May 18 is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day

National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) provides Fact Sheets, Brochures, and Questions & Answers about HIV vaccine research and trials.

HIV Vaccine Researchers are working to develop a vaccine that is 100 percent effective and will protect everyone from HIV infections. HIV research is essential for Louisiana citizens. Look at the facts below.

HIV/AIDS in Louisiana FACTS
• As of March 31, 2008 a cumulative total of 27,744 persons have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Louisiana, including 302 cases in children under the age of 13.
• There are persons living with HIV in every parish in Louisiana, and this number continues to increase each year, largely due to more effective drug therapies.
• A total of 15,795 persons were known to be living with HIV/AIDS in Louisiana, of which 8,281 (52%) had been diagnosed with AIDS as of March 31, 2008.
• In 2007, 1,152 new HIV cases were diagnosed in Louisiana; 30% of the cases were in Region 1 (New Orleans area) and 28% were in Region 2 (Baton Rouge area).
• In 2007, 803 new AIDS cases were diagnosed in Louisiana. Of these cases, 33% occurred in Region 1 (New Orleans) ad 27% occurred in Region 2 (Baton Rouge).
• In 2006, Louisiana ranked 5th highest in state AIDS case rates and 12th in the number of AIDS cases diagnosed in 2006.
• Baton Rouge ranked 4th for AIDS case rates among the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. in 2006; New Orleans ranked 8th.
• In Louisiana, 30% of new HIV cases and 31% of new AIDS cases are among women.
• HIV continues to disproportionately affect African Americans in Louisiana. In 2007, 72% of newly diagnosed HIV cases and 75% of newly diagnosed AIDS cases were among African Americans.

April is STD Awareness Month

April is STD awareness month! That’s Sexually Transmitted Diseases. The CDC estimates that there are approximately 19 million new cases of STDs each year in the United States, almost half of them among young people ages 15 to 24.
Let’s look at how Louisiana is doing. (Reports from the CDC – STD Surveillance, 2007)

Chlamydia — Reported cases and ranked by rates: United States, 2007
1 Mississippi: 21,686 Cases & a rate of 745.1 per 100,000 Population
2 Alaska:
3 South Carolina:
4 Alabama:
5 New Mexico:
6 Georgia:
7 Louisiana: 19,362 Cases & a rate of 451.6 per 100,000 Population
8 Tennessee:
9 Hawaii:
10 Illinois:

Gonorrhea — Reported cases and ranked by rates: United States, 2007
1 Mississippi: 8,314 Cases & a rate of 285.7 per 100,000 Population
2 Louisiana: 11,137 Cases & a rate of 259.7 per 100,000 Population
3 South Carolina:
4 Alabama:
5 Georgia:

Primary and secondary syphilis — Reported cases and ranked by rates: United States, 2007
1 Louisiana: 533 Cases & a rate of 12.4 per 100,000 Population
2 Alabama: 380 Cases & a rate of 8.3 per 100,000
3 Georgia:
4 Maryland:
5 Tennessee:

AMIA Summit on Translational Research

The AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) summit on Translational Research is March 15-17, 2009 in San Francisco. http://summit2009.amia.org/ Conducted in close partnership with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), this meeting will be an indispensible gathering for translational bioinformatics research and development worldwide. The abstracts to papers and posters are available for viewing.

Use 2.0 to keep up!

Having trouble keeping up with those journals that are piling up? Don’t remember where those email reports are about your committee work? Well…..

You can set up your personal Google Reader which accepts RSS feeds to monitor your favorite journals, keep track of your own publications and get notified when someone cites you, and stay up to date with society/association announcements, and your favorite blogs.

Don’t know what I just said? You should contact a reference librarian reference@lsuhsc.edu immediately. She will assist you in using these 2.0 technologies. This technology will simplify your life. You can wow your kids at the same time! The drawback? Once you get the hang of 2.0 technologies it will be 3.0 technologies!

Peanut Product Recall

The FDA has a website that lists all the peanut containing products that have been recalled by the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA). Some PCA peanut products have been linked to the Salmonella Typhimurium Outbreak.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/peanutbutterrecall/index.cfm

From PubMed Search to Research Bibliography

Did you know:
1. You can save your PubMed search.
2. Run the same search each week (or month) for updated articles (My NCBI).
3. Store your PubMed citations (and the full-text) in RefWorks.
4. Use Write-N-Cite to insert your citations into your Word document.
5. Create a bibliography for your paper.

Contact the library’s reference department reference@lsuhsc.edu where one of the librarians can assist you in setting up these available services. You can take it one step at a time.

Faculty Pubs – 2008

Check out the LSUHSC – New Orleans Faculty Publications database for your 2008 publications to make sure yours are included. I check Biological Abstracts, CINAHL, Web of Science, PubMed, SCOPUS, and EMBASE.com for publications from LSUHSC – NO. Books, book chapters, and local and regional conference abstracts are not indexed in these resources and may have been overlooked.
If your 2008 publication is not there, please submit citation information to Kathy Kerdolff, Reference Librarian (kkerdo@lsuhsc.edu).