There has been slow progress with finding practical solutions to health systems corruption, a topic that has long languished in policy-makers “too difficult tray.” Efforts to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) provide a new imperative for addressing the long-standing problem of corruption in health systems making fighting corruption at all levels and in all its for...

Along with continuous growing widespread adulterations of botanical drugs, the necessity for drug quality monitoring has become more popular than ever. Considering that antioxidants are widely found in natural plant pharmaceuticals, gallic acid (GA) is often regarded as the reference standard to make sure whether these are up to grade as guided by Chinese Pharmacopeia. Herein, a novel Bi2MoO6/B...

The current standardisation activity of Open Distributed Processing (ODP) has attempted to incorporate multimedia ows of information into its architecture through the idea of stream interfaces. At present the reference model of ODP (ODP-RM) abstracts from the precise nature of the ows of information. As a consequence of this, the ODP-RM only deals with syntactic aspects of stream interfaces and...

A review is presented on different analytical techniques used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of serratiopeptidase, a proteolytic enzyme, which has recently gained importance as an anti-inflammatory agent. Efforts have been made to collate all the relevant references to the extent possible. The review discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the cited analytical techniques, which...

This session of the TOXINS2008 conference was organized with the aim to provide an open forum in which similarities and differences between the various botulinum toxin (BoNT) preparations are highlighted and discussed. To this end the organizers invited representatives of the manufactures of the four commercially available BoNT products, Botox, Dysport, Xeomin, Myobloc/Neurobloc, to briefly sum...

BACKGROUND Public health surveillance is not ethically neutral and yet, ethics guidance and training for surveillance programmes is sparse. Development of ethics guidance should be based on comprehensive and transparently derived overviews of ethical issues and arguments. However, existing overviews on surveillance ethics are limited in scope and in how transparently they derived their results....

Inherited metabolic disorders (IMDs) are a class of genetic disorders. Each metabolic disorder may have different forms with different age of onset, clinical manifestations, severity, and even type of inheritance. Ideally, a group of different specialists, including ophthalmologists, pediatricians, biochemists, and medical geneticists are needed for the final diagnosis and management of IMDs. B...