Casting for the Cure

Keeping middle schoolers from alcohol is a tougher task in the inner city than in rural areas, even for experts armed with the best prevention programs, a new University of Florida study shows.

A three-year, three-pronged prevention program did little to keep Chicago middle schoolers from drinking or using drugs, despite its prior success in rural Minnesota, where the program reduced alcohol use 20 to 30 percent, UF and University of Minnesota researchers recently reported in the online edition of the journal Addiction.

“The intervention found to be effective in rural areas was not effective here, which really surprised us,” said Kelli A. Komro, a UF associate professor of epidemiology in the UF College of Medicine and the study’s lead author. “This is an important finding to realize this program was not enough. The bottom line is this: Low-income children in urban areas need more, long-term intensive efforts.”

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The March of Dimes Foundation awarded $3.5 million to 10 scientists who are trying to stem the growing pace of preterm birth by studying the role genes and heredity play in premature births and how the rate of fetal lung development, infection and other factors may trigger labor.

Since 2005, the March of Dimes has committed more than $11 million to its four-year-old Prematurity Research Initiative grant program.

The March of Dimes unveiled the names and the projects of the 10 scientists who are the 2008 grant recipients, including two whose work was funded in the first round of grant awards in 2005.

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The country’s two largest electronic-prescription networks Tuesday announced a merger, creating a single, secure network for the exchange of digital health information.

In a cashless transaction, which closed late Monday, RxHub LLC, a joint-venture of pharmacy-benefit managers, CVS Caremark Corp., Express Scripts, Inc. and Medco Health Solutions, Inc., will combine its operations with SureScripts, a private company founded by the National Community Pharmacists Association and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. The merger isn’t subject to antitrust review because the fair market value of the combined entity isn’t high enough, according to the companies.

The owners of RxHub and SureScripts will each retain a 50% stake in the new venture, which will initially go by the name SureScripts-RxHub, LLC, according to executives from the two companies.

The initiative is the latest in a flurry of recent moves that are likely to speed the adoption of paperless prescriptions, seen as a useful but little-used tool. The health care industry aims to shift from costly, error-prone paper prescriptions to more streamlined electronic methods that have the potential to improve patient safety and reduce the cost of care, but which also raise questions about the security and privacy of patient data.

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clinical trial will examine whether a new cancer treatment is as effective in humans as it’s proven to be in mice, say researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The treatment involves transfusing white blood cells called granulocytes from healthy young donors — whose immune systems produce cells with high levels of cancer-fighting activity — into patients with advanced cancer.

A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice cured 100 percent of lab mice with advanced cancer.

“In mice, we’ve been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors. Hopefully, we will see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans,” lead researcher Zheng Cui, associate professor of pathology, said in a prepare statement.

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