Science, Space, Health & Robotics News - Page 473

We've said we will have real-time data on the internet for our major tertiary hospitals so you can log on and see how many people are sitting in the waiting room at Royal North Shore Hospital.

We have said all along we want people to get out of their ivory towers and get down to closer where the services are delivered.

Doctors who have not treated Jobs say they can only speculate without hard information, but they said the tumor he was treated for in 2004 could have spread to another organ or resurfaced in the pancreas, requiring surgery or other treatment.
Jobs could also be coping with side effects of that surgery that can be treated easily, they said.

In 2004, Jobs was treated for a rare type of pancreatic cancer called an islet-cell, or neuroendocrine, tumor. Such tumors can be benign or malignant, but they usually grow slowly and are far less deadly than most pancreatic tumors.

The American Cancer Society estimates that 37,680 Americans get pancreatic cancer each year, but few get islet-cell tumors of the kind Jobs had. The tumors are easily removed surgically but recur in roughly half of patients, said Dr. Roderich Schwarz, a cancer surgeon at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.