Lungs

What do you do when someone is drowning?Many people think first of CPR. Few think of the Heimlich maneuver.But its inventor believes hundreds of lives could be saved if more people knew that the few steps they use to stop someone from choking can also rescue a drowning victim."

I AM WRITING in response to your April 29 editorial, "Glendening's first veto." Everyone I know, liberal or conservative, wants clean air.The problem with this or any other emission test is that many factors are involved in whether or not a car passes the test. In other words, the best any test can do without causing great inconvenience to everyone is to catch the gross polluters.I take issue with several points made. The cars are subjected to much more than just pressing on the accelerator by an attendant.

Timothy Hutton wanted to be a cartoon artist. Also on his wish list was to play basketball, football and softball.Most of all, he wanted to live -- and his doctor had said that only his strong will to survive kept him going before he received a double-lung transplant last year at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.But on Sunday night, after months of complications, his body rejected the transplanted organs and the Pasadena eighth-grader, who had been in foster care for most of his life, died at age 14.Timothy's problem was bullous emphysema, a severe chronic disease that destroyed his lungs and forced him to often rely on a ventilator to breathe.

Timothy Hutton wanted to be a cartoon artist. Also on his wish list was to play basketball, football and softball.Most of all, he wanted to live -- and his doctor had said that only his strong will to survive kept him going before he received a double-lung transplant last year at Johns Hopkins Hospital.Sunday night, after months of complications, his body rejected the transplanted organs and the Pasadena eighth-grader, who had been in foster care for most of his life, died at age 14.Timothy's problem was bullous emphysema, a severe chronic disease that destroyed his lungs and forced him to often rely on a ventilator to breathe.

A few major discoveries in the past decade are giving scientists a clearer idea of the workings of marijuana.The discoveries confirm one long-standing hunch: Marijuana is different from other drugs, acting on its own abundant network of chemical receptors.That knowledge has offered the promise of new drug therapies that might someday help correct faulty memories and poor motor coordination. While some scientists toil on those fronts, others are learning about the damage pot may cause in the lungs and its slightly suppressive influence on the immune system.

Just before rush hour on a gray Monday in November, transplant surgeon John V. Conte Jr. runs out of the University of Maryland, jumps into a waiting Jeep with a makeshift siren and heads down Interstate 95 toward Alexandria General Hospital in Virginia. He's after a set of lungs.At 36, Dr. Conte is one of six surgeons at Maryland working to build one of the country's top transplant programs. Like his colleagues, he's young, willing to take risks to help patients and able to survive on very little sleep.

In my family, asthma runs on my father's side. I was born with it. I am now 16. It restricts me from doing a lot of things. What is the average age people grow out of it?Although we would like to be able to tell you that eventually you will grow out of your asthma, many people who were born with asthma do not grow out of it, as physicians once thought. The fact that you are still having problems with your asthma suggests that you will need to continue to use medications to control it during your adult life.

Ever since an astonished doctor counted five beating hearts on an ultrasound screen, Ruth and David Good have heard plenty of advice about raising babies. No doubt, the best came from a national group that helps parents cope with babies that come in threes, fours and more.The recommendation went something like this: "Accept all help."Yesterday, looking calm and relieved not quite a week after the arrival of healthy quintuplets, the Goods said their 80-year-old farm house in York County, Pa., should be running like a well-staffed nursery in another six weeks or so.By that time, Nathan, Patricia, Amanda, Phillip and Katelyn will probably get bundled up and sent home from the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where they were born a minute apart last Wednesday in a Caesarean delivery.

Last month, Donna Jones dropped off her 3-year-old son for a long visit with the boy's god-mother and a relative in a North Baltimore home. She tried to get him back last week, but said her phone calls went unanswered.The boy, James Simon, was found dead on Friday.At first, it appeared the child was a victim of fire -- investigators said he was alone in a basement playing with lighter fluid. But an autopsy showed no signs of smoke in his lungs -- but he had bruises on his head. Monday, the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.

Hanover, New Hampshire.--New reports come out every month or so about the decline of the American mind. Every study shows a direct correlation between poor intellectual performance and frequent television watching. No surprise. There are roughly as many studies showing that television rots the mind as there are studies showing that junk food rots the body or that cigarette smoking rots the lungs -- as if we needed studies.As a society, we do more to deglamorize and control tobacco products.

When Jasmine Cadavid's parents took her to the emergency room near their Abingdon home nearly two weeks ago, the normally playful 2-year-old was lethargic, feverish and struggling to breathe. She not only had swine flu, but her right lung was so filled with fluid from pneumonia that it was getting no air. Soon she was headed to an intensive-care unit at the University of Maryland Hospital for Children, where doctors scrambled to halt the damage; she's still in the hospital, recovering, today.

