Night Read (Minnesota): Mayo Clinic contributes nearly $10 billion to local economy

Here are some news and notes from a day in MedCity, Minnesota:

Mayo Clinic said in a study released Monday that it contributes $9.6 billion to Minnesota’s economy, or 43 percent of its national economic impact. The non-profit group employs 57,000 people, including 37,000 in Minnesota. Mayo also said it generates nearly $2 billion in federal tax revenue and contributed $391 million of its own money to research and education since 2008.

Mike Parrot, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, describes in a video clip on Minnpost how the school’s Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP) prepared him for practicing medicine in the smaller communities of Greater Minnesota.

The Mayo Clinic has joined a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit against Australian blood plasma group CSL, claiming it was part of a damaging international cartel that fixed plasma prices, according to The Age newspaper in Australia.

In a guest commentary published in Finance & Commerce in Minneapolis, Kate Rubin, president of the Minnesota High Tech Association, outlines her group’s top legislative goals in 2010, including an angel investment tax credit and a bonding bill that will allow the University of Minnesota to build a Physics and Nanotechnology Center.

Glen Spielmans, an associate professor of psychology at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, recently published a report on how studies in medical journals often fail to accurately represent the actual data about a drug, according to MinnPost.

Dr. Robert Frantz, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, will climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to experience symptoms felt by patients suffering from arterial hypertension, according to the Post-Bulletin in Rochester.