
Top Stories 
Published On May 3, 2010
POLICY
Sticking Points
Percutaneous injuries among medical students and health care workers hurt in more ways than one.
600,000 to 800,000
Number of needlesticks and related percutaneous injuries from syringes and other “sharps” reported annually by U.S. health care workers
59
Percentage of surgeons in training who were accidentally stuck by a needle while attending medical school, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study
99
Percentage of residents who had sustained a needlestick injury by their final year of training, according to a 2007 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine
1 in 300
Chance that a health care worker will contract HIV if stuck or cut by a medical instrument contaminated with an HIV patient’s blood
35
Estimated number of HIV cases each year that result from occupational percutaneous injuries
3,000
Cost, in U.S. dollars, of treatment and follow-up for a high-risk exposure
1992
Year the FDA recommended that all health care facilities use needleless or recessed-needle IVs
2001
Year OSHA modified its Occupational Exposure to Bloodborne Pathogens Standard to specifically mandate the use of needleless IV systems and other
“safer medical devices”
74
Percentage of nurses in the 2008 Study of Nurses’ Views on Workplace Safety and Needlestick Injuries who said they would not accept a job from an employer that did not provide safety syringes
Dispatches

What Makes a Kid Clumsy? More research into coordination disorders shows why some children are more prone to trip, fumble and spill the milk.

Eyes in the Sky Satellite data can be used to assess the health impact of dust storms and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Additional applications could be on the horizon.

Could This One Change Help Curb the Opioid Crisis? To prescribe an effective bridge to addiction treatment, emergency physicians must get special training and receive a waiver. Making that process easier—or eliminating the requirement altogether—could make a big impact.

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

Top Stories 

The Neuroscience of Giving Up
Why do some people react poorly, even catastrophically, in emergency situations?