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A.
How a Simple Adjustment May Save Thousands of Lives
Narrator:
This is Science Today. A national, clinical trial
has found thousands of lives may be saved by simply
adjusting a mechanical ventilator that supplies
air to patients suffering from Acute Respiratory
Distress Syndrome, or ARDS. Dr. Michael Matthay
of the University of California, San Francisco who
led the ten-city study, says ARDS is a severe type
of respiratory failure in which the lungs fill with
fluid.
Matthay: There are probably about sixty to
eighty thousand people a year dying from ARDS. And
the number of breast cancer deaths each year is
forty-three thousand, so it's a major health care
problem.
Narrator: Matthay and his colleagues cut
the mortality rate down by 22 percent after re-setting
the mechanical ventilators and giving patients shorter,
oxygen-rich puffs of air, rather than the larger
volumes previously given.
Matthay: The savings should be remarkable
because in addition to reducing mortality, the study
showed that the duration of time the patient spends
on the ventilator, on the breathing machine is reduced
also.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa
Branin.
B.
Pesticide-Protective Clothing for Farm Workers
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Farm workers and even home
gardeners may benefit from chemically treated clothing
similar to anti-bacterial fabrics in the works for
the healthcare industry. Gang Sun, a professor of
textiles and fabrics at the University of California,
Davis, says his lab is working on developing cotton/polyester
fabrics treated with a chemical that can detoxify
pesticides on contact. The chemistry is based on the
safe disinfectant compounds used in swimming pools.
Sun: Because we realized that the disinfectants
not only kills the germs, it also decomposes some
toxic chemicals.
Narrator: In initial testing Sun and his colleagues
found fabrics treated with this compound almost instantly
broke down two toxic agricultural pesticides into
small, harmless fragments.
Sun:
We
are still studying what would be the fragments after
the decomposition on the fabric because we want to
prove all the fragments should be a safe chemical
than the original pesticides. We're still doing the
research on it.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Managed Care Plans and Preventive Services
Narrator: This is Science Today. A health care
watchdog organization recently found that although
nearly half the nation's premature deaths were linked
to such preventable causes as unhealthy diet, lack
of exercise or substance abuse, few managed care plans
routinely offer services to change these behaviors.
Kathryn Phillips, a health services researcher at
the University of California, San Francisco, says
managed care plans historically haven't offered these
services..
Phillips:Often because they don't see the results
- the members changed plans before the plan can reap
the benefits of a behavior change and it's sometimes
much more difficult to provide that type of in-depth
preventive service than it is to provide a simple
screening procedure.
Narrator: Phillips cautions against thinking
of managed care as one monolithic type of health plan.
Phillips: These days, most plans have some
type of managed care feature, so we need to learn
to think more specifically about what the characteristics
of specific plans are.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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D.
A New Way to Measure Evasive, Small Pollution Particles
Narrator:This
is Science Today. Small pollution particles that come
from auto exhaust, power plants and a certain amount
of photochemical smog, penetrate deeply into people's
lungs. The more particles there are, the more people
die and are admitted to hospitals for respiratory
problems. Understanding just how these particles affect
our health has proven difficult, because it's hard
to get good measurements of these chemicals between
the gas and airborne particle phase. Lara Gundel,
a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, has come up with an air sampler to do
just that.
Gundel: We devised a way to accurately separate
the gases and the particles by basically trapping
out the gases first and then catching the particles
and then measuring the particles.
Narrator:This is done using what's called a
diffusion denuder.
Gundel: Denude just means to remove, or to
strip. The reason it's called a diffusion denuder
is because it separates the gases and particles based
on their different diffusion properties and speeds.
The gases will go really fast like toddlers and the
particles will go along with the flow - like a log
in a river stream.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
How Doctors Can Better Control Pain
Narrator:
This is Science Today. There are over two million
deaths a year in the United States and more than half
of these deaths occurs in hospitals. Steve Pantilat,
a hospitalist at the University of California, San
Francisco, says up to forty percent of people, regardless
of the illness they had at the time of death, suffered
moderate to severe pain.
Pantilat:
These are people who are hospitalized. They're
being cared for in an intensive care unit, so they
had plenty of access to medical care and yet, they
had moderate to severe pain at the end of life.
Narrator: A previous study found one of the
reasons for this was the doctors' inability to adequately
assess pain. In his own research, Pantilat, found
doctors who simply believed their patients were in
pain, were better at controlling it.
Pantilat: What I say to doctors when I teach
about this is believe the patient. We have no way
to measure whether someone is in pain. There's no
machine. There's no blood test to tell whether or
not a person is in pain. And in particular, people
who have chronic pain, those people don't even look
like they're in pain. And yet, what we know is that
we're not very good at telling and we have to believe
the patient..
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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