By the time these words appear in print, I understand that we shall have taken one more step, whatever that is, towards joining the European Community whatever that is. (We have trouble enough defining what we mean by a community even within Britain; I can't imagine it's going to be any easier, in European terms, even to perceive the community, let alone define it.) Anyway, before very long, pe...

I have recently been renewing my acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling the poet, that is, as distinct from Rudyard Kipling the short-story writer and part-time novelist. R.K. the poet is very much out of favour at present, and has been these twenty years. I suppose this disfavour springs from his identification with the spirit of Empire, with the Raj, with the Great White Sahib, wit...

A personal view of the social services.

One of the most notable phenomena of the last two years has been the sudden growth of what might be called the 'ecological movement'. I think myself that 'ecology' is a bad word to use in this context; I take the word to mean the systematic and dispassionate analysis of interrelationships between various kinds of life-forms and their physical environment?and the movement is not yet very systema...

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIMS Chronic liver disease (CLD) can cause hepatopulmonary syndrome (HPS), defined as triad of liver disease, hypoxemia, and intrapulmonary vascular dilation (IPVD). The aim of this study was to determine the evidence of IPVD in a cohort of pediatric patients with CLD pre- and post-liver transplantation (LT). MATERIAL AND METHODS All pediatric patients with CLD listed for...

Mass spectrometry (MS) is a powerful tool to accurately identify and quantify histone post-translational modifications (PTMs). High-resolution mass analyzers have been regarded as essential for these PTM analyses because the mass accuracy afforded is sufficient to differentiate trimethylation versus acetylation (42.0470 and 42.0106 Da, respectively), whereas lower-resolution mass analyzers cann...

The local authority Social Services Departments are going to get a bad press during the next year or two This seems quite certain, because of the attitudes and activities of certain Members of Parliament. There appears to be quite a vogue nowadays for Members to open debates, ask questions and make speeches not so much for their impact on the floor of the House as for the amount of press covera...

HYPOTHESIS Metastatic workup for patients newly diagnosed as having breast cancer is variable, especially for early disease (T1-2 N0-1). Routine bone scans and liver imaging are often performed without any evidence to support their usefulness. DESIGN A retrospective review of patients with breast cancer referred to our center during a 2-year period was performed to determine the value of stag...

Atomic bomb survivors outside of Japan are few and often hard to follow-up. Spinal malignant lymphoma among these survivors is rare in established studies from Japan or the United States. Here, we report an 81-year-old woman, who experienced the atomic bomb explosion in Nagasaki when she was 19 years old, who presented with papillary thyroid carcinoma when she was 70 years old. Both follicular ...