The chairman and chief executive officer of management firm Nueterra Healthcare was arrested last month after police say he was observed committing "a lewd act" in his vehicle in the parking lot of an Overland Park, Kans., health club.

Daniel R. Tasset, 54, was charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, a class B misdemeanor, on Sept. 12, says the Overland Park Police Department. Mr. Tasset pleaded not guilty and was released on $2,500 bond. He is expected to appear in court for a scheduling conference next month.

The police arrived after patrons of Lifetime Fitness complained to the gym's management around 4:40 p.m. "Some patrons on the second floor of the exercise facility who had a view of the parking lot could see an individual in a dark-colored SUV masturbating," says Brian Burgess, spokesman for the Johnson County, Kans., District Attorney's office. When police approached the black Ford Expedition, Mr. Tasset -- who was seated in the middle row -- explained that he was changing his clothes, say police. A criminal history check on Mr. Tasset found no prior offenses.

"This seems so out of character for him," says a colleague of Mr. Tasset, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I would have never guessed it in a million years."

Nueterra Healthcare provides development and management services for single and multi-specialty ambulatory surgery centers, specialty hospitals and physical therapy centers. The 10-year-old company manages more than 50 medical facilities across the United States. Mr. Tasset speaks frequently at conferences. A certified public accountant, he is the former treasurer of the AAASC.

A local television station's news report on the arrest can be viewed at the following link.

Although all cochlear implant recipients appear to be at some increased risk of bacterial meningitis caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, those children implanted with cochlear implants that have a positioner are at greatest risk, according to an FDA advisory. The advisory urges healthcare professionals to be aware of the need for children to be fully immunized before receiving this implant. The only model with a positioner was withdrawn from the market in July 2002.

Two children who received the implant, but were not fully vaccinated, have died from meningitis within the past year. Since the implant population is at a high risk for pneumococcal meningitis, the agency recommends they receive the vaccination under the same schedules that apply to other individuals at a high risk for this invasive disease.

"The short answer is that all of us involved in cochlear implants need to educate and advocate for vaccination," says Brian J. McKinnon, MD, MBA, director of implant surgery in the department of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. "In truth there is no evidence that vaccination in cochlear implants will definitively prevent all cases of meningitis, but the risk-benefit of vaccination against the most common organism in patients with cochlear implants is very reasonable."

"While these devices are currently not available on the market and, as such, are not being implanted, physicians need to be cognizant of the increased risk present in children who received them in the past," says Brent Senior, MD, chief of rhinology, allergy and sinus surgery for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This risk does not appear to extend to devices without positioners that are now being utilized."

Chili peppers may someday be associated with much more than casual dining or alternative music. When used in combination with a drug called QX-314, capsaicin, the substance that gives a chili pepper its punch, blocks the activity of pain-sensing neurons without inhibiting thinking, alertness or coordination, according to a study appearing in the Oct. 4, 2007 issue of the journal Nature. The study's researchers claim that this combination drug therapy will provide a major breakthrough in the treatment of surgical and chronic pain.

Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston discovered the combination's pain-blocking potential in Petri dish experiments before injecting the drugs into the paws and sciatic nerves of rats. The treated rats could tolerate more heat than their untreated counterparts, did not show evidence of pain and continued to behave and move normally, according to the researchers.

Unlike the commonly used local anesthetic lidocaine, which blocks electrical currents in all nerve cells, the capsaicin and QX-314 combination targets pain-sensing neurons, say the study's authors. They discovered capsaicin opens channels of only pain-sensing neurons, allowing QX-314 to enter these cells and block their activity without impairing signals from other cells.

"This could very well be a major breakthrough in human patients one day, but it obviously has a long way to go from rats to clinical trials to the bedside," says Adam Dorin, MD, MBA, medical director of the Grossmont Plaza Surgery Center in La Mesa, Calif. He cautions that, "unless combined with a general anesthetic, this formulation may be incomplete in the intra-op setting as a stand-alone anesthetic for blocks because surgeons often rely on muscle paralysis to create a still surgical field."