Discover the Science of Health
To promote public involvement in current scientific research as well as to provide a resource for medical and research professionals, we’ve put together a research conferences page here at Highlight HEALTH where you can follow along with current scientific meetings.
Currently, there are two major conferences going on: the Society for Neuroscience 2010 and the 2010 American Heart Association meetings.
More than 2.5 million images and figures from medical and life sciences journals are now available through Images, a new resource for finding images in biomedical literature. The database was developed and will be maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health. Images is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/images.
As you prepare to head to the polls on Tuesday, November 2, take a moment to look up your local candidates and see where they stand on important issues in health and research.
Research!America provides a voter education initiative Your Candidates — Your Health 2010 to help you better understand your candidates’ position and help you make a more informed decision in the voting booth.
Candidates for Congress who are on the ballot were invited to respond to the Your Candidates — Your Health 2010 questionnaire following the primary in their state or territory.
Each candidate received a letter explaining the initiative and a copy of the questionnaire. They were given the option of responding by fax, mail, e-mail or online at www.yourcandidatesyourhealth.org. Each candidate’s answers appear as entered. Candidates’ responses are only reviewed for inappropriate content (e.g., profanity). Candidates are contacted and given the opportunity to edit their responses if any content was deemed inappropriate. Responses received from candidates who are no longer running do not appear on the site.
Do you know where your candidates stand on important issues in health and research?
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Health Dialog, a leading provider of care management, healthcare analytics and decision support, has made its industry-leading breast cancer decision aid Early Stage Breast Cancer: Choosing Your Surgery available to the general public. As a public service throughout the month of October, Health Dialog is providing access to a series of tools, information and resources about potential treatment options for breast cancer (see below).
Essentially every major medical advance in the last century — from antibiotics to analgesics such as Tylenol or Motrin, from blood transfusions to organ transplantation, from vaccinations to chemotherapy, bypass surgery and joint replacement — is based on knowledge obtained through research with animals. In fact, almost 75% of all Nobel Prizes in Medicine awarded since 1901 were won for discoveries that required the use of animals [1].
Indeed, animal-based research has contributed to a significant improvement in the quality and length of human life. From cancer to heart disease and stroke to diabetes, society benefits from the use of laboratory animals in biomedical research [2]. Unfortunately, there is a worldwide movement that seeks to halt those advances and establish moral and legal equality between humans and animals, to eliminate the status of animals as property (meaning domestic pets and livestock for food), and to stop the use of animals in biomedical research.
The debate between those who support animal research and those that don’t often gets portrayed in such a way that it appears that one group cares about animals while the other group doesn’t. This isn’t the case at all — fundamentally, the issue is how to reduce the total suffering for both humans and animals.
