"Medicalized" weapons--those that rely on advances in neuroscience, physiology, and pharmacology--offer the prospect of reducing casualties and protecting civilians. They could be especially useful in modern asymmetric wars in which conventional states are pitted against guerrilla or insurgent forces. But may physicians and other medical workers participate in their development?

We evaluated the epidemiology of relapsing fever from 1971 to 2003 in Israel. In civilians, incidence declined from 0.35 to 0.11 cases per 100,000 persons annually; in military personnel it averaged 6.4 cases per 100,000 persons annually. These data imply that the pathogen and vector continue to exist in Israel.

Every week, thousands of civilians in India suffer accidental injury; every week hundreds of fractures and dislocations are sustained, and hundreds of soft-tissue injuries are suffered, including infections of the hand, burns, tendon and nerve injuries. What proportion of these civilian victims will carry to their grave a shortened limb or a crippling deformity ? How can we reduce this number ?...

OBJECTIVE Drawing on two different populations, Israeli police and Hungarian civilians, the present study assessed the ability of individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to generalize previous learning to novel situations. Past neuroimaging studies have demonstrated diminished medial temporal lobe (MTL) activation and/or reduced hippocampal volume in individuals with PTSD. Our ear...

BACKGROUND Diagnostic tests for respiratory infections can be costly and time-consuming. Improved characterization of specific respiratory pathogens by identifying frequent signs, symptoms and demographic characteristics, along with improving our understanding of coinfection rates and seasonality, may improve treatment and prevention measures. METHODS Febrile respiratory illness (FRI) and sev...

Consensus criteria for the definition of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) were first identified in a 1989 multidisciplinary survey of 89 clinicians and researchers with extensive experience in, but widely differing views of, MCS. A decade later, their top 5 consensus criteria (i.e., defining MCS as [1] a chronic condition [2] with symptoms that recur reproducibly [3] in response to low level...

BACKGROUND A significant number of soldiers exceed the maximum allowable weight standards or have body weights approaching the maximum allowable weight standards. This mandates development of scalable approaches to improve compliance with military weight standards. METHODS We developed an intervention that included two components: (1) an Internet-based weight management program (Web site) and...