Seeking Community Panelists

Do you want to get involved in the NYC budget process? TranspareNYC is looking for community panelists to help decide where 1 million dollars in community grants will go. Last year, $907,798 was awarded to 167 organizations, including 36 new programs. The Manhattan Borough President’s office is specifically looking for people who display knowledge in Senior Services, Education, Urban Health Initiatives,

Re-entry and Correctional Systems, and Parks and Recreation. Those interested can visit TranspareNYC.org, and the recruitment drive for prospective panelists ends on March 29th. Questions about the program can be directed to Linda Felstein at (212) 669-4814 or LFelstein@manhattanbp.org.

Salvador Dali Watercolor Thief   

A man has been indicted and charged with Grand Larceny to the Second Degree, after stealing a 1949 Salvador Dali Watercolor from a Manhattan art gallery. On June 19th, 2012, Phivos Istavrioglou stole the drawing (with an estimated worth of $150,000) by placing it in a shopping bag. After surveillance images of the suspect were broadcast to the public worldwide, the NYPD recovered the stolen artwork in a shipping tube at Kennedy Airport less than 2 weeks later. They lifted fingerprints from the shipment and matched them with those from a juice bottle Istavrioglou stole at a Whole Foods last year. On February 16th, 2013, an undercover cop posing as a business manager of an art gallery lured Istavrioglou to NYC. He was taken into custody upon arrival at Kennedy.

 New York-Presbyterian Cancer Study

The American Cancer society is soon to begin its Cancer Prevention Study-3, which will help researchers better understand the factors that cause or prevent cancer. These studies have confirmed the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and also the impact of air pollution on the heart and lungs. For residents of East Midtown that would like to get involved, New York-Presbyterian is available as a local registration site.

MOUNT SINAI AND CONTINUUM HEALTH PARTNERS TO MERGE

The Board of Trustees from The Mount Sinai Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners have voted to approve a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a possible merger.

The MOU outlines steps toward creating a new integrated health care system that combines operations of two entities.

“Our goal as an integrated health care system is to provide exceptional medical care to New Yorkers,” said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Mount Sinai Medical Center. “The combination will create more economies of scale, increase efficiencies, and expand access to advanced primary and specialty care throughout this citywide network.”

Stanley Brezenoff, President and Chief Executive Officer of Continuum, said, “This collaboration makes available an extraordinary range of resources for the provision of compassionate, state-of-the-art care for patients. In joining with Mount Sinai, we will further enhance our ability to provide the full spectrum of outstanding care to the populations we serve.”

Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of The Mount Sinai Medical Center, sees the opportunity for increased research collaboration with physicians and scientists affiliated with Continuum, who would become part of the medical school’s academic faculty. “Mount Sinai has a legacy of groundbreaking clinical and translational research that has led to improved methods of diagnosing and treating human disease,” said Dr. Charney. “The synergy between Mount Sinai and Continuum would widen our research base and accelerate the pace of breakthrough treatments and protocols.”

The chairmen of both boards of trustees, Peter W. May for Mount Sinai and Steven Hochberg for Continuum, said they are pleased that their respective boards unanimously approved the MOU.

The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Established in 1968, the Icahn School of Medicine is one of the leading medical schools in the United States, and is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service.

Continuum Health Partners was created in January 1997 as the parent company for the partnership between four distinguished voluntary hospitals: Beth Israel Medical Center-Milton and Carroll Petrie Division, Beth Israel Brooklyn, St. Luke’s Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital.

The award-winning hospital complex on First Avenue was evacuated and shut down on the night of Hurricane Sandy when heavy flooding knocked out its backup generator. According to CEO Robert Grossman, the complex sustained $1.1 billion in damages.

“I was here that night and I saw the East River blending into Second Avenue,” Cuomo said in his announcement. “We knew right away the damage that was going to be done to this great institution.”
Workers are now in the process of drying out flooded areas in the complex, and Langone aims to restore full service by January.

CONGRESS MEMBERS ASK FOR POST-SANDY FOOD STAMP RELIEF
Members of Congress including Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler demanded easier access to federal food stamps for New Yorkers still suffering from Hurricane Sandy last week. The members wrote a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg requesting looser eligibility requirements and expanded eligibility zones for the U.S. Department of Agriculture-administered Disaster Supplemental Food Stamp (D-SNAP) program, which provides relief funding to help feed those who were hit hard by the October storm.

“Making it as easy as possible for those affected by Hurricane Sandy to have access to the resources they need to recover will also help our city rebuild,” the congress members wrote. “Allowing survivors better access to relief programs like D-SNAP will mean more people will be able to sign up, which will also translate into more profits for local small businesses such as grocery stores.”
The members noted that many New Yorkers whose homes were damaged by the storm’s extensive flooding were elderly or handicapped, so they would particularly benefit from easier access to the federal benefits.

