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A. The Role of Nurses in Patience Care & Safety
Narrator: This is Science Today. The University of California, San Francisco will lead a nationwide study on the role of nurses in patient care and safety. Mary Blegen, director of the Center for Patient Safety at the university's School of Nursing, says they are one of nine projects funded to take part in a two-year study measuring nursing quality in hospitals. Previous research has indicated that the more nurses are around, the lower the mortality rate in hospitals.
Blegen: One of the unique things about nurses is that they are there, twenty-four hours a day at the patient's bedside and if there are sufficient numbers of nurses and they are astute, then they are monitoring that patient to see any moment-to-moment change and then preventing a complication or incident from getting much worse.
Narrator: Blegen says a number of research studies had a lot of inconsistencies due to different measures and ways of analyzing data.
Blegen: So the advantage of our project is we will have much better data available to us than have been available in the past.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B. A Cutting Edge Radiation Treatment Technology
Narrator: This is Science Today. Tomotherapy is cutting-edge radiation technology that allows doctors to visualize a tumor and apply radiation at the same time with pinpoint accuracy. This lessens the dose of radiation to normal, surrounding tissues or organs.
Vijayakumar: This is a new, emerging technology – image guidance – and in the coming years, this will become the standard. Image guidance means when we give the treatment, we can actually have the treatment guided by the images.
Narrator: Dr. Srinivasan Vijayakumar is chair of the University of California, Davis Cancer Center 's Radiation Oncology Clinic. The center is the first facility in Northern California to acquire and use this technology.
Vijayakumar: We treat almost all cancers in these image guided therapy machines. Mostly, anywhere the tumor is surrounded by sensitive, normal tissues is where this technology will be extremely useful.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Striving for Better Therapeutic Interventions for Stroke Patients
Narrator: This is Science Today. Stroke remains the leading cause of adult disability in this country due to the amount of brain tissue that's often damaged during an attack. That's why researchers are working on providing early treatment for stroke patients to lessen the amount of tissue damage in the hopes that the brain's own repair mechanisms will be more effective and lead to a greater recovery. Dr. Steve Cramer, co-director of the clinical stroke program at the University of California, Irvine, says most stroke patients do get somewhat better after a stroke.
Cramer: That is to say, the natural history of stroke, is that there is some behavior of recovery, it's just not enough. So, while we work on getting people into the hospital in those first precious few hours with one hand and we work on getting the clot busters to patients with that one hand, getting them in those first few hours, at the same time, we can target these repair processes, which have a much wider window for therapeutic intervention.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D. Researchers Uncover a Security Risk with Cell Phones
Narrator: This is Science Today. A professor of computer science and two graduate students at the University of California, Davis has discovered vulnerabilities in cell phones that send or receive multimedia files. The weakness was found in the multimedia message service protocol, or MMS. Professor Hao Chen says their study revealed the service could be exploited over the Internet and potentially render thousands of phones useless.
Chen: They could build something called a hit list of vulnerable phones that you can attack from MMS and they discovered that they could surreptitiously drain the batteries of the phones on a hit list. Our attack will try to prevent your phone from entering the standby mode.
Narrator: But does this type of study give away too much information to the wrong people?
Chen: It's beneficial to disclose vulnerabilities to the public at an appropriate time. So, an appropriate time would be after you have notified the manufacturers or the service providers of the vulnerabilities and give them time to fix the problem.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Early Diagnosis of Several Foreign Animal Diseases
Narrator: This is Science Today. A rapid, early diagnostic test that can simultaneously test for several foreign animal diseases, including the viral foot-and-mouth disease that caused about $5 billion in losses to the United Kingdom five years ago, has been developed by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Veterinarian Pamela Hullinger says they worked in partnership with the University of California, Davis and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Hullinger: Homeland security is very interested in very large scale catastrophic events that impact national economy. And a disease like foot and mouth disease could be a disease that would impact this country at that scale and so they were very interested in supporting work to help on the early detection side to minimize the scope and scale, as well as to help enhance the response to foot and mouth disease outbreak, should it occur.
Narrator: Hullinger admits she didn't think such a test was possible.
Hullinger: But largely due to the technology that was developed here, it has been done. And so hopefully the country, as well as the world as a whole, is better off for this.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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