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Tuesday, October 13,1992 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise • 5 Surv%: AIMS M$ lines otteij inacQprate General News ANAHEIM, Calif. (Afe) **} AIDS hot lines often givevbuf informa- tion that's misleading, pver- simplified — or just plain wrong, a survey has found. •.'? \They actually generate a lot of .anxiety, although overall; they probably do more good than not,\ said Dr. Stepheri^'Glfickman of Cooper Hospital in Camden, NJ., who directed the survey. In the survey, drama students called 33 hot lines pretending to be people infected with the AIDS virus or people who were well but. worried. The answers they got varied widely. Gluckman attributed the poor ad- vice to haphazard training and of- ten nonexistent counseling experi- ence among the volunteers wrjo staff the hot' fines, which' are in- tended to clear up confusion about the disease. , Among other things, the survey found: —Some hot lines emphatically said AIDS is spread through kiss- ing. Most experts disagree. —Several urged people infected with the virus to take vitamins or Study indicates computer chip workers at risk for miscarriage SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A study that links chemicals used to manufacture computer chips and miscarriages among the workers who make them has raised ques- tions about the safety of one of the nation's cleanest industries. IBM recently notified its workers and competitors of a company- commissioned study that found that two widely used chemicals may significantly increase the risk. The results were seen as signifi- cant, although they were prelimi- nary and based on a small sample size, IBM spokesman Jim Ruder- man said Monday.\ International • Business Machines Corp., based in Armonk, N;Y., notified its workers, the Environmental Pro- tection Agency and members in the Semiconductor Industry Asso- ciation last month about the fin- dings. • ' In absolute terms they are not large numbers,\ Ruderman said. \Our feeling is that even one un- necessary miscarriage is too many.\ • Other,companies in recent weeks have in turn notified their workers of the results of the study. Among them: Intel, Texas Instruments, American Telephone & Telegraph Co., Advanced Micro Devices, Signetics and National Semicon- ductor, said Semiconductor Indus- try Association spokesman Thomas G. Beermann. The association has about 40 members, including virtually all the major/, semiconductor manu- facturers in the United States. \We knew these were reproduc- tive toxins, and the industry has known this,\ said Ted Smith, director of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, organized a decade ago to point to health concerns in the industry. \It really seems that the people who are making the decisions in this industry care more about de- veloping the next generation of chips that protecting the next gen- eration of children.\ The study by John Hopkins Uni- versity researchers looked at 30 female workers who handled the chemicals at IBM plants in East FishlriU, N.Y., and Burlington, Vt., from 1980 to 1989. It found that the miscarriage rate among workers who did not use the sol- vents was 13.6 percent, compared with 33.3 percent among workers who did. The chemicals — diethylene glycol dimethl ether and ethylene glycol monethl ether acetate — are used to etch away material depos- ited on the silicon wafers used to make chips. There are no cost-effective substitutes for the chemicals, Beermann said, although in newer production plants \the use of these chemicals are certainly minimized.\ Most companies have begun offering their workers transfers from areas where they are used, he said. IBM's Ruderman said changes have been made in the fabrication processes at the two plants, in- cluding purchasing the chemicals already mixed instead of mixing them on site. The new procedure dramatically decreases the risk of accidental exposure, he said. IBM has reduced by 40 percent use of the chemicals since 1989, he said, and is stepping up plans to find substitutes and phase them out entirely. The computer maker said it became concerned. about the risks when a 1986 study at the Univer- sity of Massachusetts for Digital Equipment Corp. indicated that some processes in \clean room\ fabrication areas might be harm- ful. Clean rooms are the super- clean laboratories in which com- puter chips are made. The Johns Hopkins study was begun in 1989. Final results won't be available until early next year. IBM said fewer than a dozen workers at the two plants have ex- pressed concern over possible ex- posure to company medical and safety officers since the firm notified workers of the study re- sults. Woman dies after transplant LOS ANGELES (AP) — A young woman died 1V4 days after becom- ing the first person ever to receive a transplant of a pig. liver. Susan Fowler, 26, of Burbank, died late Monday, just before she was to undergo surgery to receive a human liver that had been flown in from Utah earlier in the day, said Ron Wise, spokesman at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The cause of death was not immediately known. ^ItM&MShMrSSty d^strsssed»by J sthis^tuHupfreventSAl^.Avas=«-heroic «fc fort,\ Wise said. \We hoped that we could preserve her life. It was not to be.\ Fowler had suffered liver disease since childhood. She'd been in crit- ical condition since Sunday, when the pig liver was implanted next to her own in an eight-hour operation. The pig liver was considered a means of keeping her alive until a human organ could be found, not a permanent replacement for her own liver. Wise said that for a while after the implant, her condition became increasingly stable. She survived about 32 hours with the animal organ. \She would not have made it through (Sunday) night if this surgery had not taken place,\ Wise said. The surgery, was the second animal-to-human liver transplant this year. An unidentified 35-year-old man received a baboon liver in June at the University of Pittburgh Medical Center, in what was intended as a per- manent transplant. He died 10 weeks later after suffering bleeding inside his skull. Before that, the last known animal-to-human transplant was in 1984, when a baby received a baboon heart at Loma Linda University Medical Center. The girl, known as Baby Faye, died 20 days later. Using animal organs in humans is seen as one way to meet shortages of donor organs. On average, one patient a day dies in the United States while waiting for a liver transplant, according to the University of Pitt- sburgh. Pig livers are suitable as temporary replacements for human livers be- cause they are anatomically similar, said Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, direc- tor of the liver transplant program at the University of California at Los Angeles. \Its size is comparable, unlike the baboon's, which is very small,\ he said. But he said pigs' systems are so unlike humans' in other respects that a permanent transplant is impossible. ' The pig liver transplant, performed by six surgeons and a team of nearly 40 other medical personnel, was the culmination of eight years of research, Wise said. The liver is a large organ with complex functions including cleansing the blood of poisons, storing vitamins and minerals, and manufacturing bile for digestion. Fowler's liver began to give out last week, and a national search for a human liver did not immediately find an organ. One of the nation's largest animal rights groups decried the transplant \We are pretty shocked that they tried it again -so soon after that man died in Pittsburgh,\ said Dan Mathews, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He called the transplant surgeons \mod- em-day Frankensteins.