HYDROLOGY: Good Intensions Gone Awry

Maintenance of certification: Good intentions gone awry.

Physicians currently practice in an environment of everincreasing scrutiny and review. We are held to performance standards and quality outcomes that meet society's expectations and that are used to gauge the adequacy of our clinical expertise and service. These performance measures have evolved as precise, definitive, quantitative assessments of clinical competency through which we are judged ...

Merging Healthcare Institutions (Bill 25). Good intentions gone awry.

Allopathic medicine gone awry

To the Editor: There has been much searching for reasons to explain the increases in upper respiratory tract–related diseases over the past 25 years. Schappert’s data show that ear infections more than doubled between 1975 and 1990,1 and extrapolating his curve to the present suggests that by now this would have tripled. Although there are no national statistics for sinusitis, consensus points ...

Type V protein secretion: simplicity gone awry?

Since its discovery in the late 1980's, the family of secreted proteins termed the autotransporters has been expanding continuously to become the largest group of secreted proteins in Gram-negative bacteria. The type V secretion pathway, which includes the autotransporters (type Va) together with the two-partner secretion system (type Vb) and the Oca family (type Vc), can be defined by secreted...

Postinfluenza bacterial pneumonia: host defenses gone awry.

Influenza is a common respiratory pathogen causing both seasonal and pandemic disease. Influenza infection predisposes the host to secondary bacterial infection of the respiratory tract, which is a major cause of both morbidity and mortality in flu-related disease. In this review, we will discuss innate and adaptive antiviral responses during influenza infection, and review how these responses ...