock is Ticking


Trauma Part 3: The Lethal Triad


Trauma Part 4: Why It's Called a "Trauma Team"

Peter Burke discusses the methods his team uses to shave seconds off response time.

Now, the excerpt from the feature article Trauma.
Peter Burke spent 14 years building a surgical team that could handle the worst kind of emergencies. On April 15, that emergency arrived.
By Susan Seligson

Peter Burke had just finished the morning session of a medical conference at the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas when the news flashed on a lobby TV: two bombs had exploded near the Boston Marathon finish line, turning an annual celebration into a war zone.

Minutes later he received an emergency text message from Boston Medical Center (BMC), where he is chief trauma surgeon. The unit was inundated with the grievously injured from an attack that killed 3, among them BU graduate student Lu Lingzi (GRS’13), and wounded at least 260. Many of those rushed to BMC were battling for life, with mangled legs, collapsed lungs, and profound blood loss. Burke called his chief nurse to find out if there was any way he could help from a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. The answer was no.

When he arrived in Boston around midnight, Burke rushed from Logan Airport to BMC, one of the city’s five adult Level 1 trauma centers, all of which were scrambling to stabilize the injured. BMC received 28 bomb victims; 19 were admitted, 11 with critical injuries.

In his 14 years at BMC, Burke had dealt with hundreds of multiple admissions from car crashes or shootings. But Marathon day presented a scene more familiar to trauma program manager Joseph Blansfield, a nurse practitioner who has been at BMC since 1992. An active colonel in the US Army Reserve, Blansfield (SON’78) had run combat support hospitals in Mosul and Tikrit, Iraq. As BMC trauma surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses mobilized, Blansfield was doing what had become second nature in those war-torn places: identifying the most critically injured and getting them to the trauma bays.

Follow over the jump for the rest of this installment of health news from Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Super Typhoon Haiyan).

Hurricane Sandy anniversary and other climate news from campuses on the campaign trail

I concluded PBS NewsHour on Hurricane Sandy one year later by writing, "I'll have more about the anniversary of Sandy's landfall from Columbia University and other sources after Midnight.  Stay tuned."  As promised, here it is.

I begin with this video from PBS NewsHour, which features a Columbia University faculty member, so I decided it counts.

Climate Change, Hurricane Sandy and How to Cope

Klaus Jacob, a special research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, explains how climate change will turn events like Hurricane Sandy into more frequent and more disastrous events."One weather event like Sandy does not make climate change. But it is a symptom with many other events that will show yes there is something going [on] and we call it climate change," Jacob said.

Columbia University proper had even more about the occasion in Hurricane Sandy, One Year Later.
October 29, 2013

The year since Hurricane Sandy blew ashore in the New York area has been one of rebuilding and searching for how best to prevent the level of destruction and death it brought with it.

Columbia, with experts across multiple schools and disciplines and broad expertise in climate science, has played an important role in the recovery. “We have 700 people in the Earth Institute working on this,” said Steve Cohen, the institute’s executive director. “The Lamont Doherty Observatory has close to 100 doctoral level scientists working on this all the time.”

Columbia students and staffers helped communities rebuild. Scores of Columbia scientists have been explaining the causes behind the storm in hundreds of media interviews. Columbia professors serve on government panels that study how to prevent future damage and make recommendations to elected officials on preparedness and infrastructure changes.

Follow over the jump for more Hurricane Sandy and other climate news from Boston University via its NPR station WBUR, Columbia University, Rutgers University, and New York University, all of which I shared in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Eclipse, Sandy Anniversary, and Fall Back), plus one story I was planning on including in that diary on Daily Kos but left out by mistake.

Campus Sustainability Day 2013

Today is Campus Sustainability Day.  To mark the occasion, I'm posting all the environmental stories from campuses on the campaign trail that I've included in the past two months of Overnight News Digests on Daily Kos but either haven't included in an entry about climate, energy, biodiversity, or food, or won't be including in tomorrow's entry about Food Day.  I'll begin with the two most recent, which are from Virginia Tech.

Mussels Meet Wild Cousins

Imagine a lifetime spent clinging to a riverbed by one foot. This is the case for freshwater mussels, and their limited mobility makes habitat loss difficult to avoid.

Virginia Tech in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to repopulate sections of the Clinch and Powell Rivers.

I'm a mollusk specialist; of course I'd put this one first.

