Alicia M Prater's Writing Zone

Cell Cancer has a review entitled "Tumor vessels are eph-ing complicated"

Ephrin is one of the signaling molecules in a tumor endothelial cell cascade - but I bet the pun was developed after much cursing in the lab over figuring out how to stop tumors from growing.

Experts are not predicting  third wave of infections and the spread of the virus is still decreasing. However, millions of new infections are still occurring each month in the U.S., including 18,000 hospitalizations and 310 deaths in February (see WebMD for epidemiological estimates of total numbers between April 2009 and February 2010).

Here is a CDC chart breaking down the numbers by age groups. As you'll see, the H1N1 virus affects younger people (<64 years of age), which is different from seasonal influenza. Also, the virus is more severe for pregnant women.

But, among this unpleasant news (though not unexpected based on last Fall's investigations), there is more good news: vaccinating children for H1N1 decreases community infections by ~60% (according to a Canadian study).

An estimate

There have been two interesting releases into the history of science and medicine in recent months.

1) The National Library of Medicine has released scans of some of the most beautifully illustrated science books - You can literally "turn the pages". Once only available by visiting the Library, you can now check it out at home.

There are only a few books, but they include Robert Hooke's Micrographia, one of the first descriptions of microbes; Vesalius's book on human anatomy, with some of the first drawings of physiological mechanisms and associations; and other medical texts from the 1400s and 1500s!

Medieval medicine in its artistic glory. The very foundations of everything we know about the human body, laid to bare in those pages.

If you don't want to flip through the books, they offer g