Monday, August 27, 2007

Today's Globe: avoiding hospital infections, CSI: Harvard, Botswana babies, biotech chief, MIT Museum, California health plan

Every year, 1.7 million people contract infections while hospitalized. Officials are fighting the problem, but there are things patients should know to avoid getting sicker.

Harvard archeologists have extracted usable DNA from long-dried spit on wads of prehistoric gum. Employing methods now common at modern-day crime scenes, they also managed to gather and analyze DNA from 2,000-year-old bloodstained garments, they report in next month's Journal of Field Archeology.

The southern Africa country of Botswana has reduced the HIV transmission rate from mother to child to less than 4 percent, providing fresh evidence that several hundred thousand babies in the developing world can be saved annually from acquiring the deadly virus.

Robert K. Coughlin (left), a top economic development aide to Governor Deval Patrick, waited six weeks before notifying the governor that he had talked to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council about becoming its president, a period during which he continued to advance the administration's life science initiatives, according to e-mails and telephone records obtained by the Globe.

The day Dr. Leslie Halpern (right) discovered her calling was the day a woman walked into the emergency room at Lincoln Hospital in the Fort Apache section of the Bronx, her face slashed with a box blade.

Also in Health/Science, is it true that grapefruit juice has more nutrients than other fruit juices and do Storrow Drive lane closures add to greenhouse gas emissions?

Next month when the MIT Museum will complete a $3 million expansion, knocking out the ground-floor walls and replacing them with plate glass that will literally shine light on the latest research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brain trust.

California did not start the current wave of efforts to overhaul the American healthcare system, but what happens in Sacramento over the next few weeks could have a big impact on whether the drive gains momentum -- or peters out.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:59 AM

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