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Nostalgia Sunday – Shaare Zedek Hospital’s Schwester Selma

I didn’t know Schwester Selma but there is one time when perhaps our paths might have crossed. That would be in 1973, when my sisters and I were rushed to Jerusalem’s old Shaare Zedek hospital after a car accident (we came out with minor cuts, bruises, a few stitches in my sister’s forehead and a lifetime of self-enforced responsible driving ahead of us). Schwester Selma served from 1916 as head nurse and retired in 1973, so who knows?

The country’s first trained nurse, Schwester Selma was one of those legendary Jerusalem institutions from the pre-State era that people of my mother’s generation knew well, their children knew somewhat and their grandchildren know not at all. I encountered Schwester Selma’s biography while looking into the background of a series of photos documenting the old hospital building, which believe you me, was nothing like the new one – I can still remember the patchwork of floor tiles – but thank goodness the hospital was easy to reach and not in the middle of some out-of-the-way forest like some other Jerusalem hospitals I could mention if I cared to.

Here it is on Jaffa Road. The building now houses the Israel Broadcast Authority offices.

Then, as now, Shaare Zedek prided itself on being the only centrally located hospital in Jerusalem. There were the Misgav LaDach birthing hospital and general hospital Bikur Holim was under construction but Shaare Zedek was pretty much it during the World War I when Selma Meyer arrived to do her wartime service in Palestine (the Turkish Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany during the war).

Her autobiography includes a couple of juicy tidbits about illness and cure back in the so-called Good Old Days: “There were two epidemics right them. We were the only Jewish hospital in the new city. The old Bikur Cholim had also started building in the new city, which, however, could not be continued because of the war. Typhoid, typhus, and meningocael meningitis, all very severe cases, were hospitalized with us. Thousands of typhoid cases were passing through our hospital, probably caused by dirt; there was hardly any water. Additionally the people suffered terribly from hunger; there was hardly anything to eat.” Out of discretion to the reader, I’ve cut out the part about the lice bath.

It must have seemed like heaven for patients to come to a place like Shaare Zedek, which had a European-trained staff and clean sheets. There was no running water, but who had running water in those days?

After all, Jerusalem was no modern city. “There was still no transportation. The transportation of patients was therefore still very complicated. If somebody had to be brought it would have to be done by stretcher. We did not have enough personnel to send along and therefore the relatives had to help or hire two porters.”

During the global polio epidemic, Schwester Selma ran the country’s only isolation ward. “In those days the isolation department was even more primitive than the main house. The bathtub was made of tin, on wheels. It used to be filled with water that was brought in and then wheeled into the respective room. The toilets had no plumbing. Of course there was no heating system. In spite of all this I can maintain with a good conscience that we ran this department as a real isolation station even if this demanded many many efforts, which were well worth it in every respect.”

Schwester Selma founded the country’s first nursing school in 1934 over the objections of her hospital director who believed that too much theory and not enough practicum was a bad thing in a young nurse. But Selma, together with one father who wanted to make sure his daughter got a good education, prevailed. (Selma seated 2nd row, 3rd from left).

In recognition of her achievements, “Schwester” Selma Meyer was named a Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem (Yakir Yerushalim). She died in 1984 at the age of 100.

More amazing photos of Shaare Tzedek hospital and other Jerusalem landmarks, can be found at Photography in Jerusalem, an online archive sponsored by Hadassah College Jerusalem and educational website Snunit.

Israeli vaccine may work against swine flu too

With doctors and nurses around the world now declaring that there’s no way many of them will take the new swine flu vaccine being rushed out this fall because of safety fears, it’s not surprising that interest in Israeli company BiondVax Phamaceuticals is growing fast.

The company is developing a universal flu vaccine that is designed to protect you from every type of flu – whether it’s chicken flu, Hong Kong flu, regular flu, or cat in the hat flu. One shot can last three to five years.

Now the company has announced indications of possible success in a trial on rats against the current H1N1/A flu (swine flu). The company reported that antibodies specific to swine flu were found in blood samples from lab rats injected with the universal flu vaccine.

On rumors of this news alone, the company’s share price on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange rose 18 percent, prompting the exchange to suspend trading.

ISRAEL21c reporter Harvey Stein featured the company in June this year, when fears about the pandemic nature of swine flu were just coming to the fore. You can watch his great video above.

Don’t get too excited though. You won’t be able to sign up for a universal flu vaccine when flu season breaks out in the next few months. There’s still more development ahead.

Other Israelity reports on Swine flu:

It’s flu, but not as we know it

Anatomy of a flu panic

It’s flu, but not as we know it

Well, a few years ago, it looked like avian flu was going to be the great pandemic that would lay waste to the world’s population. Experts debated it, newspapers wrote billions of words on it, and a whole generation of children stopped picking up feathers. As the pandemic failed to materialize, however, gradually the fear subsided.

