Sound Medicine -- April 12, 2003

Hosts Barbara Lewis talks to physicians and researchers about:

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Acute burn prevention

An anniversary for the Kinsey Institute

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Each day brings new discoveries about SARS; the disease made headlines this week in Indiana, for example, and scientists have finally discovered the exact virus involved. For the latest news on SARS, we recommend tuning to National Public Radio or visiting the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Web site, which we've linked to the Sound Medicine home page. For background information, we turn to Dr. Kenneth Fife. A professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, he tracks the formation, transmission and containment of viruses.

He says "new" viruses are really variants of old viruses. Consider the influenza virus, which varies year to year. Viruses have sloppy replication habits, he explains, and easily incorporate genetic material from other viruses, including those that run in animals. When a virus contains genetic material from a duck or a pig, the newly introduced mutation can sicken many people. He defines a virus as a small infectious agent that requires a living cell to grow and copy and that can damage the cells it's growing in, causing illness.

Dr. Fife says until we can quickly and accurately diagnose SARS, it is difficult to know the number of people infected and the actual death rate. Even severity varies, he says. For every case we determine, there could be many more people who don't get seriously ill. So far we've had no big outbreaks in the US, but we don't know why, he reports.

Resources:

The Centers for Disease Control contains a wide variety of information on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The Indiana State Department of Health Web site provides the latest posting on SARS information for Indiana.

National Public Radio carries the latest news coverage of SARS developments.

Burn prevention

On April 25th, the brand new Indiana University Burn Center at Wishard Hospital opens in Indianapolis. It is the only adult/child burn center in the state. Among other amenities, the multi-million-dollar facility includes 11 intensive-care patient rooms with video cameras for virtual visitation. Joining us to talk about the new center and burn prevention is Dr. Rajiv Sood, associate professor of surgery at the IU School of Medicine and medical director of the burn center. We also talk with Zoe Krause, a burn survivor and volunteer with the People's Burn Foundation.

Dr. Sood reports the most common burns in adults are thermal; for kids, it is scalding. He says people over 70 and young children are most likely to receive serious burns, and also tend to have worse prognoses. Dr. Sood says 30% to 50% of burns are preventable. Be vigilant with children and seniors, he urges. Keep children out of the kitchen. Set your hot water heater down to 125 degrees. Don't pour gasoline on outdoor brush fires. Train your family in a fire-escape plan.

Unfortunately, severe burns are a lifelong injury, both physical and psychological. Burn-patient and burn-advocate Zoe Krause, now 26 years old, describes how she was scalded in a bathtub as at 18-months. She details her difficult recovery and her life simply dealing with chronically damaged skin, including over 100 skin grafts. "You just can't forget about it," she says of her injury. Despite outreach efforts of people like Krause and groups like the Burn Foundation, Dr. Sood says there's an inherent problem teaching burn prevention: until they or someone close to them experiences a burn, people think it won't happen to them.

Resources:

Read more about burn patient advocacy throughout the state at the People's Burn Foundation Web site. Includes information about Brave Heart camp for kids.

NIH's Medline service provides encyclopedic information about burns, including great factsheets to help burn-proof your home.

The American Burn Association is a research and educational group for medical professionals.

An anniversary for the Kinsey Institute

In 1953, Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana, published the groundbreaking work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The volume followed the best-selling Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published five years earlier, and spun Kinsey into the national spotlight. Fifty years later, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, is celebrating the anniversary of the female sexuality book by offering a series of lectures, exhibitions and events. John Bancroft, MD, current director of the Kinsey Institute, talks with us today about the significance of Kinsey's book.

Dr. Bancroft reports that initial public reaction was mixed. It shocked people to read descriptions of women as being more sexual than they assumed -- to learn that 30% of women had sex before marriage, for example. The sample of women surveyed focused on college-educated women and was small, Dr. Bancroft says, and it underrepresented black and working-class women, but for that group it was accurate.

Today the Institute research looks at how women differ in arousal and in their inhibition of arousal. His studies have shown that Protestant women are more inhibited than black and Catholic women, though it's not clear why. There is more equality between men and women today, he says, but that ideally he'd like to see men no longer in control of female sexuality.

Dr. Bancroft emphasizes the need for people to be responsible in sexual behavior, despite the media's barrage of irresponsible sexual messages. He advises parents convey the same values to girls and boys and acknowledge that young people can be responsible. He says responsible teens find it easier to be gradual and cautious in their sexual explorations.

Resources:

Learn more about the history and current research of the Kinsey Institute on the Web.

Dr. Bancroft advocates Surgeon General David Satcher's "call to action" promoting sexual health and responsible sexual behavior. Read the news release on Satcher's remarks or the full report, both published online by the American Social Health Association.

Recent more news stories from Indiana University covering the 50th anniversary of Kinsey's landmark publication.

 

Is there a medical topic you'd like us to cover? Reach us by email: soundmed@iu.edu
or by phone:
(317) 274-4848.

For a long time it was believed that the brain did not contain stem cells -- the body's basic building blocks that can turn into any type of cell. But 10 years ago, Dr. Samuel Weiss of the University of Calgary discovered the brain did indeed contain stem cells and that they migrated to the olfactory bulb to produce neurons necessary for the sense of smell. Now, a new discovery by Dr. Weiss and his team finds that a certain activity actually triggers the development of new neurons. Which of the following activities is it?

A. Aerobics
B. Sex
C. Boxing

Find out!

Scars symbolize the body's amazing ability to heal. So why are scars permanent, always reminding us of the wound that preceded them?

Find out!

Many new diseases besides SARS have appeared, apparently out of the blue, over the last century. Many now are pandemics due to easy human exchange between continents. Here are a few:

• The dengue epidemic first occurred in 1779-1780 in Asia, Africa and North America. For 200 years, it was considered a benign disease of visitors to the tropics. After World War II, a pandemic of dengue fever occurred and has intensified during the last 15 years. Infection occurs through an infected, day-biting mosquito and symptoms include sudden onset of fever and severe headaches.
• West Nile Virus originated in Africa and was identified in 1937. It spreads through bites from infected mosquitoes and causes flu-like symptoms. In 1999, the first outbreak in the US killed 6 people in New York.
• Ebola, a non-curable fatal disease that begins with fever and muscle aches followed by hemorrhaging, originated in Africa and was identified in 1976. It is said that the virus may have spread by human contact with infected primates. It is not found in the U.S.
• The Nipah virus first broke out in Malaysia in 1999 through infected pigs. The virus' natural hosts, however, are fruit bats. This flu-like disease is not found in the US It killed about 105 people in 1999.
• HIV/AIDS, now found worldwide, originated in Africa and was identified in 1981. It may have first been caught by hunters butchering infected chimpanzees. This disease that has killed over 28 million people weakens the immune system and spreads through the exchange of bodily fluids.
• In 2003, SARS originated in China and has claimed at least 84 lives. Its symptoms resemble flu and pneumonia, though its cause and host are as yet unknown.

Resources: Kari Haskell of the The New York Times; the Centers for Disease Control.