Service First

It was an assembly line that would have made Henry Ford proud.

At the top of the hill, perched along St. Louis' Riverfront Trail, stood about 30 Washington University freshmen in a volunteer litter patrol. Forty feet below -- down a rough, 45-degree slope -- lay 163 abandoned car and truck tires, wallowing in the muck and mire.

"I remember looking down with my eyes bulging out and thinking, 'Oh, is this such a good idea? Is this going to be safe?'" recalled Matt Engelhardt, residential college director for the William Greenleaf Eliot Residential College and one of the coorganizers of Service First, the new community service initiative that had drawn the students to their rather precarious position.

"But there really wasn't any stopping our students," Engelhardt continued. "They were determined that they were going to do it. I was just amazed at how quickly it all happened."

In the words of freshman Jeff Fields, "It was a self-organizing phenomenon."

Fields had spotted the tires himself. "But I walked by because I didn't think it was realistic," he said. "So I went on and filled up my trash bag with litter. But then I saw that some people had gone down through the bushes and were forming a small assembly line. They started calling others over. All of a sudden, we had people lined up along the hill, just rolling up the tires, from one person to the next. At one point, there were multiple lines."

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Study shows poverty common among aging

Politicians are now busy debating benefit cuts, tax increases and other controversial reforms intended to shore up America's highly popular Social Security system, but research released in the August 1999 Journal of Gerontology draws attention to an aspect of senior finances seldom mentioned on the campaign trail -- the fact that nearly half of all Americans still spend at least some portion of their so-called golden years living in poverty.

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United Way campaign begins

The person who receives help from a United Way-funded agency could be your daughter, your brother, your grandfather or your mother. It could be the American Cancer Society, a day care center, family counseling, the Girl Scouts USA, job training or the YMCA.

Last year, the generosity of faculty and staff allowed the University to better its goal of $375,000, with almost $413,000 pledged, and this year's annual campus fund drive for the United Way of Greater St. Louis is now under way.

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Bypass patients' bleeding risk reduced by bedside test, drug

About 600,000 people have cardiac surgery each year in the United States, and approximately 20 percent to 30 percent of them have bleeding problems. Excessive bleeding after surgery often requires treatment with medications, blood transfusions or, when severe or persistent, a trip back to the operating room.

Now, researchers from the School of Medicine have found that combining a bedside test with a drug that potentially improves the function of platelets in blood can significantly reduce blood loss and the need for transfusions after cardiac surgery.

In a study reported in The Lancet, researchers led by George J. Despotis, M.D., used a bedside test to detect platelet damage in 203 patients who had just undergone elective cardiac surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The test revealed that 101 patients were at increased risk for bleeding. Fifty of these were treated with the drug desmopressin, which promotes clotting. The other 51 received an inactive salt solution. The bedside test indicated no increased risk for 73 patients, who therefore were assigned to the study's untreated control group.

"We thought that if we could identify people with platelet defects who were at increased risk for postoperative bleeding, we might be able to intervene with a drug like desmopressin early and minimize the problem."

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