Tread the Med walking program kicks off Sept. 28

Lace up your walking shoes – Tread the Med, Washington University School of Medicine’s walking program, launches Sept. 28 in Hudlin Park. “We are launching this program because we want to help our employees get healthier and to encourage a healthy habit like walking,” says Gregg Evans, human resources consultant.

Saving 20,000 lives

Members of the Washington University community, including Lauren Yang, a second-year medical student, turned out Sept. 13 to give blood at the university-wide blood drive. In the past four years, the WUSTL community has donated enough blood to save nearly 20,000 lives, says Stephanie N. Kurtzman, director of the Community Service Office and associate director of the Gephardt Institute for Public Service.

Study looks at why second ACL surgeries often fail

Sports medicine specialists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, including Rick Wright, MD, and Corey Gill, MD, are leading a national study analyzing why a second surgery to reconstruct a tear in the knee’s anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) carries a high risk of bad outcomes. Between 1 percent to 8 percent of ACL repairs fail. Most patients then opt to have a second operation, but the failure rate for those subsequent surgeries is almost 14 percent.

The power of love, healing and recognition

Jeremy Courtney, founder of the Preemptive Love Coalition that provides medical care to children in Iraq, will give a presentation on “Reconciliation through Healing” for the Washington University in St. Louis Assembly Series at 5 p.m. Monday, Sept. 19, in May Auditorium, located in Simon Hall on the Danforth Campus. The talk is free and open to the public.

WUSTL students work to get St. Louis store on National Register of Historic Places

Students in a service-learning course in the Department of History in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis are working on an application to get the grocery store and its adjacent buildings — better known as “Tillie’s Corner” — on the National Register of Historic Places. The class, “Building St. Louis History: The City and Its Renaissance,” is taught by Sonia Lee, PhD, assistant professor of history.

Remembering 9/11: One voice

On the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, more than 400 gathered in Edison Theatre for “Ten Years Later,” a program of reflection, music and speeches about what the legacy of 9/11 means for this generation of college students.

Social Security attacks by Gov. Perry and Sen. Rubio ignore facts

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “Ponzi scheme” charge and Florida Sen. Mark Rubio’s assertion that Social Security is unsustainable recycle baseless attacks that go back as far as the 1930s, says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security. “These are attempts to muster political support by appealing to long-held prejudices to satisfy those who never accepted Social Security,” Bernstein says. “To use them as guides to public policy would undermine our country’s most successful family protection program.”

New insured numbers show tug-of-war between economy and health care reform

The estimates of the population without health insurance in the U.S. remained unchanged in 2010, as compared to 2009, reflecting the counteracting effects of not only the sluggish economic recovery but also the preliminary benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), says Timothy McBride, PhD, leading health economist and associate dean of public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.