Health and Medicine

Squeezing the toothpaste from the wrong end, sneering at her cat or putting the toilet paper roll on backwards can irk your partner no end, even after decades together. But new or old relationships, says a prominent social psychologist from the University at Buffalo, are far more likely to be ruined by one partner's low self-esteem.

Amid the human catastrophe that is AIDS in Africa, the absence of health-care systems and practices that are taken for granted in other parts of the world routinely hampers efforts to care for patients even when assistance is being provided by international organizations and charities. But in Zimbabwe, a native son who is the nation's first pharmacologist is helping to remove these obstacles and provide meaningful care to HIV/AIDS patients as the result of a joint program between the University at Buffalo and the University of Zimbabwe.

Victor Paquet watches workers work -- over and over again. An expert on ergonomic job analysis and workplace injury prevention, the University at Buffalo assistant professor of industrial engineering is looking for patterns of repetitive movement that may cause injury to workers on the job.

The world can expect more SARS-like outbreaks in the near future due to evolving cultural, environmental and economic conditions that provide viruses with new opportunities to infect humans, according to an expert on infectious disease and geographic medicine at the University at Buffalo.

The University at Buffalo has received a grant of $1,999,200 from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas to establish a Geriatric Center of Excellence in its School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

The first demonstration of reduction-oxidation, or redox, chemistry in RNA -- a critical missing link in the experimental evidence for an ancient RNA world -- was reported Sunday by University at Buffalo chemists in Nature Structural Biology online.

Students in an upper-level computer software engineering class at the University at Buffalo are helping to solve a real-world problem -- and restore a sense of independence to persons with speech and motor disabilities -- by designing augmentation communication devices.

Two researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences have received federal grants totaling more than $640,000 to conduct research into the function and development of the human vision system.

Five to 15 percent of children and adolescents in the United States suffer from a dangerous and disabling emotional disorder that poses a serious impediment to their social, educational and emotional development. It is social anxiety disorder (SAD), a condition that, according to a researcher at the University at Buffalo, is seldom researched, recognized or treated although it is one of the most prevalent and disabling mental disorders of childhood and adolescence.

The University at Buffalo and the New York State Department of Health are teaming up to conduct a study to investigate the incidence of autoimmune and respiratory diseases in the Bellevue neighborhood of the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga.