Health

It was only a few months ago when the last wave of H1N1 swept across the globe. But the "swine flu" has now disappeared from newspapers, broadcast news programs and public service announcements. Are we in the clear, or have we just reached the eye of the storm?

Physicians at Stony Brook are set to use ePrescription. This will allow doctors to send prescriptions electronically to pharmacists. Something experts say will greatly improve patient care.

A dozen people held signs citing the number of people who die each year from a lack of health care coverage. The group had gathered to rally for a public health insurance option, and then, suddenly they fell to the ground themselves. They did not literally die, but played the part in an attempt to symbolize the deaths of 45,000 people attributed to a lack of health insurance.

On a sunny April day, the women's club lacrosse teams from Drexel University, New York University and Stony Brook University came together to play and to raise awareness about mental health issues facing college students.

Cooking-related fires, which according to a Stony Brook University safety and security reading account for more than 90 percent of fire alarms, are often caused by the use of prohibited appliances in campus dorm rooms. But privacy rules prevent resident assistants from searching for an occupant’s hidden cooking equipment.

There have been a few confirmed cases of MRSA on campus, said Jerrold Stein, Dean of Students.

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.