Archive for June, 2008
June 9th, 2008
Poplar Grove resident Paula Irwin, 56, found out at a May 8 lumpectomy that she had early-stage malignant tumors in both her breasts.Â
Twelve days later she was finished with radiation treatment, thanks to the MammoSite Radiation Therapy System.
Rather than a typical six-week regimen of external beam radiation used after a lumpectomy, MammoSite uses a five-day radiation treatment that is delivered from the inside of the cavity from which the tumor was removed. The radiation comes from a computer-controlled High Dose Rate (HDR) machine, and goes through a catheter attached to a small balloon inside that cavity in the breast. Because it is targeted and works from the inside, a higher daily dose of radiation can be used for a shorter period of time. The MammoSite system got FDA clearance in 2002.
OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center has had the MammoSite system since May 2005, and SwedishAmerican Health System since April 2007.  Irwin received her MammoSite treatments at SwedishAmerican. Her last treatment was about three weeks ago.
“Within a matter of 12 days I was done with surgery and radiation all at once,” Irwin said. “It was time-efficient, which was really good for me. Plus, the external radiation tends to burn you; I’m very fair-skinned and burn easily.”
Temporary balloons with catheters are inserted at the time of the lumpectomy, after the surgeon has determined that that cancer has not spread and there is enough tissue around the cavity, said SwedishAmerican Manager of Radiation Oncology Kathy Stukenberg. When the MammoSite treatment is ready to start, the temporary balloons and catheters are removed and the MammoSite ones installed, she said.
“It was a little painful having them taken out and put back in, but nothing unbearable,” Irwin said.
The MammoSite treatments usually are done in seven-to-10-minute increments twice a day for five days, Stukenberg said. Generally each day’s treatments are spaced 5 to 6 hours apart, she said.
The procedure can only be used on people with early-stage cancer which has not spread beyond the margins of the lump, Stukenberg said. And it’s normally used for women age 45 and older, because breast cancer in younger women tends to be a more aggressive type. “If any lumph nodes are positive, you can’t have it done. And if you’re small breasted you can’t have it done because there is not enough surface tissue.”
To find out more about the MammoSite Radiation Therapy System, you can go to http://www.mammosite.com.
June 6th, 2008
This weekend, 60 high school students from northern Illinois are getting a taste of what it’s like to work in healthcare professions — complete with an emergency simulation of a car crash and its victims, a tour through a human cadaver, and a public health pandemic game.
The students are attending the fourth annual Rural Health Careers Camp on the Northern Illinois University campus. They’ve been recruited by guidance counselors and science teachers from small towns across northern Illinois. The camp’s purpose is to give the students a glimpse into healthcare careers that might bring them back home to work after graduating.
Healthcare professions find it tough to recruit students from rural communities because there aren’t many role models or places to work, said Alan Robinson, director of outreach for the NIU College of Health and Human Sciences.
The students range from incoming freshmen to juniors. The camp program tries to catch students early in high school so they have time to go back to school and sign up for the right courses if they’re interested in a healthcare career, Robinson said. Those courses might include second-year biology or chemistry, he said, if the students want to qualify for healthcare related majors once they reach college.
Sponsors include the University of Illinois National Center for Rural Health Professions, the NIU colleges of Health and Human Sciences and Educaiton, the Northern Illinois Area Health Education Center, and NIU Student Affairs.
June 5th, 2008
On June 13, the Winnebago County Health Department will be testing its Emergency Operations Plan with an exercise involving about 30 local agencies. The department has done about four such exercises in the past two years, said Emergency Response Coordinator Dan Reilly.
The Emergency Operations Plan was created to provide a coordinated response of county government and community in the event of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack, Reilly said.
Each of the exercises is done according to an “incident action plan” to simulate a specific response to a specific problem, he said. “For example, if we had a smallpox breakout, that would require a mass vaccination. But if we had an anthrax attack, that would require a specific medication distribution.
“The Centers for Disease Control says that in the event of certain types of infectious disease, we’d need to vaccinate everyone in the county within 48 hours.”