Virginia Tech: Virginia Tech partners with Smithsonian to discover deeper link between soil microbes and plants

BLACKSBURG, Va., Oct. 14, 2013 – In a recent study published in the journal Plant and Soil, Mark Williams, an assistant professor of horticulture in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and his collaborators at the Smithsonian and other institutions discovered that microbes in soil function symbiotically with plants, much like the 3 billion microbes in the human gut interact with the body.

“The study is consistent with the idea that there are complex but fundamental feedbacks between these diverse systems of soil microbiota and plant species,” said Williams. “These plant-microbial-soil interactions ultimately determine how ecosystem’s breathe life into the earth’s biosphere.”

Some of the interactions that occur in the soil microbiome — the combined genetic material of the microorganisms in soil — have not always been as readily apparent until now.

Follow over the jump for other environmental news from campuses on the campaign trail.

Health news for the week of Food Day

As I noted in Another dose of health news from campuses on the campaign trail, the research universities in states and cities holding elections this year continue to be rich sources for health stories.  Since Thursday is Food Day, I'm going to start off with a seasonal health tip involving food.

University of Florida Extension: Reducing Candy Calories

University of Florida/IFAS Nutritionist Karla Shellnut provides nutritional facts of reducing candy calories for your Halloween trick-or-treaters.

Trick or treat!

Follow over the jump for the rest of the health and health care news from Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Another asteroid fly-by) on Daily Kos.

University of Florida: UF faculty finds some mind-body therapies may reduce effects of functional bowel disorders
October 15th, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Although some health care providers may overlook alternative therapies when treating functional bowel disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome, University of Florida faculty members have found evidence that hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy may benefit patients suffering from these diseases.

Led by researchers Oliver Grundmann of the UF College of Pharmacy and Saunjoo “Sunny” Yoon of the UF College of Nursing, the study was published in the European Journal of Integrative Medicine, which highlighted it as the “Editors Choice” in its August issue.

“Our work being highlighted in this way indicates that we are able to raise awareness for the issue of a more integrative and holistic approach to medical care in the area of functional bowel disorders in the scientific community — a goal that both Dr. Yoon and I have been striving for in our professional endeavors for many years,” said Grundmann, a clinical assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy.

Columbia University: Chemist Devises Optical Imaging Technique to Unlock the Mystery of Memory
October 9, 2013

In the search to understand memory, Wei Min is looking at cells at the most basic level, long before the formation of neurons and synapses. The assistant professor of chemistry studies the synthesis of proteins, the building blocks of the body formed using genetic code from DNA. “We want to understand the molecular nature of memory, one of the key questions that remain in neuroscience,” he says.

Proteins carry out almost every biological function, and protein synthesis is a crucial step in gene expression, determining how cells respond to pathological conditions caused by cancer, autism and the physiological stresses linked to disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Min’s lab examines the proteome (the sum of the cell’s proteins), a dynamic structure tightly regulated by both production and death of proteins that ensures that the body functions normally. The formation of long-term memory is dependent on protein synthesis at a specific location and time in brain tissues.

Min and his team recently developed a new imaging technique to pinpoint exactly where and when cells produce new proteins. The method is significant in that it enables scientists to create high-resolution images of newly synthesized proteins in living cells. The findings were published in the July 9 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the research was done in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine.

From the science of health to its practice--here are two articles about educating health professionals, broadly defined.

Rutgers University: Are Your Doctors Ordering the Right Tests?
Rutgers in lead to enhance the role of laboratory scientists
Monday, October 14, 2013

Newark, NJ – The bulk of medical decisions made today are based on laboratory results. A misinterpreted result or misordered test has the potential to drastically elevate health care costs and negatively impact a patient’s health.

With so much riding on lab results, Rutgers is taking the lead to enhance the role of clinical laboratory scientists by implementing the country’s first advanced practice doctorate in clinical laboratory science (DCLS).

Beginning in 2014, the new degree offered by Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences at its School of Health Related Professions (SHRP), will address an ongoing need to achieve greater accuracy and cost efficiency in lab testing services.

University of Virginia: To Meet Societal Needs and Student Demand, U.Va. Creates Kinesiology Department
Audrey Breen
Rebecca P. Arrington
October 15, 2013

The Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia is elevating its kinesiology program to department status.

