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From Kosovo to college,
with a detour near Cedar Street
Two years ago,
when a group of Yale medical students volunteered at a camp for
Kosovo refugees, second-years Aaron Covey and Seth Goldbarg found
themselves working triage in the camp hospital. As new arrivals
stepped off the buses at Senekos, a makeshift city of white tents
in neighboring Macedonia, the students assessed the refugees
and directed those who were ill to medical care.
When they met
18-year-old Irfan Baftiu, who had been in the camp for several
days and had come to the triage center simply to make himself
useful, there was a little confusion. “I kept trying to
help,” Irfan recalled, “and Aaron kept trying to give
me water.”
But soon Irfan
and his younger brother, Bafti, then 15, were close to indispensable.
“They helped us with every project we did in the camp,”
said Margaret Bourdeaux, another of the six Yale students who
were assisting the camp’s medical staff (“Kosovo Journal,”
Summer 1999). Irfan and Bafti, who had learned English from watching
American television and movies, translated for patients and doctors,
worked on a tent-to-tent health survey and a nutritional assessment
of the children in the camp, and helped organize a soccer tournament
and a theatrical production. “From the minute we met them,”
said Covey, “we realized they were incredibly bright, with
so much potential and such a desire to help.”
A year later,
the two boys were a world away from battered Kosovo, enrolled
at a New England boarding school and living less than an hour’s
drive from their medical-student mentors in New Haven. The combined
efforts of many—the boys’ American sponsor (an emergency
physician from Ohio whom they met in the camp), the medical school
dean’s office, the Loomis Chaffee School in nearby Windsor,
Conn., and the medical students—resulted in student visas
for Irfan and Bafti and a year of study to help them prepare
for college. Loomis Chaffee provided full scholarships with room
and board for the boys to attend a summer program as well as
their final year of high school.
This summer
the brothers moved to Cleveland and the home of their sponsor,
Pamela Grim, M.D. In the fall, they will study at Oakland Community
College in Michigan, work on their written English skills and
think about the future. Bafti, who had a good year in math, is
thinking about business.
His brother
hopes to become a physician. “I saw a lot of things in Kosovo
and in the camp that are pushing me in that direction,”
Irfan said in April. “I saw victims of land mines. I saw
the operating room and what they could do for them. And I know
that I really want to help people.” |
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Emergency
Department opens its doors for Learning Channel documentary
When a 37-year-old
New Haven man leaped from the third story of a burning building
and was rushed to Yale-New Haven Hospital, filmmakers from The
Learning Channel met him at the E.R. door alongside the trauma
team.
The story of
the injured man was among dozens of trauma and emergency room
cases followed by “shooters” from TLC’s reality
TV show, Trauma: Life in the E.R. To gather raw footage
for the show, a producer and three video journalists endured
schedules to rival a resident’s, recording life in the Emergency
Department 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for a month this
spring.
From 250 hours
of videotape recorded on hand-held cameras, producer Penny Fearon
will distill two 47-minute documentaries, one to be aired this
fall and the other sometime in 2002. The award-winning show attracts
an average audience of 1.5 million on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m.,
according to Nielsen Media Research.
Yale-New Haven
Hospital will be the first in New England to be featured on the
five-year-old show. Series producer Brian Seligson said Yale-New
Haven appealed to him because of the contrasts afforded—“on
the one hand, Yale University and everything it represents, and
on the other hand, the fact that it’s an inner-city hospital
dealing with an inner-city population.”
How the film
will be edited, and consequently how the hospital will be portrayed,
is in the hands of The Learning Channel, said Reuven Rabinovici,
M.D., professor of surgery and chief of the section of trauma
and surgical critical care. The confluence of The Learning Channel’s
real-life depiction of the trauma world and his team’s ability
to provide cutting-edge trauma care leaves him confident the
team will come across positively.
“To care
for a trauma patient, you need to have an endogenous sense of
mission and responsibility, because it’s very intense. The
people involved are doing their best to provide optimal care,
whether they are on camera or off.”
Producer Fearon
will choose a few people to follow—physicians, nurses, patients—to
create two shows with recognizable characters and coherent plot
lines. She said the “shooting ratio” of tape to finished
product is luxurious, at more than 150 hours to 1 compared to
the 50-to-1 ratio typical for reality TV documentaries. One show
will document the story of the man who jumped from the building,
following him as he is treated for smoke inhalation and through
surgery for a broken femur and heel until, after three weeks
at Yale-New Haven, he heads out the door. |
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Clinical
development fund makes first round of awards
Two years ago,
when Yale University and the Yale New Haven Health System signed
their first formal affiliation agreement, one of its provisions
was a fund to expand the joint clinical programs of the School
of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital.
