Health and Medicine

In its efforts to prevent a repeat of the tragic events of Sept. 11, the United State is moving perilously close to creating in our own nation a police state where human rights are denied, according to a professor in the University at Buffalo Law School who is a human rights expert.

University at Buffalo researchers have received a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to assess environmental pollutants and their relationship to the prevalence of autoimmune disease, particularly lupus, and asthma in two Buffalo neighborhoods.

Children's Hospital of Buffalo and the University at Buffalo are taking the lead internationally in pediatric surgery with the opening of a $1.5 million Miniature Access Surgical Center (MASC) believed to be the most sophisticated of its kind in the world.

A paper by two University at Buffalo professors proposing a new approach to community revitalization has received the 2001 award for Best Action Research Paper on Housing and Community Development from the Fannie Mae Foundation and Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP).

In recognition of its strengths in bioinformatics and related areas, the University at Buffalo has been awarded a major grant to develop professional master's degrees in disciplines closely related to bioinformatics by the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Scientists at the University at Buffalo have shown that the drug methylphenidate, the generic form of Ritalin, which physicians have considered to have only short-term effects, appears to initiate changes in brain function that remain after the therapeutic effects have dissipated.

Faced with growing concerns about workplace safety as a result of Anthrax threats and the events of Sept. 11, employers hoping to retain employees and lessen employee fears should change the way they reward them, says an expert on compensation and human resources.

The University at Buffalo's Toxicology Research Center will receive $1.3 million over the next five years as a participant in a new six-member children's environmental health research center formed to study the effects of eating large quantities of contaminated Great Lakes fish on Laotian and Hmong refugees.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo and Ohio University are using the Internet to collect data from thousands of women from around the world about their experience of pain during labor in order to understand how best to ease the pain of childbirth. This is one of the first large-scale, Internet-based survey research studies to be undertaken and is expected to yield a large foundational population sample for the study of labor pain.

When UB hosts "Digital Frontiers: The Buffalo Summit 2001," on Nov. 2 and 3, one of the projects to be exhibited in connection with the event is a little honey called "EVL: Alive on the Grid" -- a peculiar virtual experience involving avatars, simultaneous occupation of virtual space, lots of music and dancing "ghosts."