Now a new flu has suddenly emerged, and it’s spreading fast. There have already been some 80 deaths in Mexico from swine flu, and cases in the US and New Zealand. Now there’s a suspected case in Israel, of an Israeli who has just returned from Mexico.

With the World Health Organization declaring the disease a “public health event of international concern”, with “pandemic potential”, flu is once more the hot disaster story of the season, making rather a nice change from Iran.

Anti-viral drug Tamiflu is being touted as an answer, but Israel also has a possible alternative – Sambucol. This herbal extract has been on the market for years, selling well in the US and in over 17 countries around the world as a remedy for flu.

The herbal remedy, made from elderberry, was developed by Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu, a world-renowned Israeli virologist, and is said to cut the duration and severity of flu by up to half.
In 2006, a British medical research institute ran cell culture tests (clinical trials were off the agenda for obvious reasons), and announced that it was 99% effective against the avian flu virus, H5N1.

A year earlier, another study showed that the remedy was not just effective against human and avian flu, but also swine flu as well. Of course at that time no one really cared about flu from pigs.

I interviewed Mumcuoglu after the 2006 tests, and she told me then that it didn’t really matter where the flu originated. “Our research has shown that the antiviral effect of Sambucol is not strain-specific. It was effective against all influenza viruses tested,” she said.

“If you stop the flu virus at the beginning then you stop it going to the lungs, or from creating the additional complications that are normally the cause of death,” she added.

Now we have still to see what actually happens with swine flu. Newspapers love to scare the public, and the public apparently loves to be scared.

In Mexico, the government is recommending that people stop going to public places, kissing friends, or shaking friends with colleagues. Though I’m clearly no expert, if swine flu one day reaches your community, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to also try taking Sambucol as well – just in case.

Israel going to pot

Forget California – did you know that Israel has one of the most progressive medical marijuana programs around?

Run out of an office in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, the Health Ministry’s program provides legally grown pot to hundreds of Israelis with medical conditions that have been proven to be helped by the active ingredient in cannabis – THC.

The categories include patients with malignant tumors who are in one of two stages – either during chemo to ease nausea and promote appetite, or those with a final stage tumor, terminal patients who have a prognosis for living for another six months; HIV patients, who attend one of the country’s eight HIV centers in the country; chronic pain patients who are being treated at pain clinics or by a known pain physician; patients with Crohn’s Disease or ulcerative colitis, who are being treated by gastroenterologists; and MS patients specifically for the spasticity symptoms upon recommendation from an MS center or a neurological specialist.

In addition patients with post stress trauma disorder are being tested with the drug on an experimental basis – these include many former IDF soldiers experiencing PSTD following their participation in battle.

Dr. Yehuda Baruch is the guy who makes the decisions which patients are accepted to the program, which receives over 60 applicants each month. The licenses need to be renewed at various intervals ranging from monthly to annually depending on the condition. According to Baruch, once a patient receives approval, he’s given the option to either grow the plants himself or be supplied free of charge by one of the minstry’s five authorized pot growers.

In addition to the medical marijuana program, Israel can boast one of the world’s superstars in cannabis research – 78-year-old Professor Raphael Mechoulam. In 1964, Mechoulam was the first researcher in world to isolate THC, and in 1993, he headed an Israeli-Scottish team that succeeded in identifying, isolating and synthesizing a previously unknown substance in the brain that functions much as THC itself. The researchers named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit word ananda, meaning inner joy.

Today, in his lab at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Mechoulam and his team synthesize the THC from a steady supply of cannabis supplied by the Israel Police, and create a liquid form that’s given to cancer patients undergoing painful marrow transplants.

Human body parts invade Haifa

Wherever it’s been exhibited since it debuted in 1995, Body Worlds by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens has generated loads of controversy. So why should Israel be any different?

For the uninitiated, Body Worlds is a traveling exhibit of plastinated human specimens created by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. Plastination, a technique patented by von Hagens in the late 1970s, creates durable, life-like anatomical specimens by replacing the fat and water in human body parts with plastic. Over 26 million people have seen the exhibit around the world, and now it’s having its Israeli debut on April 6th at the Madatek Science Museum in Haifa.

According to a museum spokesman, the exhibit is scientific and educational – designed to educate laymen about the human body, which will leadi to better health awareness.

The problem is that the bodies in the exhibit contain actual human body parts – donated by individuals before their deaths – which has raised the rackles of religious groups wherever it’s been displayed.

There’s pretty clear-cut laws about dead bodies in Judaism – they have be buried as quickly as possible out of respect to the dead – and displaying parts of them in a museum is definitely a no-no.

