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Researchers announced recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that false positive results from mammograms are more common than people realize. In an October 17 Reuters story, one of the researchers, SPH Associate Professor Cindy Christiansen, says that the more often a woman has a mammogram, the greater the chance of a false positive. "What we are hoping is that women realize this is common," says Christiansen. "In our study, 43 percent of the women were expected to experience a false positive by the ninth mammogram. The majority of times, it does not mean cancer." She suggests that doctors and technicians who perform the mammograms should reassure women so they do not panic. Only one out of 20 positive results on a mammogram actually indicates cancer.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has begun a test program that has allowed 14 HIV-positive refugees to settle in Boston this year, the first step in a humanitarian effort for such refugees, who normally would not be granted entrance into the country because they could not cover the medical costs for treatment of an incurable disease. SPH Professor Michael Grodin, codirector of Boston Medical Center’s Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, says in an October 17 Boston Globe story that such refugees not only have to handle lifelong emotional scars from being uprooted from their native land, but also the pain associated with a terminal illness. "They all have suffered incredibly," says Grodin. "Almost all of them suffer depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. And they suffer from social isolation." Under the new policy, the refugees are being treated through Medicaid or the Refugee Medical Assistance program, administered through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

A concoction touted as an "herbal Viagra without the side effects" has had success preventing impotence in rats, giving a small measure of scientific support to the briskly selling product known as BetterMAN. Developed by a biologist knowledgeable in traditional Chinese remedies, it is aimed at two of the biggest complaints of middle-aged men: erectile difficulties and frequent nighttime urination. In the October 18 Boston Globe, Irwin Goldstein, a MED urology professor who was involved in the early research on Viagra, says, "Some of the herbal medicines that have been pooh-poohed for many years may have value. But to go out and espouse the use of BetterMAN in humans based on a single rat study is inappropriate." Preliminary studies have found that BetterMAN usually begins to show benefits after about two months of daily use, while Viagra is taken shortly before sex. The two treatments cost about the same, approximately $40 per month.

Speaking at an Israel Solidarity rally in Manhattan on October 12, UNI Professor Elie Wiesel said that Yasir Arafat – a fellow Nobel laureate for peace – was "ignorant, devious, and unworthy of trust."

"It is with a heavy heart that I say our dreams of peace have gone up into the smoke of ransacked synagogues, in the lynching of Israeli prisoners, and of bloodthirsty mobs shouting their version of a Jerusalem without Jews and a Middle East without Israel," he told the crowd, according to the October 20 New York Jewish Week. "He is burying the peace process and in so doing, he has betrayed the confidence not only of his negotiating partners but of President Clinton and other Western leaders.

"All of his promises were lies, all of his commitments were false. Indeed, many peace activists here and in Israel are now reassessing the Oslo Accords. . . . I accuse him of being morally weak, politically shortsighted and an obstacle to peace. I accuse him of murdering the hopes of an entire generation – his and ours."

Wiesel said later it was difficult to reach the decision to speak out so strongly, but the lynching of two Israeli army reservists and seeing on television "the hatred in the faces of the stone throwers" acting on Arafat’s orders, made it inevitable.

"In The News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.

6 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations