Daily Debriefing
By Emily Fletcher
Published on Friday, October 23, 2009
Dartmouth College Health Services has received a limited supply of the H1N1 vaccine, which will be made available to students at high risk for complications due to swine flu at two shot clinics next week, according to a campus-wide e-mail from College Health Services director Jack Turco on Thursday. High-risk individuals, as defined by the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, include pregnant women, along with people with active asthma or chronic medical conditions. The College expects to receive more doses of the vaccine, which contains the inactivated H1N1 virus, from the New Hampshire Division of Public Health Services, Turco said in his e-mail. Health Services is doing everything possible to make the vaccine available to the entire student body, Turco said.
Dartmouth Medical School professors Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin called on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to improve the way prescription drug information is presented on drug labels in an article in the Oct. 29 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, according to a DMS press release. Schwartz and Woloshin argue that labeling is often incomplete and does not fully convey known effects of a drug to prescribing physicians, the release said. “We are very hopeful that FDA’s new leadership will try and take on this issue,” Woloshin said in the release. “Better labeling is critical: Clinicians — and their patients — need access to credible, complete information about prescription drugs without the filter of industry.”
The number of medical school applications nationwide increased by only 0.1 percent this year, despite the opening of four new U.S. medical schools, according to data from the Association of American Medical Schools that was reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The minimal increase heightens the association’s worries of a large-scale physician shortage caused by the aging population, rapidly retiring doctors and the possibility of millions of newly insured Americans as a result of health care reform, according to the Chronicle. Despite a 2-percent increase in medical school enrollment, the association estimates that the country will face a shortage of up to 159,000 doctors by 2025, according to the Chronicle.