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NEW YORK--Choice In Dying is offering a new service that electronically stores advance directives (living wills and health care proxies). The service provides instant access to these documents with one phone call, thus avoiding the search for documents at a critical time, as, for example, when a patient becomes unconscious or unable to speak for himself.

NEW YORK--Scientists at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center appear to have solved one of the long-standing enigmas of HIV infection--why some people remain uninfected even after repeated exposures to the virus. The answer lies in the genes, and in basic research published only a few months earlier.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla--In a scenario out of a recent John Grisham novel (The Runaway Jury), a Florida jury has returned a verdict in favor of a plaintiff suing a large tobacco company, causing a precipitous fall in the price of stocks of all the major tobacco companies. Philip Morris shares, for example, lost more than 10% of their value.

BETHESDA, Md--A smoking-cessation study involving 11 pairs of communities and more than 20,000 smokers found a slight advantage for intervention among light-to-moderate smokers but no statistically significant difference among heavy smokers.

LOS ANGELES, Calif--The first annual National Lymphoma Awareness Week, sponsored by the Lymphoma Research Foundation of America, is scheduled for October 13 to 19. Members of the Foundation will launch local awareness activities and educational events throughout the week to inform the public about lymphatic cancers.

SECAUCUS, NJ--To accommodate community-based physicians who may not be able to attend national professional meetings, the newly formed not-for-profit Solid Tumor Oncology Education Foundation, Inc. will sponsor a series of free local seminars and audioconferences, led by a faculty of expert physicians.

When organizers asked Tim Byers, MD, MPH, to speak at the American Cancer Society's National Conference on Cancer Prevention and Early Detection, he liked their proposed title for his talk--"Nutrition: The Data Are There."

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, which is much more expensive than AIDS antibody tests, should be used routinely to detect HIV infection in infants but not in adults, according to two new studies from Veterans Affairs and Stanford researchers.

VANCOUVER, BC--Discussions of Kaposi's sarcoma at the 11th International Conference on AIDS included reports on a promising topical treatment, photodynamic therapy (PDT), a chemotherapy regimen that could save up to $1,000 per course, and the possibility of prevention using antiherpes drugs.

SAN DIEGO--For hospitals that haven't already established a hematopoietic stem cell program, Bruce E. Hillner, MD, advises them not to do so. "If you don't have a program now, buy the services elsewhere. That is a much smarter way to go," said Dr. Hillner, associate professor of medicine, Medical College of Virginia, Richmond.

Quality of life of patients undergoing androgen deprivation is an issue that has received limited attention in the past but is currently being actively evaluated in clinical trials. This issue becomes more important as patients with longer life expectancy and no metastatic disease are treated for longer durations.

In most developed nations, cancer is second only to heart disease as a cause of death; in less developed countries, it is second to infectious disease. It is estimated that if the current trends of rising worldwide incidence continue, cancer will become the leading cause of death in the 21st century. This is particularly troubling since many of the factors contributing to cancer (eg, occupation, diet, lifestyle, and tobacco use) are known.

The past 20 years have witnessed important changes in the manner in which many people with cancer are opting to deal with their disease. In the past, patients yielded to their physicians' treatment choices and assumed that they

The mortality for patients who had colorectal surgery performed by board-certified colon and rectal surgeons over an 8-year period (1986-1994) was 1.4%, as compared with 7.3% for a similar group of patients operated on by other surgeons,

BUFFALO, NY--When young cancer patients have a question about their illness, they need an educator who has time and patience, and can talk to them in language they can understand.

Although laparoscopic surgery is a less invasive technique for abdominal surgery, a drawback is the fact that it visualizes only the surface of the abdominal cavity and may miss abnormalities within solid abdominal organs, such as the liver. The use of

dvances in cell biology and basic science are made in step-by-step increments of understanding, achieved over years of painstaking research. While not usually typical headline-grabbing material, such research has led to some of the most important

Damage occurs to our genes every day, some of it due to chemical or physical agents that have the potential to cause mutations leading to cancer. Luckily, cell proteins detect such damage and repair it before the cell reproduces, preventing a

VANCOUVER, BC--The new understanding of the importance of viral dynamics in the progression of HIV infection (see "New Thinking on HIV Progression Leads to New Strategies") has led to new guidelines for deploying drugs now available to treat HIV (a list of available agents is on page 13). Experts now recommend reducing viral load to below detectable limits, as an indication that viral replication has been curtailed as much as possible.

