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Tulane surgeon Dr. Bernard Jaffe will expand programs to Bangladesh and Malaysia, and then to Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Zambia. “The specialty of emergency medicine doesn’t exist in the underdeveloped world,” said Jaffe in a Tulane press release. “There is a critical need for training physicians and nurses in injury-care and life-support skills.” Jaffe, who has conducted three to four missions annually for the past six years, brings at least one surgical resident along with medical students who assist in training while they’re learning emergency medical skills. Jaffe’s most recent trip was to Cambodia, where accident victims are transported to hospitals by “tuk tuks” – wagons powered by a motorbike motor – without the benefit of a trained EMT.

 Children exposed to second-hand smoke at home are twice as likely to develop mental health problems such as ADD or ADHD as children in smoke-free homes, Pediatrics publication reported recently. Authors from Harvard University estimate that more than 270,000 cases of common behavioral disorders could have been prevented with smoke-free homes. Other recent studies have linked childhood secondhand smoke exposure with depression, anxiety and becoming a smoker.

Hamilton Farris Ph. D, Research Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Otorhinolaryngology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has found that tungara frogs hear, sort and process sounds similarly to humans by using relative comparisons to form auditory groups that are assigned to the same source. In other words, they take available sounds and group those that are most similar. Farris said that he now has a better understanding of how acoustic cues are used; this will guide research advances to solve communicative diseases associated with hearing deficits and attention disorders. “In noisy, complicated environments, the cognitive solution isn’t based on absolute stimulus rules, but one which compares all the sounds and then deduces their sources,” he said in an LSU-generated press release. The research was performed at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama with Dr. Michael Ryan at the University of Texas, Austin.
 

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