\ American wins Nobel economics prize STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — An American was awarded the the Nobel Prize in economics today for research that extended eco- nomic theory to areas of human behavior not previously associated with market forces. The academy said the work of Gary S. Becker, 61, of the Univer- sity of Chicago, encouraged economists to apply economic theory to areas that had been the exclusive realm of sociologists, demographers and criminologists. Becker \has applied the princi- ple of rational, optimizing behavior to areas where resear- chers formerly assumed that behavior is habitual and often downright irrational,\ said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the $1.2 million prize. Becker has borrowed an aphorism from George Bernard Shaw to describe his philosophy: \Economy is the an of making the most of life.\ go on special diets. Two hot lines strongly s recommended macrobiotic regimens. There is no evidence that such strategies help. HHot line answerers frequently failed to recognize that the stan- dard AIDS screening test can falsely find someone is infected and must be double-checked with a more rigorous test. —Callers often got different an- swers from the same hot line, depending on whom they talked to. Gluckman presented his findings Monday at a meeting of the American Society for ^Microbiology. He said that while one of the hot lines required staffers to hold degrees in psychology or social work, others demanded only a high school diploma or no academic credentials at all. The hot lines typically gave staf- fers a few hours of training and then let them answer the phones. Some required only that their vol- unteers read a pamphlet first \We start out incorrectly by let- ting anyone who walks in off the street, no matter how well-mean- ing, answer these questions,\ Gluckman said. He said he was particularly con- cerned by how emphatically the hot lines gave answers to such questions as the safety of oral sex, when experts are unsure of the right answers. \With almost no exceptions, advice was never qualified,\ he said. Attempts to reach several hot lines for comment on the findings were unsuccessful, because the lines were constantly busy. However, Dr. Julie Gerberding, an AIDS researcher at the Univer- sity of California at San Francisco, said: \It doesn't surprise me at all. This points to the need for quality control on the hot lines.\ Will NASA's search for space aliens succeed? GOLDSTONE, Calif. (AP) — Just what are the odds NASA's 10- year search for alien civilizations will find intelligent life on other planets? \Some believe our chances are good. Others are skeptical. But no one really knows,\ said Edward C. Stone, director of the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. NASA marked Columbus Day on Monday by switching on radio telescopes in California's Mojave Desert and at the Arecibo Obser- vatory in Puerto Rico. The giant, dish-shaped antennas will scan millions of frequencies in a search for signals generated by radio technology on unseen worlds across the void of space. Other antennas will join the search later.. \It was 500 years ago that three ships commanded by Christopher Columbus ... opened an era of exploration of the Americas,\ Stone told hundreds of people at a ceremony at Goldstone. \Today we embark on a new quest: a search for planets around other stars and civilizations that may inhabit them.\ If NASA does find evidence that distant worlds are inhabited by civilizations more advanced than our own, \it surely would com- prise the greatest discovery in the history of science,\ Cornell Uni- versity astronomer Carl Sagan said during the Goldstone ceremony. \It will tell us it is possible to pass through the stage of technologi- cal adolescence we are in without destroying ourselves.\ Michael Klein, one of NASA's project managers, said he is con- vinced humans eventually will find extraterrestrial civilizations. \When?\ he asked. \I have no idea. I hope it's in my lifetime.\ Thomas McDonough, a scientist who has worked on a smaller alien search run by the nonprofit Planetary Society, estimates that planets may surround one-tenth of the 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. If each of those 40 billion stars has 10 planets, that's 400 billion planets. But perhaps only one planet per solar system has conditions favorable for life, and maybe only one-tenth of those actually devel- oped life. So McDonough estimates 4 billion Milky Way planets may have life. Further, perhaps 1 percent of them have intelligent life, and one- tenth of those are advanced enough to use radio communications. That leaves 4 million advanced civilizations. But in our ancient universe, many civilizations may have thrived and then died, so McDonough concludes about 4,000 worlds in our galaxy may have civilizations we can detect right now. If NASA finds one, communication will be difficult The star closest to Earth is about four light years away — 23.5 trillion miles — which means radio signals reaching Earth would have left a planet near that star four years earlier and a response from Earth would take four years to reach that planet Most stars are much farther away, so extensive conversations could take generations. . . Becker was asleep when the academy called him at home. He was stunned and surprised, said Assar Lindbeck, chairman of die academy's Nobel Committee. \You always get surprised at five o'clock,\ said Lindbeck. Becker is the 19th American to win the prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, founded by the Bank of Sweden, is the only Nobel that wasn't established by dyna- mite inventor Alfred Nobel. , The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Edwin Krebs and Edmond Fischer of the United States for defining a basic biologi- cal process important to under- standing cancer and organ transplant rejection. Last week, Poet Derek Walcott of St Lucia became the first Carib- bean native to win the Nobel Prize in literature, The prizes are presented in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, die anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. At Marine, Charlie Mulloy got an auto loan at 7.85% APR. What did your bank do for you today? A fixed-rate Marine auto loan. This might be your best route yet to all the car you can get. Because rate savings this good mean a more affordable loan. Savings on the car you want throughout the life of your loan through lower monthly payments. 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