The expansion of U.Va.’s kinesiology program – the Ph.D. component of which is ranked ninth nationally, and the undergraduate component of which has the school’s most competitive admissions process – is the result of societal needs and student demand, U.Va. education professor Arthur “Art” L. Weltman said. According to the American Kinesiology Association, kinesiology is one of the fastest-growing majors across the country, with enrollment rising more than 50 percent between 2003 and 2008.

The academic discipline is growing in large part due the recognition that inactivity represents a major societal concern that expands the entire lifecycle, according Weltman, who will chair the new department.

“An emerging body of research indicates that sedentary behavior is associated with reduced quality of life and impaired health, including increased risk of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain forms of cancer, depression and cognitive impairment, and the increased risk of falls and other injuries, just to name a few,” Weltman said.

That's it for this week's installment.  Stay tuned for more until the week after election day.

Another dose of health news from campuses on the campaign trail

The campuses on on the campaign trail continue to be rich sources for health stories.  First Health news from campuses on the campaign trail, then More health news from campuses on the campaign trail, and now all the health-related stories from Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (2013 Nobel Prizes) show what a cornucopia of health research and outreach these campuses are.

I begin with a story related to the Affordable Care Act from Rutgers University, which I'm posting to celebrate the end of the shutdown over the ACA and the raising of the debt ceiling.

Improving Health Care, Controlling Costs – Rutgers Launches New Initiative
One key factor sets Robert Wood Johnson Partners apart from other attempts at reform – the Accountable Care Organization has the power of a major research university behind it
By Andrea Alexander
Monday, October 7, 2013

During nearly three decades as a primary care physician, Alfred Tallia has identified a daunting list of flaws with the nation’s health care.

Specialists rarely coordinate care for patients with chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure – which can lead to repetitive, expensive tests.

In most doctors’ offices, no one is responsible for developing plans with patients to lose weight, exercise and change their diet – or for following up with those patients to help them meet their goals.

But Tallia, chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School – now part of Rutgers – is getting ready to launch a solution he believes will deliver more effective care at a lower cost.

Follow over the jump for the rest of the stories.

Nobel Prizes in the sciences

Near the end of Science awards from the ridiculous to the sublime, 2013 edition, I outsourced my speculation on the Nobel Awards to the L.A. Times.

Click on the link for the list of likely winners, which features three achievements worthy of recognition per category.  We'll find out starting today if any of the predictions were correct.

Discovery News and The Economist have the answers.

Nobel Prizes: Who Won & Who Got Snubbed

All of the 2013 Nobel prizes have been announced! This year's prizes went to people doing amazing work, but not everyone can be a winner. Trace looks at who won, who was snubbed, and which deserving scientists from the past never took home a medal.

Higgs’s bosuns
Awards for fundamental physics, how cells transport chemicals, and ways of modelling on a computer how those chemicals react once they have arrived
Oct 12th 2013

WILL he or won’t he? That was the question on the mind of anyone with a passing interest in the topic as representatives of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science prepared to announce the winner of this year’s Nobel physics prize. Well, he did. Half a century after predicting the existence of the particle which bears his name Peter Higgs, of Edinburgh University, was awarded science’s highest accolade. Another, even bigger mystery was who would share the honour—and the cheque for SKr8m ($1.2m). In the event, after postponing the announcement twice (rare for the punctual Swedes) the prize-givers plumped for François Englert of the Free University of Brussels.
...
Less predictably, and less controversially, the prize for physiology or medicine went to James Rothman of Yale, Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Südhof of Stanford University, for their work on vesicles. These are small, bubble-like structures, surrounded by fatty membranes, which ship hormones, enzymes and various other molecules around a cell, and sometimes export them to the outside world.
...
Familiarity from school cannot, however, have been the explanation of a similar lack of questions after the announcement of the chemistry prize. This went to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, a trio who have collectively helped tame the daunting mathematical complexity involved in simulating chemical reactions.

The only one that Thompson Reuters called was Higgs, which was probably the easiest prediction.  From the L.A. Times:

One of the favorites in this category – and a likely emotional favorite for many people who have been following the search for the Higgs boson – is Peter Higgs, who is projected to be a co-winner with Francois Englert. The two men predicted the existence of the subatomic particle, which is thought to be associated with an energy field that imparts mass to particles. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva have all but confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson.

The rest of the winners were not called this year, although the economics prize was awarded to someone who was forecast to win last year.  He deserves an entry of his own later.  In the meantime, follow over the jump for announcements from U.S. universities involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson.