In May, the
two institutions announced the first awards from this new Clinical
Program Development Fund, directing $17.6 million this year to
11 programs in brain disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease,
developmental disorders and organ transplantation. These areas
have been designated clinical priorities by the school and hospital.
“We want
to position the medical center at the top of the field in as
many target areas as possible,” said Richard L. Edelson,
M.D. ’70, co-chair of the fund and deputy dean for clinical
affairs. “[This investment] is intended to allow these programs
to push the envelope and, in some cases, to define the frontier.”
The funded proposals
and investigators include:
Brain
Disorders
• Clinical
Neuroscience Center for Epilepsy and Neurovascular Diseases,
Dennis Spencer, M.D.
• Yale-New
Haven Medical Center Brain Tumor Center, Joseph Piepmeier, M.D.,
HS ’82.
Cancer
• Transimmunization:
A New Method for Treatment of Graft vs. Host Disease, Prevention
of Graft Rejection and Immunization against Tumor Antigens, Michael
Girardi, M.D. ’92.
• Expansion
of the Yale Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office, Leonard Farber,
M.D.
• New Infrastructure
and Organization for the NCI- Approved Yale Comprehensive Cancer
Center, Vincent DeVita Jr., M.D., HS ’66.
• Innovations
of Head and Neck Management, Clarence Sasaki, M.D. ’66,
HS ’73.
Cardiovascular
Disease
• Yale-New
Haven Medical Center Endovascular Center,
Bauer Sumpio, M.D., HS ’86.
• Integrated
Program for the Treatment of End-Stage Heart Disease, Barry Zaret,
M.D.
• Endovascular
Brachytherapy, Kenneth Roberts, M.D.
Developmental
Disorders
• Yale-New
Haven Medical Center Oncofertility Center, Steven Palter, M.D.
Organ
Replacement
• Transplantation,
Marc Lorber, M.D.
The fund received
23 proposals in the first round with requests totaling $69.1
million and awarded $17.6 of the $18 million available. Two committees,
co-chaired by Edelson and Peter Herbert, M.D. ’67, HS ’69,
chief of staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital, are now reviewing
a second round of applications for $11.5 million in support. |
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The
Giff tackles “retirement”
A former
dean spends his days teaching science to grade-schoolers in New
Haven’s Hill neighborhood
On a Wednesday morning in early January, Robert H. Gifford,
M.D., HS ’67, took nine of his eighth-grade students out
onto New Haven’s Columbus Avenue for an experiment. Braving
a wind chill of 4 degrees, they measured the length of the block
in front of Sacred Heart/St. Peter School and prepared to calculate
the speed of passing cars. The parochial school is the last of
several serving the Hill neighborhood, which borders the medical
school campus to the south and west, and Gifford, the former
deputy dean of education at Yale, is the school’s new science
teacher. In fact, he is its only full-time science teacher.
The hours are long, the work is challenging and the pay is
modest. (Gifford, who volunteered his services during his first
semester at the school, now receives a small salary.) But it
fulfills the goal he set several years before his retirement
in 1999 [“Goodbye, Dr. Gifford,” Fall 1999|Winter 2000]
of teaching science to children in New Haven’s inner city.
The lack of a required state teaching certificate thwarted Gifford’s
original plan to teach in city public schools. But his name came
to the attention of Geraldine Giaimo, M.S., the principal of
Sacred Heart/St. Peter, who was looking for a way to offer students
more science than the classroom teachers could incorporate into
their lessons.
Although Sacred Heart/St. Peter is a parochial school, only
about 30 percent of its students are Roman Catholic. Of the 224
students enrolled, 96 percent are African-American or Latino
and 62 percent meet federal guidelines for free or reduced-rate
breakfasts and lunches at the school. “We were actually
in tears when [Gifford] said he would come here,” said Giaimo,
herself an alumna of Sacred Heart, which merged with St. Peter
School in 1994. “He’s not just the science teacher.
He’s the science department.”
Both Gifford and his students, who are in grades four through
eight, have made some adjustments. For Gifford, Giaimo said,
“It’s very challenging dealing with young people.”
And for the students? “The work is hard,” she said.
“He expects a lot from them.”
Gifford’s main teaching tool is a multimedia computer
that allows him to project Web pages onto a screen. His curriculum,
which he wrote last summer, is based on national standards for
science education and has no textbook. “This way I can go
in any direction I really want to,” he said. The direction
usually involves an experiment, because he wants the students
to learn by doing and thinking. The program’s objective,
he wrote in his curriculum, is for students to develop an enthusiasm
for the natural world and an appreciation of scientific thought.
With donated funds, he bought science kits that allow the students
to carry out the experiments that underpin his teaching.
