Mike McNamara’s light blue-green eyes fairly glisten as he talks about walking on the USC campus this fall as a college freshman. Only two-and-a-half years ago, the possibility of him walking anywhere was in serious jeopardy due to paralysis from a spinal cord injury sustained while playing basketball during a junior varsity game at Crespi High School.

Now, thanks to the unfailing support of family members, friends, doctors and an exercise physiologist, McNamara, 18, will walk across campus aided just by a leg brace. He is ecstatic about the opportunities awaiting him as a full tuition award recipient of USC’s Swim With Mike fund, a 25-year-old scholarship program for physically challenged athletes. Continue Reading »

Governors have their work cut out for them in convincing the public to accept fundamental changes in Medicaid that could trim benefits and raise co-payments for the poor, disabled and elderly, a new nationwide poll shows.

Nearly three-fourths of those polled opposed cuts in state Medicaid programs to help balance state budgets, even though two-thirds said their state was in fiscal crisis or had major budget problems, according to the survey released June 29 by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan philanthropy that focuses on health care issues. Continue Reading »

Seventeen-year-old Van Brooks felt somewhat out of place talking to adults with spinal cord injuries after his own paralyzing accident last fall. Sure, the older men and women gave him some good tips on how to adjust to being paralyzed from the waist down, but the young man wanted something different — a connection with a peer.

“It’s easier for me to talk to someone my age,” the Baltimore resident says. Continue Reading »

This July, the United States is proud to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Since being signed into law in 1990, this landmark federal legislation has proved a remarkable success and has profoundly changed how society views and accommodates its citizens with disabilities. The ADA has not only changed our expectations of what accessibility is, it has redefined the rights of an entire population. Continue Reading »

Wiping out polio is proving tougher than expected, but world health experts say the disease’s demise is tantalizingly near.

In 1988, there were 350,000 cases. This year, there are just over 500 cases. But this is no time to drop the guard, experts say. Continue Reading »

When Lisa Recker was pregnant, she was inundated with ads touting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the “best investment” in the future health of her child and her family: preserving the blood from her baby’s umbilical cord.

Cord blood, as it is known, contains stem cells that can be used in transplants to cure leukemia and other diseases and may someday treat ailments from diabetes to Alzheimer’s. Continue Reading »

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., June 21 (AScribe Newswire) — Purdue University researchers may have isolated the substance most responsible for the tissue damage that follows initial spinal cord injury, a discovery that could also improve treatments for a host of other neurodegenerative conditions.

A research team led by Riyi Shi (REE-yee SHEE) has found that a chemical called acrolein, a known carcinogen, is present at high levels in spinal tissue for several days after a traumatic injury. Continue Reading »

When President Bush Says Stem Cell Research ‘devalues Life,’ What Is He Telling The Gravely Injured Troops Back From Iraq?

More than 12,000 soldiers have been seriously wounded in the Iraq war since it began in 2003. Because of improvements in body armor since the Vietnam war, more soldiers in Iraq can survive bombings and sniper attacks, but this leaves a greater fraction of survivors with gruesome damage to the head, arms and legs caused by blast and shrapnel wounds. Soldiers who would have died in previous wars are coming home with traumatic brain injuries or as amputees. Continue Reading »

For Brian Vail of Mount Gilead, the answer has been to live for 10 years with the debilitating Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, well beyond the “norm” for his affliction.

ALS has gradually robbed Vail, a 1974 Otterbein graduate, of many activities we take for granted. He is paralyzed from the neck down and has been on a Ventilator living at Bennington Glen, a nursing care center in southern Morrow County, for five years. Continue Reading »

And New York and the Rochester region to this point aren’t in the game. The state Legislature should change that before it adjourns.

At stake is $300 million in state funds that would flow to medical research institutions, including the University of Rochester Medical Center, to facilitate the study of therapies using embryonic stem cells. Continue Reading »