Anne Harding

Healing and hope

What do you do to start reading healing and hope? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. Its not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this healing and hope.

Sonia Buist: expanding our knowledge of COPD

International Advisory Board Karen Antman (Boston) Valerie Beral (Oxford) Robert Beaglehole (Auckland) Anthony Costello (London) Robert Fletcher (Boston) Suzanne Fletcher (Boston) Karen Gelmon (Vancouver) David Grimes (Durham) Ana Langer (Mexico City) Judith Lumley (Melbourne) Elizabeth Molyneux (Blantyre) Christopher Murray (Boston) Alwyn Mwinga (Lusaka) Marie-Louise Newell (Somkhele) Magne Nylenna (Oslo) Stuart Pocock (London) Giuseppe Remuzzi (Bergamo) Caroline Savage (Birmingham) Ken Schulz (Chapel Hill) Frank Shann (Melbourne) Anne Tattersfield (Nottingham) Jan Vandenbroucke (Leiden) Cesar Victora (Pelotas) Nick White (Bangkok) Peer reviewed and fast-tracked to publication in 4 weeks

On the origins of life

Before you go, see the documentary “Living Primates” (in Dropbox or on Canvas), read “Chapter 6” in your reader, and then read up on the primates at the zoo on the San Francisco Zoo’s website (www.sfzoo.org > Explore > Animals > Mammals). On the right, you will see a list of mammals that includes primates such as Chimpanzee, Gorilla (Western Lowland), Lemurs (Black, Black & White Ruffed, Red Ruffed, Ring Tailed), Monkeys (Black Howler, Emperor Tamarin, Francois Langur, Patas, Pied Tamarin), Siamang, etc.

Paul Whelton: rebuilding Tulane after Hurricane Katrina

www.thelancet.com Vol 367 February 25, 2006 643 Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on a Monday, the levees broke and flooded the city on Tuesday, and by Friday Paul Whelton had helped engineer the evacuation of Tulane University Health Sciences Center’s faculty, staff, and patients—more than 1500 people in all. “We didn’t lose a single patient or staff or faculty or anybody, which was just amazing”, says Whelton, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Tulane University School of Medicine and Senior Vice President for Health Sciences. “No single one person is the hero in any of this—it’s a group of people”, Whelton says. He points to the range of people who helped respond: the facilities staff who used electric chain-saws to cut down light poles on top of a parking garage so helicopters could land; the faculty and residents who crisscrossed among Tulane’s hospitals and clinics by boat and canoe to care for patients; and the volunteers who returned to the campus under armed guard a week after the hurricane to rescue biological materials and research animals. “There were snipers on the street, there was violent crime of all kinds”, says Laura Levy, an associate vice president for research at the university. While the contents of freezers and refrigerators—including tissue samples from the Bogalusa Heart Study dating back four decades—were lost, the rescuers managed to save genetically modified rodents and tissue samples preserved in liquid nitrogen tanks. “That really put us months ahead of where we would have been otherwise”, Levy said. 3 weeks after the hurricane, the medical school was up and running at temporary quarters at Baylor University in Houston, Texas, and the university succeeded in placing its 1400 public health degree candidates at other institutions around the country within the month. About 50 medical residents, as well as university researchers, were relocated and continued work. Whelton has been a key player in the effort to keep Tulane alive as a medical school and research institution, which has required wrenching sacrifices and months of 7-day working weeks. In December, budget shortfalls forced the medical school’s senior leadership to make 130 faculty members redundant. The dean resigned, and Whelton took his place. Colleagues say Whelton’s calm demeanour and authority as an eminent and active researcher has made him the ideal person for a very difficult job. “He’s been a tremendous positive force”, said Lee Hamm, Chair of the Department of Medicine at Tulane. “It’s a time of great frustration and challenge at almost every level and he’s been working almost literally around the clock, always with a very positive attitude.” Daily life remains a challenge in New Orleans. “Roads aren’t always open, there’s trash everywhere—it’s just difficult. Things don’t work. The post office doesn’t deliver mail very much.” What’s been particularly heartbreaking, Whelton says, is that Tulane had been experiencing unprecedented growth before Katrina, including a tripling of National Institutes of Health research grants during the past 5 years and investing

The stem cell race

100 million in facilities. “The most difficult thing is the sadness you feel, that you were really on a sort of exponential curve for growth, a very exciting and dynamic campus where everyone was pumped up”, Whelton recalls. Whelton played a part in building that vibrant campus, joining Tulane in 1997 as Dean of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Previously he was at Johns Hopkins University, where he directed the programme in clinical epidemiology for the school of public health and the medical school and was founding Director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research. ”He was really a pioneer in bridging the gap between the school of medicine and the school of public health and doing it in such a way that it would create a whole new generation of investigators”, says Josef Coresh, a professor at Johns Hopkins who took over the directorship of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Training Program from Whelton. Whelton came to Johns Hopkins as an intern in 1970 after medical school at the National University of Ireland, University College Cork. He stayed on as a resident for 2 more years, spent a year as a fellow in nephrology, and then joined the university’s faculty, where he remains an adjunct professor. Early on, he became interested in chronic disease, especially efforts to prevent such diseases at a population level by controlling risk factors. “Paul was an early and incredibly effective spokesman for this public health approach”, says Michael Klag, Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That kind of thinking has been incorporated into many of the guidelines for prevention and treatment of heart disease and stroke.” Whelton’s career success reflects his energy and capacity for work, which has clearly served him well in recent months. “He’s always been a builder”, says Coresh. “It makes sense that he would be rebuilding in a creative way.” Whelton’s efforts seem to be having a positive effect. 98% of Tulane’s medical school students have returned, and applications for the medical school—one of the most popular in the USA—remain at pre-Katrina levels. The School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine reopened in January, and 95% of its students are back. All key medical centre buildings will be open by next month. “People are back in their labs, they’re working diligently, we’re reorganising”, says Whelton.“We have a very positive feeling about our future. I think we’ll do very well.”

Sir John Robert Vane

opportunity” opened in East Asia with the U.S. military’s commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, for the foreseeable future, with the war on terrorism. And this past May, Beijing delivered one of its most explicit threats so far to Taipei’s pro-independence leaders: Either abandon your “dangerous lurch toward independence” and submit to Chinese sovereignty, or the “Chinese people will crush (your) schemes firmly and thoroughly at any cost.” Clearly, the Chinese dragon is crouching in “strategic ambiguity” no longer. With China’s rise as a military power looming over the Asian-Pacific, and Beijing stifling the voices of dissent everywhere under its immediate control, the window of opportunity for democracy in East Asia is shrinking fast. To date, Taiwan’s commitment to its own defense has been inadequate and unfocused, in part because of its fear of Chinese retribution, but also because of its strategic reliance on the U.S. to repel any Chinese aggression. Ultimately, however, if Taiwan is to become and remain a fully sovereign democracy, it will have to acquire the means to defend itself. The United States has been reluctant to impress that point upon Taipei, and only modest in its efforts to arm Taiwan, out of concern for upsetting the already fragile military balance in the region. But the time has come for a serious consideration of the consequences and potential perils of American “strategic ambiguity” in the Taiwan Strait.