A slew of health organizations are kicking off programs focused on emergency preparedness to coincide with today’s anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

New York Downtown Hospital is expected to hold its fifth annual emergency preparedness symposium today. Geared toward medical professionals, the conference will cover topics related to large-scale emergencies, such as decontamination and communication. Next week, the Primary Care Development Corp. is scheduled to hold a national summit on primary care emergency preparedness. The meeting, slated for September 19, will convene stakeholders including physicians and public health officials.

Since 2003, PCDC has worked with primary care providers citywide, and has implemented programs to ensure preparedness at 39 primary care centers. This year, PCDC will implement the program at another 20 centers at a cost of $1.4 million.

In advance of today’s anniversary, the New York Academy of Medicine launched an online tool yesterday to help households, offices, schools, and governmental agencies evaluate and improve their emergency preparedness programs. The program, Redefining Readiness, can be found at redefiningreadiness.net.

Also yesterday, the city’s Department of Health sent a bulletin to health care professionals, urging them to be alert for illness related to bioterrorism.

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FIGHTING FOR SCHIP

Governor Spitzer and a cadre of New York lawmakers met yesterday to plan their appeal of a federal decision that rejected New York’s plan to expand public health coverage for children.

“We simply cannot stand by and watch 70,000 New York children lose access to health insurance that the state fought so hard to give them this year,” Mr. Spitzer said.

In April, state lawmakers agreed to increase eligibility for a program under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which uses state and federal funds to provide health care to children.

Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rejected New York’s plan, which would expand coverage to children in families earning 400% of the federal poverty level, or $82,600 for a family of four.

The expansion is a key item on the governor’s agenda to alter health care in New York.

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NEW RECOMMENDATIONS TO INCREASE MAMMOGRAMS

Citing a decline in the number of women receiving regular mammograms, the New York chapter of the American Cancer Society has issued new recommendations to expand breast cancer screening programs.

The recommendations call for increased state funding for breast cancer screening programs, among other things.

“More than one-third of women 40 and older are not getting annual mammograms,” the chairman of the American Cancer Society’s mammography strike force, Dr. Clare Bradley, said. Nationwide, an estimated 178,480 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, according to American Cancer Society figures.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of women who received mammograms dropped in 2004 from 2000.

In New York, the number of women age 40 and older who reported having mammograms within the past year declined to 58.9% in 2004 from 68.2% in 2000. Nationwide, the number of women who had a mammogram within the past year declined to 58.3% from 62.6%.

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BROOKLYN HOSPITAL TO EMERGE FROM BANKRUPTCY

The Brooklyn Hospital Center is set to emerge from bankruptcy tomorrow, two years after it filed for Chapter 11 protection.

In July, the hospital had total operating revenue of $26.2 million and an operating loss of $255,000. Since filing for bankruptcy, the hospital has spent $13.2 million on legal fees, including $4.2 million paid to attorneys with Strook & Strook & Lavan LLP through July.

“Over the last few years, we have made a turnaround,” the hospital’s president and CEO since 2003, Samuel Lehrfeld, said. “This hospital needs to be here for the community. It’s one of the oldest community hospitals in the city of New York.”

Pending the confirmation of its reorganization plan, Mr. Lehrfeld said the hospital would move forward with plans to add psychiatric beds. Currently, the 464-bed community hospital, located in downtown Brooklyn, services 500,000 patients annually.

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RESEARCHERS LINK CONDITION TO JEWISH GIRLS IN CITY

Mount Sinai researchers have drawn a connection between a little-understood condition that causes vaginal tumors and Jewish girls living in New York City.

In a paper published in the July issue of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, researchers reported that seven out of eight cases they studied occurred among Ashkenazi Jewish girls from one neighborhood. Researchers declined to name the neighborhood due to patient privacy regulations. They said the eighth patient was a girl of Chinese decent who lived in the same neighborhood.

The condition, first identified in 2000, is not malignant and has not been linked to infertility. The new research included MRI testing, and it concluded that the tumors cannot be fully removed. Researchers believe the tumors stop growing after puberty. From an epidemiological point of view, researchers offered several possible explanations for the clustering of cases they encountered, including genetic susceptibility, environmental factors, or some kind of statistical quirk. “These are three intriguing things,” the lead researcher, Dr. Albert Altchek, a clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Mount Sinai, said.