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Rural Hospital Places Critical Bet On Health IT; Technology Raises Fears Of Hackers
Kaiser A small, rural hospital in Missouri is "rolling the dice" on electronic medical records, its CEO tells the Associated Press. The 47-bed hospitals borrowed nearly $1 million to implement an electronic records system, and that"s on top of a $370,000 operating deficit and staff layoffs. The executives are banking on a government bailout in the form of a "$3 million windfall" of stimulus-funded incentives for hospitals to switch to electronic record-keeping.
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Elderly To Benefit From First Silver Trial In UK Nursing Home
The results of the first ever silver antimicrobial product trial in a nursing home environment, published in the British Journal of Community Nursing, reveal that levels of potentially deadly bacteria can be dramatically reduced using products treated with silver antimicrobial agents, creating cleaner and safer nursing homes for elderly residents across the UK.
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Deworming Drug Could Help Reduce Spread Of HIV In Africa, Study Finds
Providing girls in rural Africa with a deworming drug could help reduce the spread of HIV, according to a study recently published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the New York Times reports. The drug, called praziquantel, costs about 32 cents per pediatric dose and prevents schistosomiasis, a worm disease that starts as a urinary tract infection. If untreated, schistosomiasis can lead to female genital sores that can facilitate HIV infection. Because the drug can kill the worms but cannot cure genital sores, girls should be protected before they reach sexual maturity, according to the Times. "For this relatively small investment, the reproductive health of young women would be improved," the authors from the Sabin Vaccine Institute, Imperial College London and Oslo University wrote, adding that "there is a reasonable chance that HIV/AIDS transmission can be reduced." There are about 207 million schistosomiasis cases worldwide, 90% of which occur in Africa, where humans are exposed usually through snail-infested water. According to a pilot program conducted in Burkina Faso, all 70 million cases among young children in Africa could be treated for $22 million, and repeating universal treatment every two years for 10 years would cost $112 million (McNeil, New York Times, 5/26).
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The Downside Of Microtubule Stability - Study Shows Stalled Microtubules Might Be Responsible For Some Cases Of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease

Stalled microtubules might be responsible for some cases of the neurological disorder Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, Tanabe and Takei report in the June 15, 2009 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology. A mutant protein makes the microtubules too stable to perform their jobs, the researchers find. The mutations behind CMT disease slow nerve impulses, reduce their strength, or both. One of these mutations leads to production of faulty dynamin 2, a protein that is crucial for endocytosis but also latches onto microtubules. Tanabe and Takei investigated how defective dynamin 2 hampers cells. Normal microtubules are continually extending and shrinking. But microtubules from cells that made the faulty version of dynamin 2 were abnormally stable, as measured by how many acetyl groups were attached to them. The researchers also found that blocking normal dynamin 2 with RNAi had the same effect as the mutation, confirming that one of dynamin 2"s functions is to promote microtubule turnover. Removing dynamin 2 shattered the Golgi complex, Tanabe and Takei discovered. Dynamic microtubules help construct the Golgi complex in two ways: they capture the vesicles that combine to form a mature Golgi complex; and they provide a track along which these vesicles can travel to their rendezvous point near the nucleus. By breaking up the Golgi apparatus and then watching the fragments reunite, the researchers found that dynamin 2 was essential for the capture step, not for transportation. Dynamin 2 also clings to microtubules of the mitotic spindle, and the team next wants to determine whether the protein regulates microtuble dynamics during the cell cycle. Notes: About the Journal of Cell Biology Founded in 1955, the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB) is published by the Rockefeller University Press. All editorial decisions on manuscripts submitted are made by active scientists in conjunction with our in-house scientific editors. JCB content is posted to PubMed Central, where it is available to the public for free six months after publication. Authors retain copyright of their published works and third parties may reuse the content for non-commercial purposes under a creative commons license. For more information, please visit http://www.jcb.org or visit the JCB press release archive at http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/rupress. Tanabe, K., and K. Takei. 2009. J. Cell Biol. doi:10.1083/jcb.200803153. Rita Sullivan Rockefeller University Press


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