Community Briefs

Thursday, November 12, 1998

Community Briefs

ORION to go offline

for maintenance

From Friday, Nov. 13th through Sunday, Nov. 15 ORION, the UCLA
Library’s online information system, will be unavailable. During
this time, library staff will be conducting a maintenance and
consolidation project for Administrative Information Systems
computing hardware.

While ORION is down, users will be able to access information
about library holdings through MELVYL, available at
http://www.library.ucla.edu.

While library users will still be able to check materials out,
they will not be able to place holds or recalls, page items from
the Southern Regional Library Facility, or place express
requests.

The UCLA Library is planning on launching a new, revamped
"ORION2" before the end of the quarter.

Library hours and hours of reference services in the individual
units will remain unchanged.

HIV-cocktails

fight onset of AIDS

Potent antiretroviral therapy as prescribed for and used by
HIV-infected people has significantly delayed the onset of AIDS
symptoms and death, according to the most complete public health
study of the new therapy.

Researchers from the UCLA School of Public Health and other
institutions found that since the so-called "AIDS cocktail" became
available, the length of time between infection with HIV to
development of AIDS was 63 percent longer than before the therapy
was available.

In addition, the length of time from infection with HIV to death
has been extended by 21 percent and the overall hazard of dying
dropped by 40 percent in the period when the cocktail was
available, compared to the periods before the introduction of the
potent antiretroviral therapies, according to the report in the
Nov. 4 edition of the Journal of the American Medical
Association.

The study is the most detailed effort thus far to measure the
effectiveness of potent antiretroviral therapy outside clinical
trials, where both physicians and patients must adhere to a strict
protocol.

"This study shows that potent antiretroviral therapy, as used in
the community, is making a dramatic difference in the lives of
HIV-infected people," said Dr. Roger Detels, professor of
epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health and lead author of
the study.

"Potent antiretroviral therapy significantly extends AIDS-free
time and survival of people with HIV infection, despite the
difficulty of staying on the complex treatment regime and the
existence of side effects," he added.

The findings are from the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS),
a long-term study of the natural history of the AIDS epidemic. The
study has followed more than 5,000 gay men from Baltimore, Chicago,
Pittsburgh and Los Angeles since 1984.

Origin of Hawaii’s plume discovered

A massive plume of hot rock rising through the Earth and
erupting through the ocean floor has been building islands in the
central Pacific, including those of Hawaii, for at least 80 million
years. Now scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
may have located the origin of the Hawaiian plume at the boundary
between Earth’s mantle layer and its metallic core.

How deep the Hawaiian plume extends has long been a subject of
debate among earth scientists, said Sara Russell, a UCSC earth
sciences graduate student. Russell worked with Thorne Lay,
professor and chair of earth sciences at UCSC, and Edward Garnero,
research seismologist at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory,
on the new study, published in the November 19 issue of the
scientific journal Nature.

Compiled from Daily Bruin staff reports

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