OBJECTIVES Georgetown University has a student run Emergency Medical Services (EMS) organization with over 100 emergency medical technicians (EMTs). We set out to determine whether implementing an electronic patient care report (ePCR) system was associated with improved physical exam documentation. METHODS This study evaluated documentation of the physical exam on prehospital patient care rep...

OBJECTIVE To examine the opinions of Libyan doctors regarding the quality of drug information provided by pharmaceutical company representatives (PCRs) during detailing visits. METHOD An anonymous survey was conducted among 1,000 doctors from selected institutes in Tripoli, Benghazi and Sebha. Doctors were asked questions regarding the quality of information provided during drug-detailing vis...

BACKGROUND The mainstay of diagnosis of relapsing fever (RF) is demonstration of the spirochetes in Giemsa-stained thick blood smears, but during non fever periods the bacteria are very scanty and rarely detected in blood smears by microscopy. This study is aimed to evaluate the sensitivity of different methods developed for detection of low-grade spirochetemia. METHODS Animal blood samples w...

BACKGROUND The effectiveness of PCR methods to amplify rickettsiae from clinical samples has still not been evaluated. Our aim was to determine the sensitivity and usefulness for Rickettsia species identification by PCR methods, targeting 16S rDNA, htrA, gltA, ompA, and ompB genes for molecular diagnosis of rickettsioses. METHODS A total of 72 clinical samples (EDTA-blood, skin biopsies and t...

We report four highly informative multiplex PCRs developed from 12 previously described EST-SSRs in Crassostrea gigas. We evaluated and validated these multiplex PCRs in 12 full-sib families. The average allelic richness and the polymorphism information content (PIC) were 11.1 and 0.811 respectively. The combined power of exclusion was greater than 99.99% using all four multiplex assays. A hund...

Conditional re,vriting and priority re,vriting are two recent generalizations of term rewriting systems. In the former, each re\vrite rule is accompanied by an antecedent which must be sho,vn to hold before rewriting can OCCUI. In the latter, re,vrite rules can be used only' in a particular order. We compare these formalisms: neither formalism encompasses the other in a practical sense, but we ...

Reverse transcription PCRs (RT-PCRs), real-time RT-PCRs and microarrays containing 50-mer oligonucleotides representing nucleus-encoded genes for chloroplast proteins from Euglena gracilis were used to compare light- and dark-grown wild-type mRNA levels to those of light- and dark-grown E. gracilis stable white mutant strains W(gm)ZOflL, W₃BUL and W₁₀BSmL. The analyses revealed no light-depende...

Temperature-sensitive (ts+) vaccine strain MS-H is the only live attenuated M. synoviae vaccine commercially available for use in poultry. With increasing use of this vaccine to control M. synoviae infections, differentiation of MS-H from field M. synoviae strains and from rarely occurring non-temperature-sensitive (ts-) MS-H revertants has become important, especially in countries where local ...