Health Notes Health Notes (July 14, 2004)

BEST DIAGNOSIS FOR PACKARD . . . Lucile Packard's Children Hospital was recently picked as one of the best pediatric hospitals in America by US News and World Report. The magazine ranked Packard No. 12 on its list of pediatric hospitals. The ranking is based on the hospital's contact with extremely sick patients and the volume of tough procedures it handles. The ranking also considers whether the hospital proposes advanced treatment guidelines, conducts research that migrates from labs and computer databases to the bedside and takes advantage of improvements in imaging, surgical devices and other technologies.
HEALTHY SODAH . . . Kids participating in a new health project developed by the Palo Alto Medical Foundation are fizzing with ideas on how to turn teens onto strengthening their characters and physique. The group, nicknamed SODAH (an acronym for Summer Opportunities for Developing Adolescent Health), is working with PAMF this summer to generate articles and content for a Website that will be geared toward providing preteens with information on exercise, nutrition, school, stress and friendships. The Web site, which is expected to launch in the fall, will be separate from PAMF's teen Web site, "We're Talking."

CRACKING YOUR GENETIC CODE . . . Here's a new concern about your keeping your medical records private. Although ethical issues over genetic research are reaching a fevered pitch, few criticisms deal with privacy. Stanford University graduate students recently studied privacy issues around DNA research. Specifically, they are concerned that if a person collected a small amount of genetic information about a former research subject, he or she could match it to database material in the future to get personal medical information about the subject. That could mean that insurance companies and employers, who have an interest in learning whether a person is prone to certain illnesses, could gain access to the information. The best solution, according to the Stanford researchers, is to restrict databases containing such information to researchers.
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