UC Regents on Thursday declared “an extreme financial emergency for UC” and approved the proposal for furloughs and pay cuts for 108,000 employees.

Members of the campus community should register their private contact information to get timely warnings about emergencies, since the campus telephone system will likely be overloaded or could be damaged during a crisis, UCSF police say.

Among 289,328 veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who used the Department of Veterans Affairs medical system for the first time between April 1, 2002 and April 1, 2008, 37 percent received a diagnosis of a mental health problem, according to a study of national VA data conducted by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.

UCSF Medical Center ranks among the nation’s top 10 premier hospitals and is the best in the Bay Area, according to the new 2009-10 America’s Best Hospitals survey conducted by U.S. News & World Report.

The decoding of a parasite genome is helping researchers identify the molecular targets for new drugs in the battle against schistosomiasis.

UC Regents are expected to vote on a plan to cut costs through salary reductions and furloughs for some employees at a meeting tomorrow at UCSF Mission Bay.

Two UCSF research papers this week are marking major breakthroughs in the effort to tackle schistosomiasis (bilharzia), a tropical disease that infects more than 200 million people worldwide and causes long-term debilitating illness and occasional paralysis or death.

The California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) has joined with the City of San Francisco and FibroGen Inc to launch the QB3 Mission Bay Incubator Network, to spur growth in the bioscience industry.