Capsules

P:Hamsters seem to be popular as classroom and household pets. But the animals may also be a source of a serious flu-like illness called lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCM), which causes fever, headaches, severe muscle aches and pains and occasionally nausea and vomiting. That is the conclusion of a team of researchers from the New York State Health Department and the U.S. Public Health Service's Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The researchers report in the A.M. A. Journal that 57 cases of LCM occurred in upstate New York during one four-month period last year. Though several of the victims came from the same families, most of the families had no contact with each other. But the victims had one thing in common: all had handled or been close to hamsters from the same Florida distributor. On testing, at least one hamster belonging to each of eight affected families studied was found to have carried the LCM virus. The public health scientists urge other physicians to look for LCM when they encounter the same symptoms, especially if their patients own hamsters.

P: Doctors, clergymen and ethicists have never been able to agree on the point at which human life begins. Does it start at conception? When the fetus becomes capable of survival outside the womb? At the moment of birth? Dr. Dominick Purpura of New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine offers a new definition. He says that life starts when brain life begins, and he defines this point as some time between the 28th and 32nd week of pregnancy. Purpura bases his conclusion on 16 years of laboratory studies and more recent examinations of 30 premature and full-term infants who died of natural causes. He found that before the 28th week, the structures and nerve-cell connections that characterize the cerebral or thinking part of the fully developed human brain were missing. But these features had begun to form in the brains of all of the fetuses that were at least 28 weeks old, and were highly developed by the 32nd week of pregnancy. Although right-to-lifers and others are bound to take issue with Purpura's suggestion that human life begins with brain life, there should be little opposition from physicians. Most of them recognize that the brain rather than the heart is the central organ of life, and that life ends with the death of the brain.

P:Because the kidneys produce the form of vitamin D necessary for the normal bone-building process, many people with kidney disease, and especially those on dialysis treatments, suffer from serious and progressive bone deterioration and may become crippled. Now help may be on the way. A team headed by Dr. Hector DeLuca of the University of Wisconsin has developed a form of vitamin D that enables the body to assimilate calcium from food and deposit it in the bones. They have tested it on about 50 patients so far. DeLuca is confident that the synthetic vitamin will prove invaluable to some 100,000 people who have serious kidney disease. The vitamin D compound has already had dramatic effect on Canadian Arthur Olson, 24, whose bones had deteriorated so badly that they could no longer support his body. Within a month of being treated with the compound, he was able to give up his wheelchair. After four months, he abandoned his crutches.

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