Recent global developments in the regulation of trade and intellectual property rights threaten to hinder the access of populations in developing countries to essential drugs. The authors argue for state intervention in the health and pharmaceutical markets in order to guarantee equitable access to these products.

Family studies demonstrated the contribution of genetic factors to the development of primary hypertension. However, the transition from this phenomenologic-biometric approach to the molecular-genetic one is more difficult. This last approach is mainly based on the Mendel paradigm; that is, the dissection of the poligenic complexity of hypertension is brought about on the assumption that the in...

Tremor amplitude was monitored in untreated patients with essential tremor by a procedure designed to minimise fluctuations due to factors known to influence tremor. Tremor was measured hourly for 6 hours in 14 patients and on five to seven occasions (separated by at least a week) in 22 patients. A wide range of within-patient variability was found, with some patients showing little and others ...

Duplicate genes in mouse are widely thought to have functional redundancy, and to be less essential than singleton genes. We analyzed nearly 3900 individually knocked out mouse genes and discovered that the proportion of essential genes is approximately 55% in both singletons and duplicates. This suggests that mammalian duplicates rarely compensate for each other, and that the absence of phenot...

1Department of Pharmacology, Baqyyatallah Medical Science University, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. 2Food and Drug Control Laboratories, Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. Food and Drug Departments, 3Tehran; 4Kermanshah; 5Fars; 6Khozestan; 7Khorasan, Islamic Republic of Iran. Received: 18/09/02; accepted: 29/09/03 ABSTRACT Prescribing, dispensing, av...

Two N balance experiments using growing pigs were conducted to study the effect of essential:total (E:T) N ratio on N retention and utilization. Purified diets contained casein and crystalline amino acids as the sole sources of N. E:T values ranged from 0.25 to 0.86 while either the concentration of total N (Expt. 1) or essential N (Expt 2) was kept constant. At a constant concentration of tota...

PURPOSE To examine the long-term risk of essential tremor (ET) in migraine. METHODS Using population-based administrative data from a subset of the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) of Taiwan, we identified 22,696 newly diagnosed migraineurs (mean age 44.5 years) and a matched migraine-free cohort of 90,784 individuals in the period 2000-2008. Multivariable Cox proportional ...

A minimal gene set (MGS) is critical for the assembly of a minimal artificial cell. We have developed a proposal of simplifying bacterial gene set to approximate a bacterial MGS by the following procedure. First, we base our simplified bacterial gene set (SBGS) on experimentally determined essential genes to ensure that the genes included in the SBGS are critical. Second, we introduced a half-r...

In his editorial accompanying our systematic review of aromatherapy (June Journal),1 Vickers2 concludes that ‘it is not of pressing scientific importance to know whether aromatherapy enhances the effects of massage, since the essential oils used in aromatherapy are not particularly toxic or expensive’. I believe that this statement is misleading, perhaps even unscientific. If massage therapy al...