It was November 2006, and Tim Askew had his hands full just dealing with the idea that his new company's technology could treat esophageal cancer. He hadn't even launched his first product, he had few employees, and revenue was still months away. But then he got a call from Dr. William Krimsky, and his world got a lot more complicated "He single-handedly changed the course of the company," said Askew, who is chief executive of CSA Medical Inc., which is housed on the third floor of what used to be Baltimore's Eastern High School.

I was never a big fan of Sister Sledge, but I'd like to hear their hit single "We Are Family" just once without having the uncontrollable urge to drive my car into a tree. I'd like to hear the name Omar Moreno and not have my ears start ringing from the sound of his wife blowing a whistle and screaming at the top of her lungs - somehow at the same time. I'd like to walk past Scott McGregor just once without thinking of Willie Stargell and wanting to blurt out, "Pitch around him!" I suppose it's going to take me a little more time to recover from the 1979 World Series.

Tucking in her chin and softly laying her cheek on one shoulder, Susanne Gibbons closed her eyes and drew her arms to her chest like folded wings. Mimicking an indelible image in her mind's eye, Gibbons was momentarily transported back to Sept. 13, 2001, when she gave birth to her daughter at Howard County General Hospital just six weeks past the midpoint of her pregnancy. "Anna," she recalled, the tears welling in her eyes at the memory, "looked like a stunned little bird when she was born."

The children seemed scarcely interested in the classroom discussion on asthma until Eric Kriner brought out the pig lungs. "Ewwwwww," they exclaimed while huddling with wide eyes around the red, wrinkled blob that had been preserved for demonstrations. Then Kriner, a clinical education director at Prince George's Community College, attached a squeeze pump to the lungs and blew them up like balloons. "Look at it!" "Awesome!" "Can I touch them? I eat pork!" It was Monday morning, and Camp Superkids, an annual, weeklong residential camp for Maryland youngsters with asthma, had gotten off to a gross start - just the way kids like it. The group of mostly 7- to 10-year-olds were so delighted by the lung demonstration that their moods had clearly shifted from that of moments earlier, when Kriner asked what it felt like to have asthma and some solemnly spoke of breathing difficulties, burning throats and being rushed to the hospital.

El Ten Eleven The lowdown -- Following the models provided by Radiohead and Sigur Ros, El Ten Eleven's sound is mellow indie rock. The Orange County, Calif., duo of Kristian Dunn and Tim Fogarty played together in several indie bands before forming El Ten Eleven, which hits the Ottobar on Wednesday night. If you go -- The Ottobar is at 2549 N. Howard St. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are $8 in advance and $10 the day of the show. For tickets or more information, visit theottobar.com. The Giant Johns head to sonar The lowdown -- The duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell have been performing together as They Might Be Giants for more than 20 years.

CENTERVILLE, Mont. -- Dennis Yatsko loved good popcorn, but making it killed him. The poison that destroyed his lungs was in the heated vapors of butter flavoring he used to produce tons of America's favorite snack for his century-old bar and customers as far as two states away. Doctors apparently misdiagnosed the disease that destroyed Yatsko's lungs. Now his daughter, Debbie Medvec, fears the same thing might be happening to her. "It's where Dad popped and bagged the corn from 2 to 7 each morning," said Dale Yatsko, one of Dennis' eight children, pointing to a 10-foot by 12-foot concrete-block shed, its walls and ceilings stained butter yellow.

The asbestos contaminating the vermiculite ore from the W.R. Grace & Co. mine in Libby was tremolite. Its fibers are far more toxic, and it produces 10 to 100 times more scarring, than the more widely used chrysotile asbestos. The fibers are like microscopic needles or spears, which, because of their sharpness, become imbedded in lung tissue. Over time, the fibers become infected and create scar tissue in the lungs and the pleura, which is the lining of the lungs and the chest cavity. The pleura, when healthy, is thinner than a balloon and as flexible.

NEW YORK - Offering clues to the often deadly spread of some cancers from one organ to another, scientists in Manhattan have unmasked the genes that trigger breast cancers to invade the lungs, according to an analysis that will be released today. The finding is considered a landmark because it is proof that a specific genetic signature exists for each type of cancer and the organ to which it spreads. Writing in today's issue of the journal Nature, scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center say their finding helps unlock the secrets of metastasis.

Even when they escape devastating complications such as cerebral palsy and mental retardation, the tiniest of premature babies - those weighing 2 pounds or less at birth - often have significant "invisible" disabilities when they enter school, researchers reported this week. Many of the children have cognitive or emotional delays and problems communicating, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Although doctors are saving more tiny babies than ever before, medicine has not succeeded in improving the lives for many of the children.