lives and visits are often infrequent. To this extent, therefore, I see the community hospital in populations in excess of 40 000 being of primary significance to the community in respect of acute diagnostic and surgical services at an appropriate level, and the geriatric and long-stay element as a part of the overall picture rather than the predominant feature. In populations less than this fi...

Dr. Zitha Mokomane is a Senior Research Specialist in the Population Health, Health Systems and Innovation research programme at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. She holds a MA and a PhD (Family Demography), both from the Australian National University. Before joining the Human Science Research Council, Dr Mokomane was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Population Studie...

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I ntroduction: In recent years a number of emerging new therapies have become available for the treatment of severe asthma among which bronchial ther-moplasty is the only nonpharmacologic intervention that has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2010. 1 Although bronchial thermoplasty has great promise for the patient with severe asthma and is now within the thera...

We appreciate the opportunity to reply to Dr. Kotze's and Dr. Yamamoto's letter1 about our paper “Prevention of postoperative recurrence with azathioprine or infliximab in patients with Crohn's disease: an open-label pilot study”, recently accepted for publication in JCC.2 We agree with the first comment concerning the hypothesis that the use of anti-TNF (tumor necrosis factor)-α before surgery...