Doctors-in-training commit medical errors

About one-third of American doctors-in-training report making at least one major error during the recent past, a new survey in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.

Thirty-four percent of respondents reported making at least one major medical error during the period under study; 43 percent of residents completing at least one year of training reported errors.

Of the participants, 20 percent reported one error, 6 percent reported two errors, and 8 percent reported three or more errors during the study period. An average of 14.7 percent of participants said they had made an error in the past three months.

The errors were generally attributed to personal distress and burnout. “Historically, there has been an attitude that training to be a doctor is stressful,” Dr. Tait Shanafelt, professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and author of the study said. “What we are starting to explore is that there may be consequences to the distress, that it may actually influence the care they provide.”This is a challenging problem,” Dr. Shanafelt said. “There appear to be both personal and professional factors that contribute to distress, so any possible solutions are going to need to both address all the potential sources of distress and set up a support system to address stress as it develops.”

New bird flu drugs on the horizon

With instances of resistance to Tamiflu, the only drug effective against the H5N1 bird flu virus, reported, there is an urgent need to develop new drugs that can be used to treat infection.

The Voice of America reports that British doctors have peered inside a key protein on the surface of the virus, obtaining structural information that chemists could use to design new drugs to block it. The new drugs would avoid the resistance that some influenza viruses have already acquired to Tamiflu.

Researchers used advanced X-ray technology to provide an "atomic picture" of the atoms that comprise one of the two surface proteins in the H5N1 virus.

Neuraminidase – the “N” in H5N1 – is the protein in bird flu that allows the virus to spread to other cells in the body. Drugs currently used to treat bird flu are based on other neuraminidase models that are not specific to H5N1.

By identifying H5N1’s unique blueprint, researchers may one day be able to use drugs that home in on the strain that has killed 139 people in the past three years.

The problem is that the new drugs are five years away, but it could potentially be shortened as countries accelerate their pandemic preparedness plans.