Author: Ken Duenke

Seventeen million Americans live with diabetes, and one of the major complications from the disease is foot wounds.

Photo by Rose BrowerChemical engineering’s John Gleaves had an April Fool’s joke — an office full of balloons — played on him by his graduate students.

Michael Sherraden, Ph.D., Shirley J. Dyke, Ph.D., Joseph Pickard, and more…

Photo by Robert BostonA free medical screening at the Tower Village Apartments was the first in a series of community-outreach events planned by medical school physicians.

Photo by Robert BostonJonathan D. Gitlin will serve as director of the new Division of Genetics and Genomic Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics.It incorporates a model of individualized medical care in which physicians look to a patients’ genetic makeup to determine the best treatment. More medical news

Eliminating the need to ascertain eligibility.Years of double-digit increases in health care costs are devastating business, federal, state and family budgets. While the United States pays more per capita for health care than any other industrialized country, 44 million people lack assured care. “Most people overlook the most affordable way to achieve universal coverage – putting all of us under the Medicare umbrella,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “That single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays.”

The first detailed studies of two of the largest human chromosomes have revealed enormous gene “deserts” lacking any protein-coding sequences and relics of the merger of two ape chromosomes to form a single human chromosome.

Washington University’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work and Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies are hosting the 15th annual powwow, in conjunction with American Indian Awareness Week and the celebration of the Buder Center’s 15th anniversary. The powwow, which is free and open to the public, will run noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, April 9 at the University’s Athletic Center near the intersection of Forsyth Boulevard and Olympian Way. Arts & crafts booths will be open at 10 a.m. This year’s anniversary powwow features American Indian arts, crafts, music, food, a stomp dance exhibit and an expanded dance contest, which is expected to draw tribal dancers from throughout the Midwest. Grand entries of dancers will be showcased at 1 and 7 p.m.

Researchers at the School of Medicine are seeking volunteers to participate in a study to determine if botulinum toxin (Botox) injections can help heal diabetic foot ulcers.

Anita Diamant, author of the bestselling novel, The Red Tent, will deliver the Women’s Society of Washington University Adele Starbird Lecture for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m., Wednesday, April 20th in Graham Chapel. Her talk is entitled “Imagining the Past: A Conversation with Anita Diamant.”