More health news from campuses on the campaign trail

The campuses on on the campaign trail have been rich sources for health stories.  First Health news from campuses on the campaign trail and now all the health stories from Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (ACA and shutdown on campus).  I'll begin with this editorial from Boston University, which was the featured story over at Daily Kos.

POV: Opposition to Obamacare Is Maddening
Ignore the critics: here’s what the law really does
By Stephen Davidson
10.04.2013

Predictably, this week’s rollout of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) received attention high in volume and intensity. While the administration signs up uninsured Americans flooding the health insurance exchanges, the government is shuttered thanks to a deadlock over opponents’ efforts to repeal the act, or failing that, to starve the implementation process for funds.

As one who has written about health policy for many years, I find the opposition to be nothing less than maddening. Some, like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), are just nasty and cynical. As the New York Times’ Gail Collins points out, he wants to kill the act because it is bound to be popular, and therefore, hard to take away from people later on. Others continue to spew falsehoods about the law. Either they have not taken the time to inform themselves of the facts or they just don’t care what the facts are. It is maddening because the issues are serious, they affect us all, and those guys treat it like a game in which the only prize is a government job for themselves in the national legislature, where, historically at least, the object was to pass legislation.

While the law is hard to master because it is long and has many parts, most of the ideas are pretty simple and have been around for a long time. What follows is an attempt to set the record straight on the assumption that not everyone is taken in by the cacophony from the far-right chorus.

I couldn't agree more.

University of Virginia brings Emily Drake discusses New Postpartum Testing, which bears on a story I reported in Last night's top news from Reuters.  It turns out that that the poor woman who attempted to crash the gates at the White House and Capitol and was shot dead for her trouble was reported to have been suffering from post-partum depression.

Nursing professor Emily Drake's character lends a touch of humor to a serious condition that affects 10 to 15 percent of women after childbirth.

Follow over the jump for more health and health care news.

Climate news from NASA and campuses on the campaign trail

The latest IPCC report on climate change that I previewed in Hot: IPCC report leaked is due out today.  To mark the occasion, here are the climate stories I originally included in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (LADEE launched) and Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (IgNobel Prizes).

First, NASA Explorer tells its channel's viewers to Ask a Climate Scientist.

Have a question that's always confounded you about Earth's climate? Wonder why it matters that the climate is changing now if it has changed before? Or how scientists know changes seen in recent decades are the result of human activities, not natural causes?

Go ahead. Ask a climate scientist.

NASA scientists will be recording video responses to some of the questions we receive. The responses will be posted to the NASAExplorer YouTube channel.

To submit a question, record a short, 10-15 second video with your question and upload it to YouTube -- and be sure to tag the video "#askclimate" so that we can find it. You can also simply post a question on Twitter with the same hashtag, "#askclimate."

NASA has at least one answer video that I'll post later this week or early next.

Next, Rutgers Biologist Analyzes Glacial Microorganisms for Climate Change Clues.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013

CAMDEN — On the surface, glaciers are massive bodies of ice that continue to slowly carve out the Earth’s landscape, but what goes unseen beneath these frozen rivers are entire communities of microbial life that could be playing a key role in glacial melting.

“Glaciers are an interesting thing to study to try and understand an entire ecosystem in its full complexity, from microorganisms to algae to animals,” says Andrey Grigoriev, a professor of biology at Rutgers–Camden.  “We want to determine what species live there and to figure out the structure of the glacial ecosystem.”

In the first stage of his project, Grigoriev is taking an intimate look at Alaska’s Byron Glacier, located some 48 miles south of Anchorage (and more than 4,000 miles from Rutgers–Camden).

Rutgers scientists aren't the only ones from campuses on the campaign trail studying the effect of climate change on glaciers.  New York University does as well in Antarctic Reseach Details Ice Melt Below Massive Glacier.
September 12, 2013

An expedition of international scientists to the far reaches of Antarctica’s remote Pine Island Glacier has yielded exact measurements of an undersea process glaciologists have long called the “biggest source of uncertainty in global sea level projections.”

The research, which appears in the latest issue of Science magazine, was conducted by scientists at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., the University of Alaska, Pennsylvania State University, NASA, and the British Antarctic Survey.

The article details the landmark results of the Pine Island Glacier expedition, giving scientists an extensive look beneath the ice at one of the most remote research sites on the planet – a site whose fate could affect the lives of millions.

