Johns Hopkins Medicine News

The Department of Medicine will host a forum featuring official surrogates of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama at a special Grand Rounds. The format will include presentations representing each candidate’s position on health care issues and policies, including NIH funding for scientific research and ensuring fairness as it relates to indigent care and access.

Three Johns Hopkins University researchers have been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. Harry C. Dietz, M.D., Lisa A. Cooper, M.D., M.P.H., and Nancy Kass, D.S., are among 65 new members nationwide. Election to this prestigious body affirms their remarkable contributions to medical science, health care and public health, as well as to the education of generations of physicians. It is one of the highest honors for those in the biomedical profession.

An international effort led by physician scientists at Johns Hopkins to control the global spread of HIV-related tuberculosis and treat the dual epidemics in hardest-hit countries has received $32 million in additional funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Institute of Medicine has awarded the 2008 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Award in Mental Health to Paul R. McHugh, M.D., the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and professor of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Working with genetically engineered mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins have shown that daily doses of a standardized extract from the leaves of the ginkgo tree can prevent or reduce brain damage after an induced stroke.

Existing recommendations for treating vitamin D deficiency in children with cystic fibrosis (CF) are too low to cover the serious need, leaving most at high risk for bone loss and rickets, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

A critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins who has reviewed recent studies of intensive care unit (ICU) patients and data from The Johns Hopkins Hospital concludes that the routine use of deep sedation and bed rest in ICU patients may be causing unnecessary and long-term physical impairment and poor quality of life after hospital discharge.