Haifa’s Chief Rabbi Shear Yeshuv Cohen said he’s not going to initiate any formal protests, but he’s urging a boycott of the exhibit. And knowing when they have a cause to fight about, it’s likely the local haredi population (in Haifa, it’s pretty small – maybe that’s why they chose the northern city to host the exhibit) will come out to protest the opening.

To add more tabloid elements to the mix, the macabre former king of pop Michael Jackson, has evidently approached von Hagens about getting plastinated at the end of his days. And no story would be complete without a Holocaust angle. German magazine Der Spiegel, revealed a couple years ago that von Hagen’s father was in the SS during WWII.

All in all, a perfect story to take our minds off of Gilad Schalit, and the endless coalition talks.

Giving Till it Hurts

They expected a large number of people – maybe 20,000 potential donors. But Ezer Mizion got far more than it bargained for on Wednesday, when it held a mass national campaign to add Israelis to its bone marrow registry; over 60,000 people crowded the 80 testing stations the organization had set up around the country, with long lines outside many of them as people waited patiently for their turn to be tested.

The large crowds had gathered at the donation stations to help find a bone marrow match for Dan, a three year old boy from Ramat Hasharon, and Amit, a six year old girl from Kfar Sava. Both have rare forms of leukemia, and both have rare tissue types that are found in less than 2% of the population, about 1 in 30,000 – meaning that finding a donor with compatible bone marrow with theirs for a transplant, which the two children desperately need to fight the cancer that has caused their own blood and lymphatic system to go haywire. So, the Ezer Mizion organization, which provides medical support services for those who need ongoing medical help, organized the bone marrow donor recruitment drive, setting up dozens of stations around the country on Wednesday where Israelis could go and have a small sample of their bone marrow taken in order to determine whether they could be compatible donors for Dan and Amit.

The organization has run similar recruitment drives in the past, but Wednesday’s drive was by far the largest ever. My daughter waited on line for a chunk of time waiting for the test, which doesn’t necessarily hurt, but can be lengthy. Between the wait, the test, and the recovery time, she spent over two hours on the project – and there were thousands of others like her around the country, who took time off from work and school to help.

Why were so many willing to help this time? According to an acquaintance who works with the organization, Israelis are in a “giving” mood, having gotten into the habit in recent weeks, collecting supplies to send to soldiers on the front. Ezer Mizion established its marrow donot bank ten years ago, and so far has taken samples from 380,000 Israelis – and helped find hundreds of matches for individuals with leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, and immune deficiency syndromes.

If you donate marrow and your marrow is not a match for Dan and Amit, don’t worry – your information will go into the Ezer Mizion database, and you might get called on to help in the future. Besides marrow, Ezer Mizion needs money, too – in order to test the samples it collects (each sample costs $45 to test). Their phone number in Israel is 1800-236-236; any help will be greatly appreciated.

Israel picks up the bill

While the news is full of Israel’s “crimes” against the civilian population in Gaza, here’s one “crime” you probably haven’t heard about. Israel routinely admits residents of Palestinian Authority controlled territory into its hospitals – and the Israeli taxpayer foots the bill. Not only that; Israel even helps pay for treatment of patients in PA hospitals, where the patient never even comes near an Israeli hospital!

While many of us probably have heard of exceptional cases of Israeli doctors treating PA Arabs, I, and probably you, were under the impression that it was limited to high profile or complicated cases, such as the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation – with ill PA residents coming to Israel as a last resort. That kind of thing has been going on for a long time – even during the current war, as evidenced by the photo (courtesy of the IDF spokesperson), captioned “Injured Palestinian receiving medical treatment by Israeli and Palestinian medical personnel at the Erez crossing.”

But Israel’s contribution to the health of Palestinian Authority residents goes far beyond emergency assistance; according to some folks I interviewed for a story on a new database system being developed by an Israeli software company for hospitals in Bethlehem and Ramallah (an amazing story in and of itself!), Israel’s Health Ministry often pays for care of PA residents both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority itself!

The company building the database, called i-Rox, is located in Bnei Brak, and consists almost entirely of ultra-Orthodox women programmers (this story just gets better all the time!). According to the company’s CEO, the programmers are building in a component that allows PA hospitals to share their information with Israel’s Health Ministry, because in some cases, Israel’s health funds help provide – and pay for – treatment of patients in PA hospitals.

Yes, I had a hard time believing it too – until I Googled this World Health Organization PDF document. According to this eye-opening reporting (for 2006-7), “Approximately 60,000 Palestinians from the West Bank area have been treated in Israel hospitals over the past year. Around 20,000 were hospitalized, and about 40,000 received ambulatory services of all sorts. Approximately 5,000 patients from the Gaza area have been treated in Israeli hospitals over the past year – about 2,000 hospitalized and about 3,000 receiving ambulatory services of all sorts. Among the patients receiving medical care in Israel, approximately 2,500 were children, the majority of whom received long-term treatment for cancer and complicated operations.”

