SAIS to develop program for early-career journalists

The Pew Charitable Trusts has awarded a three-year $2.9 million grant to the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies to develop a fellowship program in international affairs for early-career journalists.

The Pew Fellowships in International Journalism program will provide both classroom training and reporting experiences to journalists interested in developing their understanding of global issues. Special emphasis will be given to population, migration, environmental degradation, human rights and other humanitarian concerns.

The program will be led by John Schidlovsky, former director of the Freedom Forum Asian Center in Hong Kong and foreign correspondent for The Sun. Schidlovsky has directed journalism programs in virtually all Asian countries, Australia and the South Pacific.

Each year two classes of seven fellows each will be selected by a seven-member advisory board comprised of journalists and experts in global concerns. The four-month program will include an intensive eight-week study period, six weeks of individual travel and a week of presentations by the fellows on their experiences.

"A lot of the work produced during these fellowships may find its way to the public through print or broadcast, but the project's ultimate success will depend on the trajectory of the fellows' careers after they leave the program," said Don Kimelman, a former foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer who is director of the Pew Trusts' Venture Fund. "Ideally, John Schidlovsky and SAIS will be helping to train the next generation of international journalists."

WJHU's media talk show to be aired twice

WJHU's Media Show hosted by Sheri Parks and David Zurawik will now be aired twice each week.

In addition to Sunday afternoons, when it is broadcast live from 4 to 5, the program can be heard on Monday evenings from 7:30 to 8:30.

"The encore show will be basically the same as the Sunday program," says producer Lisa Morgan, "but with a 'freshened' version of 'Critical Reception.'"

"Critical Reception" is the last segment of the show, during which Parks and Zurawik give readers their picks and pans for TV viewing during the coming week.

Elder care database chosen by Social Security

A software system developed by Hopkins for use by employers offering adult and elder care referral services to their employees has been selected by the national Social Security Administration headquarters.

Milestones is a comprehensive computer software package that helps users find elder and adult care services through a custom-designed database, which can be searched by a wide range of criteria including location, medical care provided, caregiver support, payment options, spiritual services available and even social activities desired.

"This is the most flexible database system I've seen for adult care," said Kathi Beauchesne, director of Hopkins' Office of WorkLife Programs, who supervised and contributed to the program's development. "It allows a user to target an organization or an agency so they get exactly the result they're looking for."

Currently, the database is comprehensive for the Maryland, Virginia and Delaware region, including some 3,500 resources. Beauchesne said the plan is to make it more national in scope.

Public Health to campaign against antibiotic misuse

The School of Public Health has joined a national campaign by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop misuse of antibiotics. Studies show that antibiotics are used--and misused--most frequently for infections like the common cold, coughs and sore throats.

Bernadette Albanese, of International Health, who will be conducting training sessions for area physicians, says, "About 50 million times a year in the United States, doctors unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics. This is causing drug-resistance in bacteria such as pneumococcus."

According to CDC, antibiotic prescriptions written unnecessarily each year include 18 million for the common cold, 13 million for a cough and 6.5 million for a non-strep sore throat.

Cancer cells self-destruct when 'sweet tooth' thwarted

Some cancer cells are such incredible sugar junkies that they'll self-destruct when deprived of glucose, their biological sweet of choice, according to evidence recently found by Hopkins researchers.

"The change when we took away glucose was dramatic," says Chi Van Dang, director of Hematology. "By the next day, we knew very quickly that the cells we had altered to resemble cancers were dying off in large numbers."

Scientists have long suspected that the cancer cell's heavy reliance on glucose, its main source of strength and vitality, also could be one of its great weaknesses, and Dang's new results are among the most direct proofs yet of the idea.

Results of the study, published in the Feb. 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that drugs that cut off the glucose supply may be a potent way of fighting cancer with few ill effects on healthy tissues.
--Marc Kusinitz