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CSU Receives Record $42.5 Million Gift for Regenerative Medicine from John and Leslie Malone – Video

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CSU Receives Record $42.5 Million Gift for Regenerative Medicine from John and Leslie Malone
Philanthropists John and Leslie Malone have committed a record $42.5 million to Colorado State University to develop regenerative medical therapies for anima...

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CSU Receives Record $42.5 Million Gift for Regenerative Medicine from John and Leslie Malone - Video

Albert Einstein College of Medicine Announces New Chair of Department of Microbiology & Immunology

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Newswise December 30, 2014(BRONX, NY)Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University today named Steven A. Porcelli, M.D., the new chair of the department of microbiology & immunology. A noted immunologist, Dr. Porcelli is currently the Murray and Evelyne Weinstock Chair in Microbiology & Immunology and professor of medicine at Einstein.

Dr. Porcelli graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University, received his M.D. from Yale University and completed a medical residency at Temple University Hospital. He served as fellow and then junior faculty member in the division of rheumatology, immunology and allergy at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.

Steve Porcelli is an outstanding physician-scientist who has made major contributions to our understanding of how the immune system responds to tuberculosis infection. He has been an excellent mentor to junior faculty within the department of microbiology & immunology and a terrific colleague who is eminently qualified to assume the responsibilities of chairing this superb department, said Allen M. Spiegel, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean at Einstein.

While an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in the 1990s, Dr. Porcelli discovered the CD1-dependent pathway for antigen presentation to the immune systems T cells. His work revealed that T cellsthought to recognize only protein antigenscan recognize lipid antigens as well. Those studies aroused Dr. Porcellis interest in tuberculosis, caused by a bacterium (Myocobacterium tuberculosis) that is about one-third lipid by weight. He has been studying various aspects of TB ever since.

Dr. Porcelli was recruited to Einstein as the Irene Diamond Associate Professor in Immunology in 1999. Since 2004 he has served as scientific director of Einsteins Flow Cytometry Core facility and of FACS (fluorescence-activated cell sorting) resources for the Einstein-Montefiore Center for AIDS Research.

As part of his TB research, Dr. Porcelli is working to develop a more effective TB vaccine in collaboration with Einstein scientists William R. Jacobs, Jr., Ph.D., and John Chan, M.D. (Dr. Jacobs is professor of microbiology & immunology and of genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; Dr. Chan is professor of medicine and of microbiology & immunology and attending physician in infectious disease, department of medicine, at Montefiore Medical Center, the University Hospital for Einstein.) That research has led to a new live attenuated vaccine, built from M. tuberculosis and created by deleting two genes that contribute to the bacteriums virulence. Mouse studies involving this double mutant vaccine showed that a single immunization was significantly more effective than the BCG vaccinethe only current TB vaccine, now nearly a century oldand also extremely safe.

Another aspect of Dr. Porcells TB research involves a subpopulation of lipid-recognizing T cells called invariant Natural Killer T (iNKT) cells, which respond to M. tuberculosis infections. A naturally occurring class of molecules called glycolipids can selectively activate iNKT cellsand synthetic glycolipids called alpha-galactosylceramides activate them even more strongly. In research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Porcelli is synthesizing different alpha-galactosylceramide molecules and testing whether they can improve the immune response against M. tuberculosis, possibly as adjuvantssubstances that increase the bodys response to vaccines.

Since receiving his first major independent research project grant in 1996, Dr. Porcelli has been continuously funded as a principal investigator by the National Institutes of Health. His TB research is supported by four major NIH grants with current annual funding totaling approximately $1.36 million. Dr. Porcelli is also supported by a $113,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help develop vaccines to prevent HIV infection.

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Albert Einstein College of Medicine Announces New Chair of Department of Microbiology & Immunology

Governor-Elect Hutchinson Names New Surgeon General

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LITTLE ROCK, AR (News release) - Governor-Elect Asa Hutchinson announced on Tuesday that Dr. Greg Bledsoe will be the state's new Surgeon General.

Dr. Bledsoe is a board certified Emergency Medicine physician and Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine of Marshall Medical Center South in Alabama, a department that oversees the care of approximately 40,000 patient visits each year.

After completing medical school and residency at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Dr. Bledsoe spent five years on faculty in the Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine completing a two-year fellowship in International Emergency Medicine and a Masters in Public Health (MPH) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2005, he received the Teacher of the Year award from the Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Bledsoe has extensive experience in international travel having visited over 50 countries. His international medical experience includes serving as a field physician in Honduras, teaching disaster preparedness in Tanzania, leading a nutritional survey among the Beja tribe in northeast Sudan, working as a medical consultant in Beijing, China, teaching Emergency Medicine in Qatar, and acting as the medical officer for ships in both Antarctica and the Arctic, including the North Pole.

In addition to his clinical duties, Dr. Bledsoe has been an instructor and medical consultant for the United States Secret Service. He was the personal physician to former President Bill Clinton during Clintons tour of Africa in September 2002, and served in Uganda and Senegal on the advance team of President George W. Bush when the President visited the African continent in July of 2003.

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Governor-Elect Hutchinson Names New Surgeon General

Discover The Power of Black Raspberry Seeds Let Food Be Your Medicine – Video

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Discover The Power of Black Raspberry Seeds Let Food Be Your Medicine
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Discover The Power of Black Raspberry Seeds Let Food Be Your Medicine - Video

We Used To Call It Socialized Medicine

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What we now call single payer health insurance is what we used to call national health insurance and before that it was socialized medicine.

Do these name changes make the underlying ideas more palatable? Apparently not.

Vermont has now thrown in the towel on its plan to create single-payer heath insurance presumably an option states are permitted under the Affordable Care Act. State officials decided that even in blue state Vermont voters would be unwilling to agree to the huge tax hike needed to pay for the scheme: an 11.5 percent payroll tax and an income tax of up to 9.5 percent, on top of the current one.

Giving up cannot have been easy. It came at the end of a four-year, very expensive effort. Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin was elected in 2010 on an explicit single-payer platform and he has been trying ever since to make it a reality. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page explained:

Health and Human Services bestowed a $45 million grant for planning, and since 2011 Mr. Shumlins team has worked closely with HHS, the Treasury and White House budget office.

The state hired William Hsiao of Harvard and Jonathan Gruber of MIT to design the program. The former economist created Medicares price controls in the 1980s and the latter is sometimes called the architect of Obamacare.

So what was the point of the whole exercise?

Thats not clear. Almost everybody in Vermont already has health insurance (the uninsurance rate is 6.8%). And the insurance they have is more comprehensive than what most other Americans have. Its even more comprehensive than what Obamacare promises. As Avik Roy explains, Silver plans, used as the benchmark for Obamacares subsidies, have an actuarial value of 70 percent. That means that for every dollar of expected health costs, the insurance company will plan to pay 70 percent and patients will pay 30 percent in the form of co-pays and deductibles. By contrast, the actuarial value of the average Vermont private plan in 2011 was 87 percent, according to Hsiao and Gruber.

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We Used To Call It Socialized Medicine


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