Marzieh Ghiasi

I have exciting news! Today we sent out the final version of MSURJ (the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal) to the printers. We’ve completely revamped the look of the journal from previous years, and we have more research articles than ever. Our launch is in about a week when everything is going to come together, and that’s definitely the best part of being Editors-in-Chief. It’s been a great run.

Every year, for more than twenty years or so, the McGill Anatomy & Cell Biology Students Society has held an “anatomically correct” bake sale at the systemic human anatomy class. This year’s bake sale was pretty amazing and apparently in an hour managed to raise nearly two-thousand dollars for a charity for deaf students here in Montréal! I took a couple of (low-quality) cell-phone pictures. Yes the last one is legs and kind of NSFW.

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/articles/20738

Diagnosis gone digital
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, October 5th, 2009

Almost every field has adopted digital technology, and medicine is no exception. However, the transformation of health informatics in the past decade has not simply been a change in tools of the trade, but a change in the very way knowledge is acquired and applied.

13th century Anatomical Illustration | Source

As a discipline that brings together health care and information science, health informatics is involved in setting up resources like search engines that doctors can use to retrieve clinical data. These tools can be grouped into two categories – information retrieval systems (IRS) and clinical decision support systems (CDSS).

Pierre Pluye, a physician and associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, investigates these electronic resources. He explained how IRS provide a way to filter the staggering amount of available information down to only the most relevant.

“There are 19 million abstracts on Medline [an online biomedical database]. Physicians do not have time [to read every single one]… because basically you would have to read 24 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep updated,” said Pluye.

CDSS differ from IRS in that they provide patient-specific information. Clinicians can use calculator-type programs that look at a patient’s history to determine their likelihood of contracting diseases or experiencing medical complications.
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Article #2, finally– the fruit of our collective effort!

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6776
Also featured on: http://www.ntdsociety.com/among-the-neglected/

Among the Neglected
By Marzieh Ghiasi and Hannah Thomas
Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Marzieh Ghiasi and Hannah Thomas explore the chasm between the enormous human cost of Neglected Tropical Diseases and funding for research and drugs

“The parasite gets inside the nose and it completely destroys the face.”

Professor Greg Matleshweski, a parasitology expert, is describing the fate of 12 million people afflicted with Leishmaniasis, a highly prevalent condition in parts of South America. “When you have that kind of affliction you can’t function in society. You are outcasts, really lepers.”

Leishmaniasis is just one of 14 infections known as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). Sometimes called the “biblical diseases,” or the “diseases of poverty,” they have persisted for centuries. Along with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, NTDs pose a huge challenge to global health – but because they almost exclusively affect the world’s poorest, their plight has been neglected in public discussion, investment, and research.

NT-What?

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of NTDs includes leprosy, elephantiasis, Chagas disease, cholera, dengue, and sleeping sickness. Categorized as viral, bacterial, or helminthic, they thrive in regions far beyond the tropics.

According to the WHO’s numbers, one billion people are afflicted, 2.7 billion are at risk, and between 500,000 and one million die each year of NTDs. If a 670-person classroom were a microcosm of the world, these diseases would plague 100 people.
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