Oral Challenge with Trimethoprim-Sulfamethoxazole in Patients with “Sulfa” Antibiotic Allergy

Letter to the Edito

Physical properties and micromorphology of till deposits from Talla Earth Observatory, Southern Uplands, Scotland

This factual report describes the 2007 field program at BGS’ Talla Earth Observatory, in the Scottish Southern Uplands, UK. The work involved 12 trial pits with logging of pit walls, soil sampling for particle size analysis and undisturbed sampling for thin sections and micromorphological analysis of a till and a hard pan in moranic deposits. The tills of the Langholm Till Formation (of McMillan & Merritt, 2012) are technically ‘coarse soils’ from a BS5930:1999 ground engineering perspective; typically very dense/hard, very wellgraded silty sandy gravels with a matrix dominated by silt and sand. In thin section the till sandmatrix-supported gravel clasts show a preferred alignment orientated suggesting a micro-fabric indicative of a subglacially deposited till. Clast lithology includes sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, and are consistent with the local bedrock lithology. Cobbles and boulders are often ‘very strong’ from a geotechnical perspective, but may have weaker ‘rotten’ crust in valley floor settings. The work provides new data on the geotechnical properties of Scottish tills and enhances our understanding of the physical and hydrological properties of commonly encountered Quaternary deposits that occur in the Talla Burn and nearby upland catchments

Readiness for PENicillin allergy testing: Perception of Allergy Label (PEN-PAL) Survey

Clinical Implications: Patients reporting penicillin allergy believe their allergy to be permanent, would take penicillins if tested negative, but are rarely referred for penicillin testing, leading to differential antibiotic utilization

Penicillin allergy labels drive perioperative prophylactic antibiotic selection in orthopedic procedures

'Clinical Communications' [No abstract

Mineralogy and Malignant Mesothelioma: The South African Experience

South Africa is a uniquely mineral rich country. Of the six types of asbestiform minerals found in the country, three, namely crocidolite, amosite and chrysotile were mined and milled on a large commercial scale. Asbestos was used locally in South Africa, but the majority of its production was exported worldwide. In the 1970s, South Africa was the world’s third largest producer of asbestos, behind Canada and the USSR. About 97% of the world’s production of crocidolite and virtually all of the amosite came from South Africa. The output from the South African asbestos mining industry peaked at 380,000 tonnes in 1977 and declined thereafter as export markets declined due to restrictive legislation in countries that imported asbestos (Virta, 2006; Kielkowski et al., 2011). Legislation in South Africa banning the use of all types of asbestos came into effect in 2008, well after the last asbestos mine ceased production in 2001 and closed in 2002. Although South Africa benefitted financially from the exploitation of its asbestos mineral reserves, the revenue from asbestos never accounted for more than 3% of the value of its total minerals output (McCulloch, 2003). There is however a high price to pay in terms of a legacy of disease and environmental contamination through mining activities and the transport of asbestos and asbestos containing products

Towards a novel carbon device for the treatment of sepsis

Sepsis is a systemic inflammatory response to infection in which the balance of pro- andanti-inflammatory mediators, which normally isolate and eliminate infection, is disrupted[1]. Gram negative sepsis is initiated by bacterial endotoxin release which activatesmacrophages and circulating monocytes to release TNF and IL-1β followed by IL-6 andother inflammatory cytokines [2]. As the disease progresses, an unregulatedinflammatory response results in, tissue injury, haematological dysfunction and organdysfunction. Severe sepsis, involving organ hypoperfusion may be further complicatedby hypotension that is unresponsive to adequate fluid replacement, resulting in septicshock and finally death [3].Despite improvements in anti-microbial and supportive therapies, sepsis remains asignificant cause of morbidity and mortality in ICUs worldwide [4]. The complexity ofprocesses mediating the progression of sepsis suggests that an extracorporeal devicecombining blood filtration with adsorption of a wide range of toxins, and inflammatorymediators offers the most comprehensive treatment strategy. However, no such deviceexists at present. A novel, uncoated, polymer pyrolysed synthetic carbon device isproposed which combines the superior adsorption properties of uncoated activatedcarbons with the capacity to manipulate porous structure for controlled adsorption oftarget plasma proteins and polypeptides [5]. Preliminary haemocompatibility andadsorptive capacity was assessed using a carbon matrix prototype

Horizontal and vertical movements of starry smooth-hound Mustelus asterias in the northeast Atlantic

Commercial landings of starry smooth-hound Mustelus asterias in northern European seas are increasing, whilst our knowledge of their ecology, behaviour and population structure remains limited. M. asterias is a widely distributed demersal shark, occupying the waters of the southern North Sea and Irish Sea in the north, to at least the southern Bay of Biscay in the south, and is seasonally abundant in UK waters. There are no species-specific management measures for the northeast Atlantic stock, and the complexity of its population structure is not yet fully understood. To address this issue, we deployed both mark-recapture and electronic tags on M. asterias to gain novel insights into its horizontal and vertical movements. Our data suggest that the habitat use of M. asterias changes on a seasonal basis, with associated changes in geographical distribution, depth utilisation and experienced temperature. We report the first direct evidence of philopatry for this species, and also provide initial evidence of sex-biased dispersal and potential metapopulation-like stock structuring either side of the UK continental shelf. Investigations of finer-scale vertical movements revealed clear diel variation in vertical activity. The illustrated patterns of seasonal space-use and behaviour will provide important information to support the stock assessment process and will help inform any future management options

Optimal time-critical scheduling via resource augmentation

We consider two fundamental problems in dynamic scheduling: scheduling to meet deadlines in a preemptive multiprocessor setting, and scheduling to provide good response time in a number of scheduling environments. When viewed from the perspective of traditional worst-case analysis, no good on-line algorithms exist for these problems, and for some variants no good off-line algorithms exist unless {Rho} = {Nu}{Rho}. We study these problems using a relaxed notion of competitive analysis, introduced by Kalyanasundaram and Pruhs, in which the on-line algorithm is allowed more resources than the optimal off-line algorithm to which it is compared. Using this approach, we establish that several well-known on-line algorithms, that have poor performance from an absolute worst-case perspective, are optimal for the problems in question when allowed moderately more resources. For the optimization of average flow time, these are the first results of any sort, for any {Nu}{Rho}-hard version of the problem, that indicate that it might be possible to design good approximation algorithms