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Surgery in Space: Medicine’s Final Frontier

October 12, 2018

Astronauts on long-duration flights will need access to more than just routine care

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Surgery in Space: Medicine’s Final Frontier

Friday, October 12th, 2018

The concept of human space exploration of space has experienced something of a recent revival in the public consciousness. The private SpaceX and Virgin Galactic companies (and their eccentric front men) often make front-page news for their achievements and goals, which ultimately involve traveling to and colonizing distant planets. Though some decry these ambitions as extravagant fantasies, news pertaining to novel developments in extraterrestrial exploration often goes viral over digital media, reflecting genuine public interest in the topic.

Though we are technologically closer to realizing long-distance space travel than we were 50 years ago, significant engineering, financial and logistical obstacles remain. The health and well-being of participants on future exploratory or colonization missions encompasses all of the aforementioned. The medical needs of future explorers and colonists must be adequately met in the face of arguably the most adverse and unpredictable conditions humans will ever venture into.

…continue reading ‘Surgery in Space: Medicine’s Final Frontier’

Image: By Derek Springer from Los Angeles, CA, USA – Star Trek 017, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4994823

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Scientific American

This Flu Season, Physicians Need to Scrap the ‘Martyr Culture’ of Working While Sick

February 7, 2018

As the worst flu epidemic in nearly a decade sweeps the U.S., here’s a message that more Americans need to heed: stay home if you are sick. Sadly, that’s a hard sell, especially in medicine

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This Flu Season, Physicians Need to Scrap the ‘Martyr Culture’ of Working While Sick

Wednesday, February 7th, 2018

Doctors routinely show up for work when they are sick. I’ve done it myself, seeing patients while I had pneumonia, or suffering with severe hip pain. And I’ve been complicit many other times, watching physician colleagues work through similar and sometimes worse illnesses without demanding that they go home.

Of course, none of us want to spread illness and harm our patients. So we tell ourselves it will be fine if we just wear a mask and gloves, take ibuprofen, and march on through the day.

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STAT

My Year on “Mars”

January 2, 2018

Physicist Christiane Heinicke spent 365 days sequestered with five others in a geodesic dome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano to test what isolation might do to the psyches of the crew on a Mars mission

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My Year on “Mars”

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018

The wind sweeps quietly across the barren, dry landscape. There is not a shrub in sight, not a tree, not a single blade of grass that the wind might disturb. Only barren grayish-red rocks.

The wind never touched us as we peered out of our only window, which was more of a porthole than a real window. We did hear it though as it swept across our white dome perched on the slope of the volcano.

We lived and worked for an entire year halfway up Mauna Loa under conditions similar to those that explorers on Mars will encounter. We called the 1,200-square-foot space that we lived in our “habitat,” and whenever we left it we had to wear spacesuits. We each had our own tiny room outfitted with a bed, a small table, a stool and a chest of drawers.

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Scientific American

Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End

August 29, 2016

One year ago, six volunteers—an astrobiologist, a physicist, a pilot, an architect, a journalist, and a soil scientist — entered a 36-by-20 foot dome, located near a barren volcano in Hawaii, to simulate what living conditions would be like on Mars. Today they re-emerged from their year-long isolation

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Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End

Monday, August 29th, 2016

The NASA-funded project is called HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), designed to test the effects of isolation in confined conditions of a human mission to Mars. This is the third such simulation, and the longest; the two prior missions lasted for four and eight months, respectively. The Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii was chosen as a location because it’s most similar to the red, barren Martian terrain.

The six participants could only communicate with the outside world via email, and those transmissions were delayed by 20 minutes to mimic how long it would take for such a signal to travel between Earth and Mars. Resources were limited: anything they needed, they had to bring into the dome with them at the outset, right down to duct tape. Food was replenished every four months, and water every two months.

The crew were allowed to leave the dome, but only if they donned heavy space suits. And there were simulated emergencies: everything from power outages and broken tools, to a forced evacuation to avoid a harsh radiation wave.

See also: Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflight – Report from the Committee on Ethics Principles and Guidelines for Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflights, chaired by our Jeffrey Kahn

Image: By NASA – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7824863

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Gizmodo

Scottish Nurse Who Recovered From Ebola Is Back In Isolation

October 12, 2015

Doctors say Pauline Cafferkey is suffering “an unusual late complication” from her previous Ebola infection. They note that “Pauline previously had the Ebola virus and this is therefore not a new infection.”

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Scottish Nurse Who Recovered From Ebola Is Back In Isolation

Monday, October 12th, 2015

A Scottish nurse who recovered from Ebola in January has been medevaced from Glasgow to London in a Royal Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane specially equipped for infection control.

Cafferkey is being treated in the isolation unit of the Royal Free Hospital in London, the same high-security, bio-safety ward where she was treated for Ebola in January.

Cafferkey came down with the virus in December of last year. After volunteering as a nurse at an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone, she got sick soon after returning to the U.K.

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NPR: Goats and Soda Blog

Surgery in Space: Medicine’s Final Frontier

Surgery in Space: Medicine’s Final Frontier

This Flu Season, Physicians Need to Scrap the ‘Martyr Culture’ of Working While Sick

This Flu Season, Physicians Need to Scrap the ‘Martyr Culture’ of Working While Sick

My Year on “Mars”

My Year on “Mars”

Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End

Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End

Scottish Nurse Who Recovered From Ebola Is Back In Isolation

Scottish Nurse Who Recovered From Ebola Is Back In Isolation

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