MOUNT SINAI OPENS NEW MEDICAL CENTER
Mount Sinai Medical Center opened the Leon and Norma Hess Center for Science and Medicine last week. The new 500,000-square-foot, $440 million clinical and research facility, located at 1470 Madison Ave., features eight floors of laboratories and outpatient care offices that will treat a range of diseases and disabilities, including cancer and autism. A new 52-story apartment building next to the center at 1214 Fifth Avenue will be used by the hospital for primary care and diabetes work in addition to providing luxury and affordable housing. At the hospital’s opening on Thursday, Mount Sinai reps said that in the coming years the new center is expected to generate over 800 jobs and garner over $350 million of National Institutes of Health funding.

CITY’S CREATIVE ECONOMY GROWING, BUT MINORITIES BEING LEFT BEHIND
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office released a report last week on the city’s entrepreneurial economy. Titled “Start-Up City: Growing New York’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for All,” the report summarized recent growths in “entrepreneurial” industries like finance, fashion, marketing and technology, but also addressed these fields’ limited accessibility, citing census data that showed only 29 percent of employed Blacks and 20 percent of employed Latinos work in these “creative economies.”

“Too many working-class New Yorkers lack the resources and skills to share in this growth,” Stringer said in a statement, noting that annual salaries for jobs in this new tech economy often start at $65,000, well above the city’s median family income. “We need to turn this engine into a pipeline to the middle class for thousands of New Yorkers.”

To achieve this end, the report recommends increasing office and housing affordability, expanding computer science training in public schools and improving transportation to growing business districts, among other initiatives.

That is the question Robert Woo asked Dr. Kristjan Ragnarsson in 2007 after a crane collapsed 25 stories above the ground and spilled 30 pounds of steel tubes on him. Woo was an architect hired by Goldman Sachs at the time, working on the construction of their global headquarters downtown. He was a new father of two boys, and at 39 years old, was just entering the peak of his career.
Ragnarsson, the chairman of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, answered Woo with the same response he has given most of his patients over his 41-year career as an internationally renowned doctor dealing with spinal cord injuries. “It’s possible,” he said. “But the chances are small.”

On Dec. 6, however, Woo took a very literal step toward beating the odds. Mount Sinai’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, in the Klingenstein Clinical Center at 1450 Madison Ave., celebrated the opening of its Rehabilitation Bionics Program with a demonstration of a battery-powered exoskeleton that allows paralyzed users to walk. The device is called the Ekso, and Woo was chosen to give it a spin for a small gathering of friends and sponsors.

Woo has been strapped into the machine many times before. For the past year, he has trained with it three times a week in sessions that last up to two hours. The device looks like the lower half of a human skeleton, with a spinal cord and jet pack attached. The current model, still a fairly early prototype by developer Ekso Bionics, requires the assistance of two physical therapists to stabilize the walker and to operate the leg controls. They fussed with the device as Woo ambled from one end of the room to the other, but they did not dampen his enthusiasm for the device.

“Standing here today and talking to you eye to eye, instead of looking up to people and being looked down on, it makes you realize what you take for granted,” he said in a short speech. “Only when you lose it, and your entire world changes, you realize that even the smallest thing can make a huge difference in how we see ourselves and how others see us.”

Woo catalogued the numerous and unexpected health improvements he has experienced from his training sessions, including fewer muscles spasms and better digestion and bladder control, in addition to greater physical strength. About three months ago, he felt hunger for the first time since his injury.

“I’m getting things back. My quality of life has just soared,” he said. “When I get the chance to stand up, I just don’t want to stop. There are times when the therapists say the session is almost up, and I say, ‘Okay, one more round, one more round.’ ”

Three other wheelchair-bound users of the machine, including Chris Tagatac, an ambassador for Ekso Bionics, avowed the same health benefits, both physical and psychological. “When I look at this device, I see a device that helps us get connected again,” said Tagatac. “It connects us physically—we feel our feet again on the ground. It connects us eye to eye with the world, which is priceless in my mind.”

The Ekso developed out of a military program that designed powered leg braces for soldiers to help with heavy lifting. According to Dr. Ragnarsson, many models of walking machines had been created before the military’s funding—models composed of everything from steel to inflatable fabrics—but all failed because they could not provide the right mix of power and balance, and required too much energy.

“Now, we have technology that is totally different,” Ragnarsson said.

With the opening of the Rehabilitation Bionics Program, the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine aims to test the limits of this technology to prove its benefits and determine its marketability.

“There are lots of different potential advantages to these technologies. They can help with fitness, they can help with mobility and there may even be the possibility that they can encourage neurological recovery,” said Jeanne Zanca, assistant professor in the department. “But all of these things are hunches. We need to put some data behind them so that we can aid the development of these technologies and we can back up how they should be used to improve the health and quality of life of individuals.”

Woo is optimistic about the Ekso’s progress. “One day, the device will be so small that I can wear my clothes over it,” he said. “I can walk down the street. I can push my children to the park. I can stand up next to my wife to give her a hug. I could do so many things.”