Hail and Farewell

The Brennemann Blog is retiring

It has been our pleasure to bring you medical news stories of significance and to post alerts of important commentary from the medical field.



This has been a one-person operation (despite the editorial we) so the Brennemann Blog, from the Brennemann Library, must cease its service.

Thank you for subscribing or being lured into reading it by means of my e-mails.

Look forward to even more virtual communication as the new hospital becomes a reality.



Irene Wood

Tracking the Who, When and Where of the Flu Bug

How viruses spread through real-life social networks was tracked by researchers by means of wireless sensors. These devices tracked high school students, teachers, and staff members throughout one day during the height of last January’s swine flu outbreak. From the Stanford News

Cutting Ultrasound Down to Size

Smaller, cheaper ultrasound machines are standard equipment for students at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"It is well-established that heart disease begins to develop in childhood. Now, two new studies add to a burgeoning body of evidence that developing heart-healthy habits as a youngster or adolescent may have lasting benefits in adulthood."
So summarizes the article in the November 30, 2010 WSJ.
"One of the reports suggests that the presence of such risk factors as high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol by about age 9 strongly predicts a thickening of the walls in the carotid or neck arteries in early adulthood.. . . . Children who ate fruits and vegetables once a day had healthier arteries as young adults than those who ate them less than twice a month. "

Embracing Incentives for Effective Health Care

"Spurred by incentives in the federal health-overhaul law, hospitals and doctors around the country are beginning to create new entities that aim to provide more efficient health care. But these efforts are already raising questions about whether they can truly save money, or if they might actually drive costs higher. The WSJ reports on the efforts of hospitals and physicians

Dissolving the Data Silos in Health Care

A revolutionary future for health care: "Technology analysts refer to the elements of [information] system]like this as “data silos”—each data set stored by itself, never touching the others. Over the past few decades, many industries have started breaking data out of their bunkers and using powerful computers to cross-index them, revealing previously unsuspected patterns. In health care, however, data isolation is still the norm. The capabilities for much more expansive integrated electronic information are available to health care, as reported in this article in The Atlantic.

Self-Focusing Eyeglasses

The September 27 edition of WSJ Online spots a big advance in eyeware - self-focusing eyeglasses. With " TruFocals, the wearer can manually adjust [two lenses] to give clear, undistorted vision, whether reading a book, working on a computer or looking into the distance." This ingenious innovation was developed and refined over 20 years byinventor Stephen Kurtin. Despite their Harry Potter-ish look, these round eyeglasses should ease the aging process and be available to the public next year.