Tag: New York

Medical school at NYU will now be free for all students

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New York University said Thursday that it will offer free tuition to all its medical school students, in the hope of encouraging more doctors to choose lower-paying specialties.

Many surveys have shown that medical school graduates gravitate to the more lucrative specialties, in part to pay off enormous student debts.

“Every student enrolled in our MD degree program receives a full-tuition scholarship, regardless of merit or financial need, that covers the majority of the cost of attendance,” the school says on its website.

NYU said it got a batch of grants to pay for the full scholarship option, including some from Home Depot co-founder Kenneth Langone, who chairs the medical school’s board of trustees.

“This decision recognizes a moral imperative that must be addressed, as institutions place an increasing debt burden on young people who aspire to become physicians,” Dr. Robert Grossman, dean of NYU’s school of medicine, said in a statement.

Medical school is expensive. The Association of American Medical Colleges calculates that it costs an average of more than $240,000 to attend a public medical school. It costs $322,000 for four years at a private school, the group calculates.

NYU says its scholarship, which begins in the 2018-19 school year, is worth $55,000 a year.

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the average debt for medical students is more than $100,000. The medical college association pegs the average debt at nearly twice that, or $180,000.To pay it off fast, medical school graduates often choose high-paying specialties such as orthopedics or plastic surgery. A survey last year by Medscape showed that orthopedists make $489,000 a year, compared with family practice physicians and pediatricians, who earn $200,000 a year.

The result is a shortage of the general care practitioners who are most needed, especially in rural parts of the country and in the so-called Rust Belt across the Midwest, according to several studies.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/medical-school-will-be-free-nyu-n901431

Woman jostled on NYC subway loses grip on crickets and worms

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New York City subway riders are likely to get bugged over a lot of things — but a recent incident was one for the books.

The New York Post ( http://nyp.st/2c1fvpK ) says a woman trying to sell crickets and worms lost her grip on her odd cargo when she got jostled Wednesday evening on a “D” train.

Rider Chris Calabrese says startled passengers had crickets on their arms; his girlfriend was crying. The worms wriggled on the floor.

Passengers moved to the other end of the subway car. Someone pulled the emergency brake and the train halted on the Manhattan Bridge.

http://bigstory.ap.org/b7e35f4ddf6940f49a986fe1542c0fca

New York Jets pack their own toilet paper for Wembley trip

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NFL players are tough. But they’re also sensitive souls – and they care deeply about toilet paper.

The New York Jets are at Wembley on Sunday, and they have gone to great – some may say outré – lengths to make sure the players are looked after properly. They have their own clothes washer. Their own private chef. And – get this – they’ve imported 350 rolls of their own toilet paper to, as the New York Times puts it, “replace the thinner version used in England”.

The Times spoke to Aaron Degerness, the Jets’ senior manager of team operations, about what was required for the team’s arduous trek to one of the world’s most inhospitable environments for a few days in one of the world’s most easygoing cities. And people say professional sports stars are pampered.

The details are mind-boggling. Five thousand items – from cereal and extension cords to gauze pads and wrist – have been loaded on to a ship containing supplies for all six NFL teams playing in London this season. (Jacksonville play Buffalo in week seven, and Kansas City take on Detroit the following week. The ship left New York in August) The Jets have spent 11 months planning for about 65 hours overseas, an undertaking that Degerness said involved about 10 times the work that preparing to play in, say, Miami would have required.

An industrial launderer will pick up the players’ dirty practice clothing at one location and deliver it clean to another. A chef at the Jets’ London hotel will be flown in to observe how food is cooked and served at team headquarters.

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/oct/01/new-york-jets-toilet-paper-wembley

Among New York Subway’s Millions of Riders, a Study Finds Many Mystery Microbes

On By A.P.In Kebmodee, Medicine, microbiology, Nature, ScienceLeave a comment

Have you ever been on the subway and seen something that you did not quite recognize, something mysteriously unidentifiable?

Well, there is a good chance scientists do not know what it is either.

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

“People don’t look at a subway pole and think, ‘It’s teeming with life,’ ” said Dr. Christopher E. Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College and the lead author of the study. “After this study, they may. But I want them to think of it the same way you’d look at a rain forest, and be almost in awe and wonder, effectively, that there are all these species present — and that you’ve been healthy all along.”

Dr. Mason said the inspiration for the study struck about four years ago when he was dropping off his daughter at day care. He watched her explore her new surroundings by happily popping objects into her mouth. As is the custom among tiny children, friendships were made on the floor, by passing back and forth toys that made their way from one mouth to the next.

“I couldn’t help thinking, ‘How much is being transferred, and on which kinds of things?’ ” Dr. Mason said. So he considered a place where adults can get a little too close to each other, the subway.

Thus was the project, called PathoMap, born. Over the past 17 months, a team mainly composed of medical students, graduate students and volunteers fanned out across the city, using nylon swabs to collect DNA, in triplicate, from surfaces that included wooden benches, stairway handrails, seats, doors, poles and turnstiles.

In addition to the wealth of mystery DNA — which was not unexpected given that only a few thousand of the world’s genomes have been fully mapped — the study’s other findings reflected New York’s famed diversity, both human and microbial.

The Bronx was found to be the most diverse borough in terms of microbial species. Brooklyn claimed second place, followed by Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, where researchers took samples on the Staten Island Railway.

On the human front, Dr. Mason said that, in some cases, the DNA that was found in some subway stations tended to match the neighborhood’s demographic profile. An area with a high concentration of Hispanic residents near Chinatown in Manhattan, for example, yielded a large amount of Hispanic and Asian genes.

In an area of Brooklyn to the south of Prospect Park that roughly encompassed the Kensington and Windsor Terrace neighborhoods, the DNA gathered frequently read as British, Tuscan, and Finnish, three groups not generally associated with the borough. Dr. Mason had an explanation for the finding: Scientists have not yet compiled a reliable database of Irish genes, so the many people of Irish descent who live in the area could be the source of DNA known to be shared with other European groups. The study produced some less appetizing news. Live, antibiotic-resistant bacteria were discovered in 27 percent of the collected samples, though among all the bacteria, only 12 percent could be associated with disease. Researchers also found three samples associated with bubonic plague and two with DNA fragments of anthrax, though they noted that none of those samples showed evidence of being alive, and that neither disease had been diagnosed in New York for some time. The presence of anthrax, Dr. Mason said, “is consistent with the many documented cases of anthrax in livestock in New York State and the East Coast broadly.”

The purpose of the study was not simply to satisfy scientific curiosity, the authors said. By cataloging species now, researchers can compare them against samples taken in the future to determine whether certain diseases, or even substances used as bioterrorism weapons, had spread.

City and transit officials did not sound grateful for the examination.

“As the study clearly indicates, microbes were found at levels that pose absolutely no danger to human life and health,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in an email. And the city’s health department called the study “deeply flawed” and misleading.

Dr. Mason responded by saying he and his team had simply presented their complete results.

“For us to not report the fragments of anthrax and plague in the context of a full analysis would have been irresponsible,” he said. “Our findings indicate a normal, healthy microbiome, and we welcome others to review the publicly available data and run the same analysis.”

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.