Harvard Medical School's publishing arm has a new iPhone application for all things swine flu, pulling information from local and national health specialists, its own medical and business schools, and an outbreak locator, all downloadable from the iTunes Store.

Called the HMSMobile Swine Flu Center, it offers video guides for preventing infection, interactive tools to determine if an illness is likely to be swine flu, and advice for businesses dealing with illness, according to Harvard Health Publications. It also includes access to HealthMap's “Outbreaks Near Me” program, a real-time map of disease outbreaks developed by John Brownstein of Children's Hospital Boston and Clark Freifeld of MIT's Media Lab.

Emergency doctors at Children's Hospital Boston began seeing an increase in what they think are swine flu cases over the weekend, Dr. Anne Stack, clinical chief of emergency medicine, said yesterday.

About 25 to 30 children a day are coming to the hospital with the hallmarks of flu -- fever, cough, sore throat, congestion, and headaches -- pushing the total number of emergency patients 40 percent higher than usual for this time of year. Doctors are not testing patients for flu, but they see the uptick in visits as a sign of the spreading H1N1 virus.

"Normally this time in October we see 170 kids a day, but on Monday, we saw 240," Stack said. "We are assuming everything that looks like flu is probably H1N1."

Thirteen Massachusetts researchers and clinicians have been elected to the Institute of Medicine, a prestigious national body that makes recommendations on health and health-care policy.

The institute's 65 new members include:

Amy N. Finkelstein, professor of economics, MIT
Alfred L. Goldberg, professor of cell biology, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Sue J. Goldie, professor of public health, and director, Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Daniel A. Haber, professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center
Tyler E. Jacks, professor of biology, and director, David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, professor and chair, department of society, human development, and health, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, professor of pediatrics and health sciences and technology, Harvard Medical School; and chair, informatics program, Children's Hospital Boston
Dr. Joan Y. Reede, dean for diversity and community partnership and associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School
Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Clifford B. Saper, professor of neurology and neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, and professor and head, department of neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Dr. Megan Sykes, associate director, Transplantation Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, and professor of surgery and professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Bruce D. Walker, director, Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard University
Dr. Ralph Weissleder, professor of systems biology and radiology, Harvard Medical School, and director, Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Doctors who receive money from drug or medical device makers are expected to reveal those payments when speaking at professional meetings or submitting a manuscript to a medical journal. A new study led by Boston researchers found that the accuracy of physicians' disclosures fell short when compared to what orthopedic device makers reported.

Dr. Mininder Kocher of Children's Hospital Boston and his New England Journal of Medicine co-authors took a list of payments made to surgeons by five companies that develop and market knee and hip replacement implants. The information was published on company web sites in late 2007 as part of a settlement with the US Department of Justice, as this Globe story reported.

Before the March 2008 annual meeting of the Academy of American Orthopedic Surgeons, physicians who were making presentations or serving on committees for the meeting were asked to list payments they received that could indicate potential conflicts of interest. About seven out of 10 physicians disclosed financial relationships that the device manufacturers had already made public, the authors concluded.

"The thrust has been voluntary disclosure from the physicians," Kocher said in an interview. "Our study would suggest that that may not be so accurate and is difficult to validate."

Boston researchers will play a leading role in a new federal initiative focusing on stem cell biology and regenerative therapies.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute today announced $170 million in grants over seven years to 18 teams of researchers working in nine hubs across the country. The new NHLBI Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium includes Dr. George Daley of Children's Hospital Boston and Dr. Kenneth Chien and Dr. David Scadden of Massachusetts General Hospital.

Progenitor cells, unlike stem cells that can renew themselves indefinitely, can divide only a limited number of times and can become only certain kinds of cells. The hope is that stem and progenitor cells can be harnessed to grow new cells that could replace or repair cells damaged by heart, lung, and blood diseases.

Daley and Chien will head the hub studying ways to use induced pluripotent stem cells in regenerative therapy for heart and blood disorders.

Scadden and Dr. Jay Schneider of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas will lead efforts studying progenitor cell types in the heart and lung and exploring how the microenvironment within the heart, lung, and bone marrow determines what progenitor cells do.

Massachusetts remains second in the number of grants awarded through federal stimulus funding for biomedical research, after a new batch of grants were announced today by the White House.

With 1,148 grants made through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to date, the state trails only California's 1,604, in keeping with earlier grant totals tallied in this Sept. 4 Globe story.

