133 While the safety of endoscopic banding liga-tion is largely undisputed, there is one major risk of this technique: esophageal perforation during insertion of the overtube. Perforation of the esophagus often occurs as a result of inability to relax the pharyngeal muscle by the patient and forceful insertion of the tube by the endoscopist. The development of multiple banding ligators (Speedba...

The face of Whipple disease is changing rapidly. The disease was originally described in 1907 by the pathologist George Hoyt Whipple [1], but it was not until 1961 that electron microscopic studies showed it definitively to be caused by bacteria [2, 3]. The causative organism could not be cultivated, and the cell wall ultrastructure was considered ambiguous, so there was even uncertainty as to ...