Headlines @ U.Va.

Transplant director: We don’t have Duke’s type of problem
News that surgeons at Duke University mistakenly transplanted a heart and lungs with the wrong blood type into a teenage girl, eventually leading to her death, sent hospitals nationwide scrambling to review their procedures. Dr. James Bergin, who heads the U.Va. Medical Center’s heart transplantation program, said, “I sat down with all the coordinators. We examined what we do to make sure it was appropriate. We did not make any changes.” He noted that the Duke transplant did not follow the United Network for Organ Sharing’s accepted procedure, as the patient’s name had not turned up in the computer-generated list of patients eligible to receive the organs. “We have always stayed within the UNOS system,” Bergin said. “Then of course, the whole system depends on the UNOS coordinating center to have the correct blood type. That still could be the issue.”
— Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 3

Residential colleges broaden students’ horizons
The concept of residential colleges began at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the Middle Ages, but is undergoing something of a resurgence these days, according to a recent Washington Post article. The story featured the comments of U.Va. student and Brown College resident Rebecca Cullers, who extolled the virtues of having greater and more personal contact with the resident faculty members. She also suggested that the college’s mix of first-year students and older peers is beneficial. “When you live in a first-year dorm, you are only with first-years,” she said. “You become bonded with these people because you don’t know about other things going on.”
— Washington Post, Feb. 25

Seeking a link between frigid air, wet hair and colds
We know that viruses cause the common cold. So why do we still fret about children who insist on going out in the cold sporting shorts and wet hair? Because it’s easy to see that the cold and flu season coincides with the onset of cold weather, an observation that has bedeviled generations of medical researchers. “Health and the weather was a big topic in previous periods of history,” said Dr. Jack M. Gwaltney Jr., professor emeritus of medicine. His theory: It’s not the heat (or lack thereof) but the humidity. Rhinovirus thrives in the wet, overcast days of fall and spring, he said. “Climate has both biological and behavioral consequences,” he said. “There are plenty of experiments left to do.”
— New York Times, March 4

Polls, not protests, sway presidents
The media has stepped up its coverage of anti-war demonstrations in recent weeks, with large rallies taking place both in the U.S. and overseas. But do the gatherings have any effect on policy? Politics professor Larry Sabato suggests that political leaders rely far more on polls than protests as measures of public opinion. “The key question is whether the protests are representative of a broader public opinion or just a narrow slice. So far, the protests are representative of a narrower slice. But if that slice broadens into half the pie, then [President] Bush will have no choice but to pay attention.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 23