Word: pastes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sweden's Tommy Tuvuynger and his team of professional hunters don't have to go far to find their prey. Tuvuynger is employed to keep down rabbit numbers in the Swedish capital, Stockholm. The rabbit population there has exploded over the past few years thanks to owners setting free their pets. Last year the eradication squad killed 6,000 of the furry critters, which are not native to Sweden. When the city started killing the rabbits in 2006, officials realized they would have to dispose of their carcasses. At around the same time, the European Union passed a law that...
Three years ago, Dr Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege in Belgium, examined a comatose 43-year-old Belgian patient, Rom Houben, who for the past 23 years had been assumed by medical professionals to be brain dead. Laureys, who runs a coma study group specializing in such cases, performed sensitive clinical and imaging tests on Houben and made a startling discovery: the former engineering student who suffered a brain injury in a car accident in 1983 was not in a vegetative state at all. (See the top 10 comas...
...Nearly all of his voluntary muscles were paralyzed - including those controlling eye movement - but his brain functioned almost completely normally. He suffered from "locked-in syndrome," in which patients are aware of their surroundings but unable to communicate to the outside world. In the past three years, Houben has learned to talk through a computer: a language therapist traces his finger over a keypad and when it hovers over the desired letter, he contracts a muscle in his finger. He now has plans to write a book. "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," Houben recently told a journalist...
...past week, Houben's case has raised numerous questions. How common are such diagnostic mistakes? How can they be prevented? Is Houben's communication method really accurate? In the still-evolving field of coma studies, where scientists probe the twilight at the cusp of consciousness, it seems there are few clear answers. (See the year in health from...
...Houben's case come to light? Over the past five years, Laureys and others have studied brain-injury patients classified as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). In such states, patients awake from a coma and return to a normal sleep cycle, but show no signs of awareness or consciousness. Laureys and others have found that around 40% of such patients are misdiagnosed. Most of these misdiagnosed patients fall under a classification called "minimally conscious," in which they show subtle but consistent signs of awareness. (The "minimally conscious" classification was only recognized in 2002 thanks to the work...