Which explains why Gifford and nine students were freezing
outside the school, armed with notepads, stopwatches and a tape
measure. Their hypothesis was that few drivers passing the school
adhered to the posted 25-mile-per-hour speed limit. The students
further hypothesized that men were more likely to disregard the
limit than women.
Before leaving the warmth of the classroom, Gifford reviewed
the required math, leading them through the calculations necessary
to translate feet per second into miles per hour. “Tomorrow,”
said Gifford, “we’re going to construct a graph that
will allow us to know, so we don’t have to calculate
it all the time.” After measuring the speed of three cars,
Gifford and the students gave in to the cold and went inside,
vowing to return another day to collect more data. “No one’s
going the speed limit, that’s for sure,” Gifford said,
noting that a much larger sample was needed for the study. “We
need a lot of cars. We need well over 100 cars.”
At a school science fair in February, the students presented
their results. They surveyed 206 cars and found that 81 percent
exceeded the speed limit, that 85 percent of female drivers and
79 percent of male drivers exceeded the limit, that all westbound
cars and 91 percent of eastbound drivers were speeding and that
the average speed was 35 miles per hour.
At Sacred Heart/St. Peter, his last class is over by 12:35
p.m., but Gifford often spends afternoons at the school. He arranges
for after-school tutoring for students who need it. He recently
offered his fellow teachers in-service training on classroom
applications of the Internet. And he’s working with K–3
teachers to develop a science curriculum they can use in the
classroom. “I felt I could bring something to the school
they didn’t have,” Gifford said, explaining his decision
to volunteer as a teacher. “It was an opportunity.”
Giaimo couldn’t agree more. “He is laying a foundation,”
she said, “in a way that I don’t think anyone else
could.” |
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Smart
cards for health care’s future?
Before the end
of the decade, patients may be arriving at the doctor’s
office with their personal genetic information encoded on a smart
card to help their physicians tailor their treatment. But who
else will have access to that personal information? Those were
among the visions and concerns for the future of health care
presented at the fourth annual Pharmacogenetics and Medicine
Lectures at the School of Medicine in early April. The conference
brought together experts in genomics, medicine and policy to
discuss the changes in medicine resulting from emerging information
about the relationship between an individual’s genetic makeup
and both the health benefits and detrimental side effects of
medications.
Pharmacogenetics
is the rapidly developing field that applies new tools based
on genetic differences to drug development and, eventually, to
choosing the best treatments for patients. The morning-long event
in Harkness Auditorium drew nearly 200 attendees from the medical
school and from biotechnology, pharmaceutical and venture capital
firms around the Northeast.
Gualberto Ruaño,
Ph.D. ’92, M.D. ’97, is chief executive officer of
the conference sponsor, Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a New Haven
firm that is discovering the associations between genetic variations
and clinical outcomes that will make those smart cards possible.
He predicted that within the next five to six years smart cards
will begin to be a part of health care practices and will quickly
become standard medical technology for prescribing medications.
Genomics, he said, can be predictive. “At the end of the
day, our purpose is to create a genetic PDR,” the
equivalent of the Physician’s Desk Reference used
by doctors for guidance in prescribing medications.
Gail Wilensky,
Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Center for Health Affairs/Project
HOPE, an international health foundation, and chair of the Medicare
Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare
issues. She pointed out that there is a great deal of skepticism
about the current value of health care relative to costs, but
was optimistic that pharmacogenetics will receive support. “The
promise of better targeting of pharmaceuticals,” she said,
is “better value for our money.”
Medical ethicist
and Professor of Medicine Robert J. Levine, M.D., HS ’63,
noted the importance of maintaining patient privacy and making
improvements in health care as a result of pharmacogenetic advances
becoming widely accessible. Without dealing with public fears,
achieving personalized medicine may not be so easy, warned Alan
McGowen, president of the Gene Media Forum, a public information
organization that focuses on biomedical science. “We can
avoid the pitfalls,” he said, “if we take a very strong
stance in educating the public about the benefits and are honest
about the risks in this research.” |
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Talking
about health
Students from
Yale’s health professions joined with city and state health
officials for Spring Into Health Fair on Communiversity
Day in April. At tables set out on the University’s Old
Campus, students in medicine, public health, nursing and the
Physician Associate Program offered information about a variety
of health topics including smoking prevention and cessation,
asthma and dental health. They also provided information about
nutrition and health insurance as well as blood pressure screenings.
Among the hands-on events was a chance to learn CPR with a mannequin.
Organizers hope this will become an annual event and timed it
to coincide with Communiversity Day on April 7. “Given that
there are going to be hundreds of people here, it’s an incredible
public health opportunity,” said Sara Schulman, M.P.H. ’01,
co-chair of the event with second-year medical student Grace
Suh. |