The June 13 exercise will test a scenario involving an infectious agent, Reilly said. The specific agent will not be revealed until the start of the exercise. The simulation will provide advanced vaccination training — a technique that is a bit different from normal vaccinations — at a mass vaccination site. “We’ll be sending all the Health Department people through it so they know what it looks like, as well as people from area agencies,” he said. Those agencies include all local hospitals, law enforcement agencies and fire departments, major employers and the Rock River Valley Blood Center as well as other entities, Reilly said.
The Health Department also wants to include nursing students, pharmacists and veterinarians in this exercise, Reilly said, “people you wouldn’t normally think of. We’d like to have a pool of semi-trained people so that if something would happen, we could get them trained really quickly and send them out.”
The department expects about 300 people to participate in the exercise.
For more information on participating, call Dan Reilly at 815-720-4217 or e-mail dreilly@wchd.org. The deadline for signing up to participate in the exercise is 5 p.m. on Wednesday, June 11.
June 4th, 2008
When I was a young girl, bananas were considered a deadly food.
It made sense in that time and place. We were living in Japan, it was the early 1960s, and a new cholera epidemic had just started in Indonesia and spread to Taiwan. The nation of Taiwan was the source from which Japan imported most of its bananas.
People in that part of the world were terrified of cholera. It could be a death sentence. The bactera that caused the disease came from the feces of infected people, and spread through contaminated water and (to a lesser extent) food — hence the fear of bananas from Taiwan. We knew that cholera, which causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, could send a healthy person into shock and death from dehydration in just a day or two. (These days the World Health Organization has a rehydration solution which is used to very effectively to treat cholera victims during outbreaks that still occur in third-world countries.)
I’d always thought of cholera as a third-world disease. But recently I learned that in the 1800’s, before people knew about bacterial infections and how they spread, several cholera pandemics made their way to the United States.
In fact, the first Board of Health in Rockford was created in 1854 because of a cholera pandemic that reached this city. Victims of the disease were quarantined in a house outside the city limits. Because the situation was considered a health emergency, the city passed an ordinance providing for nuisance abatement and preservation of health in June of that year, forming the new Board of Healtlh.
That Board of Health was a predecessor to today’s Winnebago County Health Department. The Board’s creation is the beginning spot in a historic timeline displayed on a wall at the WCHD building. According to its records, the Winnebago County Health Department opened in 1962 and merged with the city’s health department in 1970.
These days, cholera is not a threat in our part of the world. But the Winnebago County Health Department still is concerned and preparing for the possiblity of other potential pandemics, said Emergency Response Coordinator Dan Reilly.
In fact it has created an Emergency Operations Plan to provide coordinated responses of county government and community in case of a health emergency such as a pandemic or bioterrorism attack, Reilly said.
Under the plan, the Winnebago County Health Department holds exercises to train and test local agencies and health professionals on responses to specific health emergency scenarios, he said. One of those exercises is coming up on June 13.
Stay tuned to this blog for more details.
June 2nd, 2008
Want to see what patients have said about their satisfaction with a particular hospital, or how the hospital compares with others when it comes to recommended care and outcomes?
On the Web site “Hospital Compare” you can see that information for most hospitals across the country and here in the Rock River Valley.
The Web site was created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, together with the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), a public-private collaboration that promotes reporting on hospital quality of care. The patient satisfaction and outcome data on Hospital Compare includes all patients, not just those on Medicare and Medicaid.Â
To find data on hospitals, click on the main Hospital Care link, then on the “Find and Compare Hospitals” bar, and then on the “Begin Search” bar under the “General Search” heading.Â
On the next page you can search by hospital name, zip code, city, state or county. That’s where I chose to view hospitals within 25 miles of Rockford. Five are listed: Rockford Memorial Hospital, SwedishAmerican Hospital, OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center, Beloit Memorial Hospital and Rochelle Community Hospital. All five provided process of care and outcome measures. For Rockford Memorial and Beloit Memorial, patient satisfaction ratings were not available.Â
The data on the above links is for the most recent survey, from July 2006 through June 2007. For archived information from earlier dates, click here.
I was alerted to this site by the quarterly Information Service Letter, a publication of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Rockford.Â
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