“Intensive melting under the Pine Island ice shelf, as observed in our study, could potentially lead to the speed up and ultimate break-up of the ice shelf,” says David Holland of NYU’s Courant Institute and one of the paper’s co-authors. “That’s important, as this ice shelf is currently holding back inland ice, and without that restraining force, the Pine Island catchment basin could further contribute to global sea-level rise.”

Not to be outdone, the other research university in NYC, Columbia University posted Summer Heat Wave May Have Triggered Landslide on Lonely Alaskan Glacier.
September 10, 2013

A massive landslide in Alaska’s snowy Wrangell-St. Elias mountain range in July may have been caused by a summer heat wave making some slopes more vulnerable to collapse, says the scientist who first discovered the avalanche.

“Most of the big landslides that I’ve worked on in Alaska from 1999 to now have been south-facing, summer-time failures,” Colin Stark, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told NASA’s Earth Observatory. “My suspicion is that this landslide was probably caused by sustained daytime warming and progressive melting of rock permafrost.”

The slide let loose some 35 million tons of rock and debris, a collapse that registered on the global seismic network and was detected within hours by Stark and his colleagues Göran Ekström and Clément Hilbert from the Lamont campus in Palisades, N.Y. The July 25 landslide was confirmed by pictures taken by NASA satellites before and after the event.

I told my students in Environmental Science this week that climate change would be most visible near the poles.  This research shows what I said is true.

Health news from campuses on the campaign trail

I have been under the weather for the past week and went to see my primary care physician today (yesterday by the time this entry posts).  To reflect this, I'm posting health care and health research news from campuses on the campaign trail.  All stories were originally included in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (LADEE launched) and Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (IgNobel Prizes).

I begin with Rutgers Today on YouTube: Revolutionizing Urban Healthcare

Cindy Sickora runs a mobile healthcare program in Newark. Suzanne Willard heads a wellness center. Together, two leaders of Rutgers nursing schools are striving to make healthcare accessible to city residents, who are among the most underserved in the nation.

Follow over the jump for more stories.

Food news from campuses on the campaign trail

For the past two weeks, I've been featuring "the research stories from the public universities in each of the states having elections for federal or state office this year plus stories from all research universities in major cities having municipal elections" on the Saturday editions of Overnight News Digest.  As a result, I have lots of stories on topic for this blog.  I've already featured some of them in Sports news for a football Saturday, The science of lying from LSU and Discovery News, Friday the 13th research a bit late, More on Friday the 13th from Rutgers, and Floods in Colorado from ABC News and University of Colorado.  Now it's time to start sharing the rest in theme posts.

Tonight's theme is food, and I begin with two videos from Rutgers Today on YouTube.

First, The Science Behind Candy.

If you think you like candy or ice cream just because they're sweet, you're missing the science behind the treats. Rutgers food science professors Richard Ludescher and Beverly Tepper say we're drawn to more than just the sweet taste. Flavor and especially texture influence our likes and dislikes as well. We also checked in with Rutgers alums and owners of Thomas Sweet Ice Cream and Chocolate, Michael and Jennifer Schnur, to talk about the role science plays in their business.

Next, The Great Tomato Tasting.

If you love tomatoes, heaven is located in New Jersey at least one day a year. Each summer Rutgers hosts the Great Tomato Tasting at Snyder Research Farm. Visitors feast on more than 80 varieties of heirloom and hybrid tomatoes with unique names such as "Snow White," "Green Doctors," "Dad's Sunset" and "Power Pops." Tasters also get to sample apples, peaches, basil and honey.

Finally, New York University describes how Steinhardt's Bentley developes TED Studies curriculum on "sustainable consumption" for Western diet.

Half of all Americans consider environmental impacts when deciding whether or not to buy a product, according to a survey released this summer by Yale and George Mason universities.

But we show greater dedication to a method of food consumption that runs afoul of the best sustainability practices: the Standard American, or Western, Diet.

“Westerners are eating enormous quantities of sugar, beef, chicken, wheat and dairy products, and washing it all down with an amazing array of caffeinated and alcoholic beverages,” writes NYU Steinhardt’s Amy Bentley, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health. “Americans in particular consume over twice the amount of solid fats and added sugars recommended for daily intake, and they consume far fewer fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains than those who lived in earlier eras—and less than experts recommend for optimal health.”

Here's to our diet being both more nutritious and more sustainable.