Immune System

Travel medicine for the zero-gravity set

2012-12-14 16:21:00

Virgin Galactic is already offering $200,000 tickets to intrepid tourists who want to take a suborbital flight on a craft called SpaceShipTwo. Start-up Golden Spike announced earlier this month that it would offer round trips to the moon for two...

Flu season hits U.S. early and hard

2012-12-03 13:58:00

The flu season has gotten off to its quickest start in nearly a decade, a sign that it could be a bad year for the illness, officials said on Monday. Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, urged people to get...

Nobel winner Joseph Murray dies; performed first successful kidney transplant

2012-11-26 20:17:00

BOSTON — Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who performed the world's first successful kidney transplant and won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work, has died at age 93. Murray suffered a stroke at his suburban Boston home on Thanksgiving and died at Brigham...

Dr. Joseph Murray dies at 93; Nobel winner performed first kidney transplant

2012-11-27 16:40:00

Since ancient times, surgeons have dreamed of transplanting healthy organs into patients disabled by disease and injury, but the human body's powerful immune system stymied all such attempts, leading many observers to conclude that the procedure was...

The gut and its bacteria a growing focus of research

2012-09-13 00:00:00

The yards of dank tubing in our midsections form a complex, amazing and absolutely pivotal foundation for human health. And the more that scientists come to appreciate this, the more they anticipate that future medical discoveries will come from the lowly...

The Cutting Edge

2012-10-23 16:30:00

When Dr. Amir Abolhoda recently performed robot-assisted lung cancer surgery at UC Irvine Medical Center — the first procedure of its kind in Orange County — it marked the latest leap in the fast-evolving field of robotics. The minimally...

Baby beluga -- first rescued in U.S. -- 'not out of the woods'

2012-07-06 15:54:00

The two Alaskan fishermen had stopped to examine a bald eagle when they noticed something sleek and gray in the Bristol Bay surf: a baby beluga whale in the shallows, faintly whistling and clicking. The whale, already dehydrated and disoriented, soon...

Probiotics: A gut-check on bacterial health

2012-10-06 00:00:00

A fascinating, if disconcerting, fact: More than 100 trillion so-called good bacteria thrive in or on the human body. A sizable chunk of them maintain residence in the human digestive tract. Probiotics, live microorganisms that benefit their human host,...

Genetics to determine cancer treatments

2012-09-13 00:00:00

The war on cancer is poised to enter a new phase that promises more precise treatments, fewer side effects and, most of all, more survivors. And none too soon. Although death rates from many cancers have slowly but steadily declined over the decades,...

Designer antibodies, nanoparticles, bacteria

2012-09-13 00:00:00

When you pop a pill in the future, don't expect old-fashioned results. Thanks to new advances in the lab and a deeper understanding of the human body, drugs are becoming highly personalized and precisely targeted. And the hope is they'll also be more...

Fighting diseases with genetic therapy

2012-09-13 00:00:00

Genes make us who we are — in sickness and in health. We get our genetic makeup from our parents, of course, but in the future, we might be getting genes from our doctors too. Imagine your doctor promising to cure your cancer or heart disease by...

Treating HIV and preventing it at the same time

2012-07-11 17:11:00

Treatment drugs can do more than improve the health of people with HIV: If administered early, medications can also reduce the spread of the disease to sexual partners and may help stem the AIDS epidemic. But many logistical hurdles stand in the way of...

Swartz studies how biologic fluids move through tissue and how that movement affects human health. This work helps explain how the immune system responds to tumors, and how tumors resist cellular attack.

2012-10-01 14:49:00

Treat it: Ice it and take an antihistamine like Benadryl or rub hydrocortisone cream on the bite to stop the itching. Head to the doctor if: In extremely rare conditions, some people will have problems breathing or feel sick or faint 3 to 14 days after being bitten.

2012-06-27 23:44:08

Lexy Becker gathers Easter eggs with her younger brother, Nicholas at their home in Aberdeen on Saturday. Lexy, who recently had a bone marrow transplant in Minneapolis, returned to Aberdeen for the Easter weekend. She is wearing a mask because her immune system is still weakened.

2012-04-07 21:11:00