By analyzing DNA from a strange mass of tissue found in a man's abdomen, researchers have discovered a previously unknown parasite that can infect and kill humans. The researchers have yet to name the parasite or determine what it looks

DALLAS--Fine-needle aspiration (FNA) breast biopsies in women with mammographically apparent, nonpal-pable breast lesions were deemed impractical due to the high rate of insufficient samples in a Radiologic Diagnostic Oncology Group (RDOG) study, and were stopped 19 months into the trial, Etta D. Pisano, MD, said at the American College of Radiology (ACR) National Conference on Breast Cancer.

VANCOUVER, BC--The new more aggressive approach to HIV infection, using antiviral drugs early and in combination, reflects not only the availability of new drugs but also the application of new thinking about HIV infection (see reports "Early Combination Treatment May Provide HIV Control" and "Researchers Propose New Treatment Guidlines for HIV"). Initial (primary) HIV infection causes an acute flu-like syndrome that is followed by years of relatively asymptomatic disease. This period of "clinical latency" had been thought to reflect viral latency, but work by David D. Ho, MD, and his colleagues at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, New York, has shown otherwise.

SAN DIEGO--There are many sound reasons why a medical center may want to capitate its oncology services and just as many wrong reasons, said Paul M. Kennelly, who recently assumed the position of president and CEO of the management services organization at the City of Hope Oncology Network in Southern California.

WASHINGTON--Although the chemical MTBE, added to gasoline in the winter to reduce the emission of carbon monoxide, does not pose a substantial human health risk, more study needs to be undertaken to assess both short- and long-term health effects, a National Research Council (NRC) committee said in its review of a draft of a federal report.

WASHINGTON--President Clin-ton has reappointed Barbara K. Rimer, DrPH, to a second 2-year term as chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB) and appointed Richard J. Boxer, MD, professor of family and community medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, to a full 6-year term. Dr. Boxer had served on the board for a year to complete the term of Paul Calabresi, MD, who resigned to join the President's Cancer Panel.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) estimates that more than 8 million Americans alive today have a history of cancer, of whom 5 million were diagnosed 5 or more years ago. Most of these 5 million can be considered cured, while others still have evidence of cancer. In 1995, about 1,252,000 new cancer cases were diagnosed. This estimate does not include basal and squamous cell skin cancers and in situ carcinomas except bladder. The annual incidence of these skin cancers is estimated to be more than 800,000 cases. There has been a steady rise in cancer mortality in the United States in the last half-century. In 1995, about 547,000 people died of cancer--more than 1,500 people a day. One out of every five deaths in the United States is from cancer.

SAN DIEGO--Today when almost all payment and delivery models co-exist in every market, marketing approaches to cancer care services must respond to all payer models, including managed care and fee-for-service, said Karen M. Gilden, a senior consulting associate with Oncol-ogy Associates, Inc., Warrenton, Va, and the editor of Cancer Management.

BETHESDA, Md--Many people believe that the law under which the FDA regulates foods, drugs, devices, and cosmetics contains an exception for tobacco, but FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler, MD, told a symposium on tobacco addiction that this is not so, and that his agency plans to forge ahead with its proposed regulations.

ORLANDO--Impotence and incontinence, the radical prostatectomy complications that patients fear most, can be reduced through simple modifications in surgical technique without compromising cancer control, according to two reports presented at the American Urological Association's 91st annual meeting.

VANCOUVER, BC--Treatment for AIDS is beginning to resemble cancer therapy: Some studies suggest that best results occur when disease burden is reduced early by aggressive use of combination therapy. Previous thinking has been to hold effective antiviral agents in reserve until disease progression.Presentations at the 11th International Conference on AIDS showed that combination treatment, especially with regimens that include one of the new protease inhibitor drugs, can reduce the virus to undetectable levels in the blood. Reduced viral load decreases the risk of disease progression and is often followed by clinical and immunological improvement.Speaking at the meeting, Scott Hammer, MD, of New England Deaconess Hospital, Boston, pointed out that the ability of combination therapy to reduce viral load to undetectable levels means that "eradication of virus has become an acceptable hypothesis to be tested."Researchers at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center are testing that hypothesis using aggressive combination treatment during primary infection.