News in brief - June 14, 2004

Davis International Awards announced - Scholarship aims to support research - $50 million given for science education - Kidney cancer patients found to do better at high-volume hospitals

Davis International Awards announced

Shankar Man Rai, MD, and Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia are the 2004 recipients of the AMA Foundation's Dr. Nathan Davis International Awards in Medicine and Public Health.

Dr. Rai, a plastic surgeon in Kathmandu, Nepal, was named Outstanding International Physician. He has dedicated his career to charitable service, performing free surgeries for impoverished children with birth injuries and congenital anomalies. Since 1992, the U.S.-trained Dr. Rai has been working with Interplast, a charitable group that dispatches surgical teams to perform operations and train local physicians.

Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital was named the Outstanding Global Health Initiative. The hospital treats women with obstetric fistula, still common in the developing world. More than 25,000 surgeries have been performed free since its beginning in 1974.

The Nathan Davis awards were to be presented June 12 at the opening of the AMA Annual Meeting.

Scholarship aims to support research

Keeping young physicians involved in research is the goal of the Charles E. Culpeper Scholarships in Medical Science Program.

Application deadline is Aug. 16. Information is available online (www.goldmanpartnerships.org) or at 847-947-5512.

$50 million given for science education

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has doled out $50 million in grants to support undergraduate science education. Some 42 institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico will receive four-year grants of $500,000 to $1.6 million for new courses in such fields as bioinformatics and computational biology, fellowships for postdoctoral researchers and new technology like mobile teaching laboratories to bring science to disadvantaged and minority students in remote areas.

Undergraduate biology is not well-funded nationally, said Stephen Barkanic, director of HHMI's undergraduate science education program.

Public and private funders tend to focus their support on research programs, infrastructure and graduate training, but undergraduate biology tends to be neglected," he said. "Smaller colleges and universities, in particular, often are overlooked in the intensive competition for grant dollars."

Kidney cancer patients found to do better at high-volume hospitals

Mortality rates for patients having surgery for kidney cancer were lower at high-volume hospitals, according to a recent study conducted by University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, researchers and published in the May Urology.

Researchers analyzed 20,765 cases between 1993 and 1997 and found that there was an overall mortality rate of 1.39%, which declined as surgical volumes increased.

Patients at hospitals that performed more than 33 nephrectomies a year had a 32% lower risk of dying in the hospital than patients where 15 to 33 were performed. They also had a 25% lower risk than patients operated on in hospitals where one to 14 nephrectomies were performed.

"Large-scale regionalization or selective referral has the potential to improve outcomes, but additional studies are necessary to determine the costs and benefits of such an approach," the researchers stated.