The National Board of Hadassah, meeting at its annual Mid-Winter Conference in New York, announced that it has voted the funds to establish a Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Ein Karem, Jerusalem. Mrs. Faye L. Schenk, president of Hadassah, said that the National Board has voted $1 million above this year’s annual Hadassah Medical Organization quota to launch this new department and to meet the additional needs of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center.
Mrs. Charlotte Jacobson, chairman of the Hadassah Medical Organization said that daily, emergency cases are brought into hospitals suffering from the side-effects of new drugs such as L-dopa, the birth control pill. “Frequently, the patients are in a coma, and treatment must be delayed until a series of tests have been performed, before the doctors can treat the patient. While medical students are taught how to prescribe drugs,” Mrs. Jacobson continued, “their training concerning the side-effects is deficient.” She explained that this new department will centralize testing, teaching and research on humans, which is different from the School of Pharmacology where the researchers work with animals.
The National Board also voted funds to set up a blood bank at Hadassah to provide fractions (i.e., just red or white cells) as well as whole blood, which is often wasteful. When blood is fractionized one pint can often serve three or four patients. The blood bank will also be responsible for the sophisticated tissue-typing needed in tissue and organ transplants and in immunological testing, and will serve the entire country and will cooperate with the Israel Ministry of Health.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
