Orshe

It’s a tough job market, but if you’ve won a Nobel Prize and run the NIH, we may have a gig for you.

Harold Varmus, the guy with the intimidating CV who has run Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for the past decade, has asked Sloan-Kettering’s board to start looking for his successor.

What causes cavities — bacteria that form a film on and eat away at teeth — is the same in kids and adults, but how prone an adult is to cavities is usually set in childhood, according to Burton Edelstein, a dentistry professor at Columbia University and president of the Children’s Dental Health Project in Washington, D.C.

Folks from Sciele Pharma stopped by Health Blog HQ recently to talk about the company’s potential treatment for premature ejaculation. They were making the rounds at newspapers and magazines in an effort to raise awareness of the condition and their product, even though the company hasn’t asked regulators for approval yet.

Here are a few threads from around the world on what’s happening with the H1N1 swine-flu pandemic.

Four patients in the past six weeks had Tamiflu-resistant flu at Duke University Hospital. In at least two of the cases, patients contracted the resistant bug before they had been treated with Tamiflu, a Duke infection-control doctor told the Health Blog. All of the patients were on a cancer ward, and had suppressed immune systems.

There aren’t enough bodies to go around for everyone who needs a steady supply of cadavers for training and experiments. That shortage is helping turn the process of procuring cadavers into a functioning market, says a Harvard professor.

Rising medical costs, higher unemployment and a rapidly aging population are putting the health-care system under tremendous financial strain. This all sounds close to home but a story in today’s WSJ says those problems are confronting health care in Germany, whose system is often held up as one of the world’s models.

Drug and device companies, along with other industry players, spend about $1 billion a year to fund the continuing medical education classes doctors have to take to keep their licenses current. We may soon get more insight into how that money flows: A little-discussed provision in the House health care bill would require drug makers to disclose their spending on CME, the WSJ reports.

Researchers are studying whether swine flu can be transmitted in the blood, as part of an ongoing effort to keep the blood supply safe from infectious disease. That’s the subject of my latest column.

There’s also another new effort underway to improve the safety of blood transfusions by monitoring adverse reactions and errors through a collaboration between the federal government and organizations involved in blood collection, transfusion, and tissue and organ transplantation.

The flu had been rampaging through our kids’ school for weeks –- some days, their classes were less than half-full -– and we hadn’t been able to find any pediatricians or pharmacies with the H1N1 vaccine in our suburban Denver community.

So when the county announced a free H1N1 clinic for students, I figured we should take advantage. The first clinic was this past Saturday, at a local high school.

Kids taking the latest generation of antipsychotic meds gain significant amounts of weight–as much as 19 pounds on average in just 11 weeks for kids taking Zyprexa, according to a study published today in JAMA. Abilify, Risperdal and Seroquel were all linked to weight gain as well. Here’s the WSJ story.