James Polson keeps the letter tucked away as a treasured memento.

The Children's Heart Center administrator, a nurse practitioner, had taught infant CPR to parents of children in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). One day, he got a letter from one of those families, thanking him for the lesson that saved their child's life.

“That's why this gift is so important,” he said of the American Heart Association's donation of 1,150 Infant CPR Anytime Kits. Valued at $44,275, the gift should supply a year's worth of families whose children have been served by the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), PICU, special care nursery and labor and delivery at UMMC.

Blood was drawn on what was thought to be a routine visit to UMMC. A child, 23 months old and born to an HIV-infected mother, was being checked for virus levels. Treatment with a combination of antiretroviral drugs had been started just 30 hours after birth. The cocktail was doing its job; there was a diminishing viral presence that was virtually undetectable by 29 days old.

About a year ago, Emily Tandy of Flowood discovered years of tanning delivered a life-threatening reminder: melanoma.

Today, she tells anyone who will listen to avoid tanning beds, to use sunscreen and to regularly check their bodies for skin cancer.

“I'm pale and I'm proud of it,” she said. “I'd rather be pale and alive than tan and dead any day.”

Her serious tanning habit started at 17 when she got a job at a tanning salon. In the 18 or so months she worked there, she said she probably tanned three times a week. “Then I'd lay out with friends on the weekend,” she said, rarely using sunscreen and brushing off her Mom's advice to cut back on the activity. “I did all that stupid stuff.”

College dampened her sunbathing time to “maybe three to four times a month.”

At 26, after she'd watched the middle of a freckle on her upper right thigh slowly darken over the previous year, she said she told her Mom, “This doesn't look right.”

This time, she took her mother's advice to have it checked out.

Health-care organizations like the University of Mississippi Medical Center have now become a favored target of cybercriminals.

The Ponemon Institute, an independent research organization focused on privacy, estimates that medical identity theft affected 1.8 million people in the United States at a cost of $80 billion in 2015 alone.

The institute suggests criminals were able to exploit information from medical records to commit fraud four times more often than other types of identity theft.

A number of interesting events is scheduled for the upcoming week at the Medical Center.