Dr. Larry Corey

Dr. Larry Corey, M.D., president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Academy is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy-research centers.

The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Dr. Corey has led the Hutchinson Center since January 2011 and has held other leadership positions there since 1996, first as head of infectious disease sciences in the Clinical Research Division and later as senior vice president and co-director of the Center’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division.

Dr. Corey is an expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development. His research has focused on herpes viruses, HIV and other viral infections, particularly those associated with cancer.

He also is principal investigator of the Hutchinson Center-based HIV Vaccine Trials Network, an international collaboration of scientists and institutions that combines clinical trials and laboratory-based studies to accelerate the development of HIV vaccines.

Dr. Corey is a professor of laboratory medicine and medicine, adjunct professor of pediatrics and microbiology, and holder of the Lawrence Corey Endowed Chair in Medical Virology at the University of Washington. He is also an infectious disease physician at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Dr. Corey is the Hutchinson Center’s second president to be elected to the Academy. Yeast geneticist Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., a 2001 Nobel laureate, was elected in 1998. He led the Center from 1997 until 2010.

Corey is among 220 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business and public affairs who have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012 class of fellows.

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy fellows have included: George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony Oct. 6 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Mother Jones: Santorum In ’93: More Government Needed in Health Care

Rick Santorum (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

If elected president, Santorum vows, he will end the “tyranny” of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Yet as an up-and-coming congressman in the early 1990s, Santorum took a much different line. Then—like now—health care was one of the nation’s most divisive issues. In 1993, Republicans were up in arms about a health care reform bill spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and pushed by President Bill Clinton. … During that fiery debate, Santorum said it would be a mistake to allow the delivery of health care services to be determined only by the market. He asserted that Republicans were “wrong” to let the marketplace decide how health care works. He instead argued that government should play a “proactive” role in shaping the health care marketplace “to make it work better” (Andy Kroll and Tim Murphy, 3/5).

The Atlantic: Making The Best Of What Is Often The Very Worst Time Of Our Lives (Book Excerpt)

As difficult as things are now, these may turn out to be the good old days. How we die is already a public health crisis, and care for people through the end of life is poised to become a generation-long social catastrophe. … Very soon, for the first time in human history, older people will outnumber younger people on our planet. In the United States, one in five adults is 65 or older. … Those of us who are concerned about long-term care have good reasons to worry. The nursing homes of the future — our future! — may make today’s nursing homes look like luxury hotels. It doesn’t have to turn out that way (Ira Byock, 3/7).

American Medical News: Legal Risks Of Going Paperless

System breaches. Modification allegations. E-discovery demands. These issues are becoming common courtroom themes as physicians transition from paper to EMRs, legal experts say. Not only are EMRs becoming part of medical negligence lawsuits, they are creating additional liability. … Studies are mixed about how EMRs will impact liability for physicians. … Whatever the future holds for EMRs, it’s important that doctors reduce their liability risks during system implementation, legal experts say. Being aware of potential legal pitfalls prevents doctors from falling victim to technology intended to do good — not cause hardship (Alicia Gallegos, 3/5).

The Daily Beast: Talking About Sex Is the Only Way To Stop HIV

[The United States has] been stuck at about 50,000 new infections each year for more than a decade. Compared with the challenges facing places like sub-Saharan Africa, our failure is particularly galling: we have plenty of drugs that work, the money and systems to administer them, and effective, if not particularly popular, ways to interrupt the spread (condoms, clean needles, abstinence). So why aren’t we doing better? The answer is blindingly simple: sex. Almost all HIV in the U.S. is spread by sexual intercourse, yet when faced with this fact, we act like a bumbling junior-high-school kid hearing about the birds and the bees for the first time. As a result, we have before us an unabated 30-year epidemic of a sexually transmitted disease (Kent Sepkowitz, 3/5).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

“It is time to sound the alarm,” said Dr. Judy Wasserheit, vice chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, who wrote the article with Dr. Gail Bolan of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. P. Frederick Sparling of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill.

Gonorrhea bacteria - Photo CDC

Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease that can infect the genital tract, throat and anus.

There are more than 600,000 cases of gonorrhea a year in the U.S., making it one of the most common reportable infections in the country.

Untreated, gonorrhea can cause a number of serous complications, including infertility, a chronic painful pelvic condition in women called pelvic inflammatory disease, and ectopic pregnancy, a serious complication in which the fetus develops in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus.

In rare cases, the bacteria can travel through the bloodstream and infect joints, heart valves and the brain.