Among the newly funded projects is a $4.5 million joint effort by scientists at Children's Hospital Boston, the Cambridge-based Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School to sequence whole genomes of people with autism. Dr. Christopher Walsh of Children's, Michael Greenberg of Harvard, and Stacey Gabriel and Dr. David Altshuler of the Broad are the co-investigators.

Their work will build on Walsh's earlier studies of 85 Middle Eastern patients who share ancestors and recessive forms of autism. The researchers will sequence their DNA to pinpoint disease-causing genes and also study parts of their genome that don't code for proteins -- sometimes called "junk DNA" -- but might influence gene activity related to autism. Gene activity in brain cells will also be examined.

Part of the federal Grand Opportunity program to spur research activity, the grant must be spent within 18 months.

Massachusetts has made a strong showing in a $348 million federal grant program that encourages biomedical researchers to engage in high-risk projects with the potential to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into treatments.

Eleven of 42 Transformational R01 grants are flowing to scientists in the state and 12 of 55 New Innovator award winners are based here. One of 18 Pioneer Award recipients is from Massachusetts. All three programs from the National Institutes of Health are designed to spur exploration that may have been deemed too risky in past rounds.

Boston researchers reported today a novel use for electronic medical records -- using data in patient records, they say they were able to identify likely victims of domestic abuse an average of two years before a diagnosis was actually made.

Ben Reis, Dr. Isaac Kohane, and Dr. Kenneth Mandl of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School studied six years of hospital admissions and emergency visits for patients over 18 years old. Based on the patient's history, including injuries and assaults, they determined whether patients met a definition of domestic abuse. Then they looked at actual diagnoses of domestic abuse.

"Our model predicted abuse two years before it appeared on medical records," Reis said in an interview. The article appears online in the British Medical Journal.

Sugar-sweetened beverages are a target in the fight against obesity and taxes are one of the weapons governments should use, researchers say in a New England Journal of Medicine commentary appearing online today.

A group of academic and state specialists in public health, including Dr. David Ludwig of Children's Hospital Boston and Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, review research linking sugary drinks not just to weight gain but also to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as this recent Globe article also reported. The Journal authors say that taxes can cut consumption by making it too expensive and finance health programs with the proceeds, following the model of programs to curb smoking.

A national tax of 1 cent per ounce of sugar-sweetened beverage would yield $14.9 billion in the first year, they write. According to this calculator cited in the analysis, that could mean $320 million for Massachusetts.

The authors acknowledge that taxing sweetened beverages won't solve the obesity epidemic, but it is one way to cut consumption, which doubled in the United States between 1977 and 2002.

"Seat-belt legislation and tobacco taxation do not eliminate traffic accidents and heart disease but are nevertheless sound policies," they write. "Similarly, obesity is unlikely to yield to any single policy intervention, so it is important to pursue multiple opportunities to obtain incremental gains."

The scientists who gained international attention in the spring when they brought a real-time map of swine flu outbreaks to the world are putting disease information about your neighborhood in the palm of your hand.

John Brownstein of Children's Hospital Boston and Clark Freifeld of MIT's Media Lab today announced Outbreaks Near Me, a free application designed for Apple's iPhone or iTouch devices that allows users to see information about infectious disease outbreaks where they are. The application, available here, is based on HealthMap, which gathers, evaluates, and maps data about emerging outbreaks based on Google searches, news reports, blogs, and chats in addition to traditional official sources.

"People have their cell phones with them at all times, and especially in other parts of the world, cell phones are much more used than PCs," Brownstein said. "Cell phones represent an extraordinary tool to provide location-based service. You can search for restaurants near you. Why not understand what is happening around you in public health?"

Outbreaks Near Me also lets users send their own reports, including photos, to the HealthMap team, which will review them for possible inclusion on its world map. The application will also send alerts about new outbreaks in the user's area, or tell them if they've just entered a new place where disease activity has been reported. Brownstein said they are looking at other devices where the application could be used.

Intended for both the general public and public health practitioners, HealthMap drew the most attention in its three years of existence in the spring, when a novel strain of flu known as H1N1 emerged in Mexico and quickly spread around the world.

"Historically what we have tried to do is to be accessible to everyday audiences, as opposed to being only a tool for epidemiologists," Freifeld said. "We've taken that a step farther and allow people to have HealthMap in the palms of their hands."