President Barack Obama
Barack Obama once again made history when yesterday he recited the presidential oath of office, and became the first African American President of the United States. Now, on January 21st, President Obama will begin to face the serious challenges plaguing our country head on. Read the rest of this entry »
The Food and Drug Administration has a website where consumers can search for information on foods recalled because of potential Salmonella contamination.
You can search by brand name, UPC, product description (for example, crackers with peanut butter), or any combination of the three.
The FDA has traced the source of Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak to peanut butter and peanut paste manufactured by the Peanut Corporation of America in their plant in Blakely, Georgia. The FDA recommends that consumers avoid all commercially-produced food made with peanut butter until more information is known about the extent of contamination.
Almost all colorectal cancer patients who are treated with an EGFR inhibiting drug, including Erbitux® (cetuximab) or Vectibix™ (panitumumab) will develop some skin rash. Treating it before it appears results in fewer difficult symptoms of itchiness, pain, swelling, and unsightly acne-like rash and postpones their development.
During the STEPP trial, doctors randomized patients scheduled to receive Vectibix to either begin preemptive treatment of skin rash a day before their first treatment or to wait until symptoms appeared. Less than a third (29 percent) of patients getting preemptive treatment developed grade 2 or greater skin rash during the first six weeks of treatment. However, if doctors waited to begin treatment when rash appeared, two-thirds (62 percent) of patients had grade 2 or greater skin rash during that same six weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Incidence of rectal cancer in younger patients is increasing, although there is no similar pattern with colon cancer or in older rectal cancer patients. The reason for the trend is unclear.
First observed in a single cancer center, the trend toward more rectal cancer in patients under forty was confirmed in review of the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. Read the rest of this entry »
I am sitting at the Oakland airport waiting for my flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles going home from the Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium. This is the only GI symposium in the United States which brings together all the experts dealing with patients with GI cancer, including surgeons, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, gastroenterologists, and scientists.
We all realize that it takes a team to provide the best care, particularly with novel developments in technologies such as virtual colonoscopies, new drugs, new surgical techniques and new insights on cancer risk and prevention strategies. Read the rest of this entry »