As far as Israel providing services to PA hospitals, “Public health laboratories at the Israel Ministry of Health continue to regularly provide assistance to the Palestinian Health Authority in the way of laboratory tests for poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, influenza and other viral diseases,” the report says. Israel – via the health funds and the Health Ministry – continued those tests throughout the year, “in spite of the fact that the Palestinian Authority delays or halts payments.” Of course, the anti-Israel forces out there have never let themselves get confused by the facts – but at least we know the truth, and in this day and age, that’s no small feat.

Hope for Israeli Startups

Tivo, Skype, Java, and other technologies that we now wonder how we did without – all of them were first displayed and demonstrated at the world’s premier hi-tech show, DEMO. Being able to present at DEMO is a prestigious accomplishment, and in order to get in, you’ve got to have something special.

This year, there are ten slots for Israeli companies at DEMO ‘09, and the lucky companies chosen to present this year – out of 300 applicants! – will be announced this Monday in Tel Aviv (yours truly has been invited to check it out). Those going on to the show (this year being held in Palm Springs, March 1-3) are practically guaranteed a shot at the big time (over the past four years, DEMO presenters have raised well over $2.5 billion dollars after the show). Previous Israeli entrants have included, among others, G.ho.st, which gives users a “personal computer” of their own from any terminal in the world, with it’s own operating system and software, and Vringo, which pioneered the business of video ringtones. Attending the show are dozens of computer businesses pros and journalists, as well as angels and VC’s.

Click to see video about DEMO \'09

Speaking of money: Is there any out there for startups anymore? Haven’t all the investors been scared off, after losing their shirts on the stock market and almost every other investment vehicle? Some have, sure. But in recent conversations with a whole raft of entrepreneurs, I’m hearing that there is money out there – and that because of the crisis, they may even have an easier time getting some. With stocks now considered suspect, investors are looking for places to put their money – and startups with good ideas and a good model are more attractive than ever, because they’re seen as a better bet than speculative stocks right now. Of course, that could just be the “happy face” talk they’re putting on to impress me (or reassure themselves) – but there’s a definite logic there. Besides, there’s this company, which just a couple of months ago netted $19 million in VC money. Not a bad take during a recession – or a boom, for that matter!

The Golden Hour

If there’s one thing Israeli medics are good at, it’s first aid. As a result of battlefield experience over 60 years of war, chovshim, as they are called in the IDF, have learned how to treat serious injuries with few supplies under heavily pressure.

The lessons learned on the battlefield prove invaluable for major civilian emergencies as well, such as the tragic bus crash outside Eilat. Sixty Russian tourists on a junket to Eilat plunged off the side of a narrow, twisty road to a ravine nearly 200 feet deep. Twenty four people died, and the rest were all in serious condition, as of Tuesday night. While many were killed on the spot, several died of the injuries they sustained later on,

What if the injured had gotten treatment sooner? Could they have been saved? Maybe, say doctors who advocate the Golden Hour theory that even severely injured people have a higher chance of surviving if they get substantial, emergency room style treatment within the first hour after they’re injured. The problem is getting them to the treatment site especially under difficult field conditions, such as when a bus is stuck at the bottom of a ravine, with no path or road to the top, and no place for a helicopter to land. Not to mention that moving the injured often makes things worse, exacerbating the problem and making treatment at the facility more complicated.

There is a solution on the horizon, though. As it happens, I spoke to Dr. Eran Shenkar today, a battlefield medical expert who has helped develop a new concept vehicle for remote medical care, called the MedUAV. Interviewing Dr. Shenkar and others at the Fisher Institute in Herzliya in preparation for an article for 21C (look for it soon!), I had no idea how relevant the conversation would be just a few hours later.

The MedUAV, says Dr. Shenkar, can essentially bring the emergency room to the field. Developed for the battlefield, it’s also ideal for civilian emergencies in difficult to reach circumstances. As a remote UAV, it’s smaller, cheaper, and more compact than a helicopter meaning it can go places a helicopter can’t, and, in times of war, there’s nobody to shoot down. The MedUAV can land or take off vertically, meaning it’s ideal for use in, say, a narrow ravine where there’s no place for a helicopter to land. The MedUAV can carry sophisticated equipment equipped with Wi-fi sensors, allowing a field medic to hook up a patient and allow a doctor to provide remote treatment, by giving instructions to the medic. And, after it delivers its supplies, the MedUAV can transport patients back to the medical tent, where they can be transported to hospitals by helicopter.

It’s a great solution to the golden hour problem and when it’s ready for field use, chances are good that tragedies like today’s bus crash will end up being a bit less tragic, with perhaps many more of the injured being restored to good health more quickly.

 

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