"Health & Medical News"

A commercial space flight industry is working to make the adventure and romance of space travel available to the general public — or at least to those with $200,000 or more to spare.

Space tourism, still in its embryonic stages, has some experts estimating that 10,000 to 15,000 people a year will fly in orbital and suborbital space in the next decade.

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While the match is made by a computer, the decision whether someone actually gets on a list, and his medical urgency classification, is made by local transplant committees. At Columbia-Presbyterian, the adult transplant coordinating committee meets every Friday morning, chaired jointly by Yoshifumi Naka [MD, PhD], the transplant surgery program director and Donna Mancini [MD], a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Advanced Cardiac Care, who oversees transplant cardiology. There are usually about 30 people around the table — transplant cardiologists, social workers, psychiatrists, infection specialists, neurologists, surgeons, transplant nurses and others. Most of the cardiologists are from Mancini’s section, but very occasionally an outside cardiologist may attend as well, to help advocate a listing for one of his patients.

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U.S. Surgeon General Kenneth Moritsugu said that the fact that he didn’t drink alcohol until after age 21 had a lot to do with the good role models provided by his parents, the New Mexican reported Sept. 26.

Moritsugu, who was in New Mexico to promote his Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking, said his father drank the occasional glass of beer, while his mother limited her drinking to a rare glass of wine.

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A survey of nearly 700 surgical residents in 17 U.S. medical centers finds that more than half failed to report needle-stick injuries involving patients whose blood could be a source of HIV, hepatitis and other infections.

Authors of the report ??” appearing in the June 28 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine ??” say most residents in the survey falsely believe that reporting and getting timely medical attention won??™t prevent infection. Residents also say reporting takes ???too much time??? and interrupts their work.

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