shared with his longtime partner, Robert Ripley) and suffering from end-stage AIDS. Dr. Marvez-Valls did not perform tasks that would involve excessive exposure to needles, such as suturing or IV insertion, but he continued diagnosing and treating patients in the E.R. and Trauma services at Charity Hospital even after the hospital was shut down by Hurricane Katrina, practicing medicine in tents and other temporary emergency rooms until his death from AIDS-related kidney disease in 2006 at the age of 52. Patient privacy concerns have dogged Trauma from the beginning. In the early 2000s, a group of patients from New Jersey who appeared on the show sued The New York Times Co. In response, one appeals court ruled that the format of the show technically qualified as news and that the series deserved the same protections under the law. Later, in 2005, two men in Florida whose cases were featured on the show sued the producers for breach of privacy, claiming show crew and producers would disguise themselves as hospital personnel to obtain release signatures for the taped footage under false pretenses. Charles Sims, an attorney for the show's producers, has dismissed the men's claims and asserted that all releases were obtained properly. Spin-offs In its first spin-off, Paramedics followed the activities of teams of EMTs and paramedics in a number of large urban centers in the United States. The series lasted from 1998-2002. Its spirit lives on in the newer series Boston EMS, which has a similar premise. The second spin-off was Code Blue. Life after cancellation When Trauma was canceled by TLC in 2002, NYT Television still had unused footage from a 3-month shooting session at Memorial Health Trauma Center in Savannah, Georgia. To make use of this footage, TLC agreed to renew Code Blue, a show originally conceived as a limited run series based on life at a single hospital, Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana. The new version of Code Blue, now named Code Blue: Savannah, consisted of eight episodes crafted out of the unused footage from the Trauma shoot at Memorial Health Trauma Center. This version of Code Blue has a different shooting style, a different narrator, and a different narrative tone, making it more closely resemble an episode of Trauma: Life in the E.R. rather than the mix of hospital life and New Orleans local color that made up the original Code Blue. In December