The bacteria that causes gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, has a history of quickly acquiring the ability to resist antibiotics. In the 1940s it became resistant to sulfa drugs, in the 1980s to penicillins and tetracyclines, and by 2007 to flouroquinolones.

Today, treatment with a class of antibiotics called cephalosporins is considered the most reliable option, but resistance to this class of drugs is on the rise both abroad and in the U.S., raising concerns that doctors here will soon begin seeing cases they cannot cure.

Untreatable cases have not yet been reported in the U.S., but they have appeared in Asia and Europe and a worrying number of strains in the U.S. are showing signs of resistance to cephalosporins.

Resistance to one of the cephalosporins has risen 17-fold in the U.S. over the past few years, Dr. Wasserheit and her colleagues write, increasing from just 0.1 percent of cases in 2006 to 1.7 percent in the first part of last year.

Resistance has been increasing even faster in the western U.S., reaching 3.6 percent of all cases last year and 4.7 percent of cases among men who have sex with men.

Although higher doses may overcome the ability of these strains to resist cephalosporins for a time, Dr. Wasserheit and her colleagues write, urgent action is needed now to prevent the spread of these strains and to develop new treatments.

“There is much to do, and the threat of untreatable gonorrhea is emerging rapidly,” they conclude.

 To learn more:

• Visit the National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus information page on gonorrhea.

• Visit the Public Health – Seattle & King County’s page on Sexually Transmitted Infections.

Supporters of the initiatives say these new services allow students to get good information about sex anonymously. But there are also those who oppose these initiatives, writes Hoffman.

…proponents of abstinence-based sexual education argue that these digital services presume that sexual activity among teenagers is the norm, and do not spend enough time on alternatives.

“They are only focusing on the risk-reduction model,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, which hopes to kick off its online service for teenagers next year.

Those who run digital programs say they simply want teens to have accurate information, to help them make good decisions. Even though popular culture is saturated with sex, facts and advice can be hard to find.

To learn more:

• Read Hoffman’s article Sex Education Gets Directly to Youths, via Text.

Some of the services discussed:

• ICYC – In Case You’re Curious

• Chicago’s The Sex-Ed Loop

• California’s The Hookup.

• SexEtc: www.sexetc.org

• National Abstinence Education Association: www.abstinenceassociation.org

It is projected that 1 in 50 Latinos will become infected with HIV in their lifetime, yet fewer than half of Latinos in the U.S. have been tested for the virus.

Among Latino men about 80 percent of infections occur among gay and bisexual men, with the largest number of new infections among gay and bisexual men under the age of 30, according the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Of these, 1 in 5 are unaware they carry the virus, the CDC says.

In King County there are more  750 Latinos who have HIV or AIDS. Of these, Public Health – Seattle & King Count officials say, 40 percent received a late diagnosis, meaning they were diagnosed with a immunodeficiency due to the infection shortly after their first positive HIV test result.

Many of these individuals could have been infected for years, unknowingly infecting others and missing the chance for early treatment.

“HIV medications work best when started early,” says said Dr. Matthew Golden, Director of Public Health’s HIV/STD Program. “The earlier we catch infection, the sooner people can get medication that will keep them healthy. And they can consistently use condoms to keep their partners from getting infected.”

In King County, HIV has a disproportionate impact on the Latino community, which makes up 6 percent of the population but 13% of people recently diagnoses with the infection.

To raise awareness in the Latino community Public Health – Seattle & King County and Seattle’s Latino LGBT organization Entre Hermanos have teamed up to launch a new campaign called, All Together: The Latino HIV Testing Campaign, or Todos Juntos: Campaña Latina para la Prueba del VIH.

As part of the initiative the campaign has released a new video, directed by local filmmaker Drew Emery, that features a broad cross-section of Latino and Latina community members speaking about the importance of routine HIV testing.

The CDC recommends that all adolescents and adults age 13 to 64 be tested for HIV, that people in high-risk groups to be tested at least yearly, and that HIV testing be part of standard prenatal and pregnancy testing.

A number of programs provide low-cost options to pay for HIV testing and treatment for people have HIV or AIDS.

Some of local testing locations with Spanish speaking staff include:

• Consejo
• Sea Mar
• Entre Hermanos
• Gay City
• Public Health clinics

• Go to Public Health’s HIV/STD Program website for more information about these clinics or SabiaUD.org for information in Spanish.

• Or, to find confidential testing resources near you, visit hivtest.org, a fully English-Spanish bilingual site.