Health

In a sunlit room with murals of seascapes decorating the earth-toned walls, men and women work on their laptops or flip through channels on individual flat screen televisions from reclining chairs. They make coffee and help themselves to snacks stocked in a small kitchen. Except for the I.V. drips injecting doses of chemotherapy into their arms during sessions that can last as long as 10 hours, the cancer patients here go about their day much as they might at home.

A woman is rushed to the operating room after giving birth. The baby is fine, but the mother is hemorrhaging, losing blood at a rate of about one cup per minute. In eight minutes, she could lose her total blood volume. Hospital staff pages a response team whose responsibility it is to stop the bleeding -- and fast. Stepping into a 24-hour emergency service elevator, they are rushed to the patient, bags of blood in hand.

The University Counseling Center is expanding its services on Oct. 8 to include long-term psychotherapy for university students with the opening of a new third-party office within walking distance of Stony Brook.

Yesterday’s University Senate meeting ran late, effectively postponing a planned vote on a proposed campus-wide smoking ban.

The postponement came as the University Senate and Campus Environment Committee’s smoking ban subcommittee released two reports of opposing opinion on the matter.

Wireless microchips monitoring biochemical changes in tissue cells may become the future of cancer prevention.

Researchers at Stony Brook University, including physicians from the Health Sciences Center and engineers and computer scientists from CEWIT - the popular acronym for the Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology - are collaborating on developing the new devices.

The nation experienced somewhat of a medical panic last week, spurred by the discovery of a new and more resiliant strain of the devasting HIV virus. The main characteristic of the new strain, dubbed "Super AIDS" by many, is its high resistance to previously-effective drug treatments.