UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Emergency hospital disaster plan developed

BALTIMORE, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. medical researchers say hospitals planning for a surge of disaster victims should begin with a strategy to empty beds of relatively healthy patients.

The researchers, led by Dr. Gabor Kelen, director of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, say data suggest such a strategy could safely empty 70 percent of a hospital's inpatient population within 72 hours.

Kelen said his panel believes all hospitals should continually rank patients according to how sick they are and assign a constantly updated "score." That number would be used during an emergency to eliminate the emotional effects of deciding which patients to discharge, keep or send to another facility.

Health care officials fear few U.S. hospitals could deal with the extraordinarily large numbers of causalities that can be produced by a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina, a possible terrorist attack like Sept. 11, or epidemics.

"Without this sort of system in place, the worry is a hospital's resources would be quickly overwhelmed in a major crisis," said Kelenl. "So not only would the disaster victims not get adequate treatment, but neither would the patients who are already hospitalized."

Mass extinction also changed ocean ecology

CHICAGO, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- A U.S.-led study suggests the Earth's biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago changed the ecology of the oceans.

Researchers say the event wiped out an estimated 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species. But it did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans by displacing complex communities of ecologically simple marine life.

Furthermore, scientists say the apparently abrupt shift set a new pattern that has continued ever since: the dominance of higher-metabolism, mobile organisms that find their own food, over older groups of low-metabolism, stationary organisms that filter nutrients from the water.

"We were able to combine a huge data set with new quantitative analyses," said Peter Wagner of Chicago's Field Museum and lead author of the study. "We think these are the first analyses of this type at this large scale. They show that the end-Permian mass extinction permanently altered not just taxonomic diversity, but also the prevailing marine ecosystem structure."

The findings by Wagner; Scott Lidgard, also from the Field Museum; and Matthew Kosnik of Australia's James Cook University, appeared in the Nov. 24 issue of Science.

Study looks at ethnic menopausal symptoms

AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- A U.S. scientist is conducting a $1.2 million study of differences in menopausal symptoms reported by four of the most common U.S. ethnic groups.

Senior investigator Eun-Ok Im of the University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing said the National Institutes of Health-funded, Internet-based study will collect data from 500 middle-aged Caucasian, Hispanic, African-American and Asian women nationwide.

"Increasing ethnic diversity of our population requires health professionals to practice with greater cultural competence in areas such as the management of menopausal symptoms, where cultural beliefs mediate the biology of reproduction and aging," said Im.

A growing number of studies have challenged the universality of menopausal symptoms by indicating ethnic differences in how women experience them. For example, it has been reported Hispanic women experience more urinary problems and African-American women have more weight gain.

"All of this has been reported, but findings are inconsistent," Im said, adding she believes her study will present a more valid comparison because she is getting equal numbers of participants from each ethnic group.

The study is expected to be completed during 2009.

Seismologists take Earth's temperature

SANTA CRUZ, Calif., Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. seismologists say they have directly measured, for the first time, the heat flowing from the Earth's molten core into an area at the mantle's base.

The scientists say that flow helps drive both the movement of tectonic plates at the Earth's surface, as well as the geodynamo in the core that generates Earth's magnetic field.

The boundary between the core and the mantle is halfway to the center of the Earth, at a depth of 1,740 miles. The new temperature measurements were obtained by relating seismic observations to a recently discovered mineral transformation that occurs at the ultrahigh pressures and temperatures prevailing near the core-mantle boundary.

"This is the first time we've had a 'thermometer' that tells us the temperature halfway down to the center of the Earth," said University of California-Santa Cruz Professor Thorne Lay, first author of the paper.

Using 72,000 hours of supercomputing time, the scientists determined the temperature at the upper boundary is about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At the lower end of the boundary the temperature is about 5,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The study appeared in the Nov. 24 issue of the Science.

NASA: Global warming cuts ocean food

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- NASA scientists say global warming is reducing the oceans' primary food supply, posing a threat to fisheries and ecosystems.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers reached that conclusion by comparing nearly a decade of global ocean satellite data with several records of Earth's changing climate. They found whenever climate temperatures increased, m marine plant life in the form of microscopic phytoplankton declined. When climate temperatures lowered, marine plant life became more vigorous or productive.

"The evidence is pretty clear that the Earth's climate is changing dramatically, and in this NASA research we see a specific consequence of that change," said oceanographer and study co-author Gene Carl Feldman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Md. "It is only by understanding how climate and life on Earth are linked that we can realistically hope to predict how the Earth will be able to support life in the future."

The study is published in the current edition of the journal Nature.