Why Listening to Children and Young People is Important in Family Justice

During the last thirty years there has been a growing body of evidence indicating that children and young people often feel marginalised when their parents are making critical decisions which will shape their young lives, and calling for family justice professionals to hear their voices. This article explores the research evidence, examines the relevant theories about child development, and demonstrates how a focus on age-related competency fails to take account of children’s subjective meanings about their lives. The authors consider a model of participation first designed to understand adult participation in government, and show how this can be usefully applied to understanding children’s participation in family justice

Evaluation of methods suitable for the sterilisation of surgical instruments contaminated with human prions

Human prion disease is associated with the accumulation in brain of an abnormal glycoprotein known as prion protein. Prions are far more resistant to physical and chemical inactivation than conventional pathogens. In 1996 a new disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was recognised as distinct from sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and initially showed a rapid rise in incidence. The potential for iatrogenic transmission of prion disease via surgical instruments, despite presumed adequate sterilisation, is well documented. The long asymptomatic incubation periods seen in human prion diseases therefore provide a significant risk of transmission. This project investigated the disinfection of prion-contaminated surfaces, with the goal of developing a process applicable to medical instruments on a large scale. It also aimed to investigate the susceptibility of different brain regions to infection and the spread of peripheral infection to brain, as well as the mechanisms of disease transmission from infected surfaces to tissues. Potential sterilisation procedures were tested on steel wires that had been incubated in infectious brain homogenate. These wires were then inserted into the brains of appropriate indicator mice, which were observed for the clinical signs of prion disease and subsequently investigated using immunohistochemistry. To investigate the susceptibility of different brain regions to infection, steel and plastic spheres were inserted stereotaxically and mice culled at different time points and subjected to immunohistochemical examination. Intraperitoneal and subcutaneous insertion of these spheres was used to investigate the travel of infectivity from peripheral tissues to the central nervous system. Attempts were made to develop a high sensitivity cell culture assay, to enable quantification of the amount of sterilisation produced by different methods, and to investigate their kinetics

NMDA receptors and activity-dependent tuning of the receptive fields of spinal cord neurons

After peripheral nerve section, sensory neurons regenerate but do not regain their original topographical position in the skin. Here we report that in the early stages of sciatic nerve regeneration, the cutaneous receptive fields (RFs) of dorsal horn neurons are larger than normal, reflecting the disorganized topography of the regenerated afferents. When nerve regeneration is complete, small contiguous RFs emerge, indicating a central compensation for the disrupted peripheral somatotopy. If the NMDA receptor antagonist MK801 is given during regeneration, RFs do not show this reorganization, but remain large and diffuse. We suggest that the coincident activity of afferents, newly innervating adjacent or overlapping cutaneous territory, acts through postsynaptic NMDA receptors to strengthen the central effectiveness of these inputs at the expense of other non-adjacent and non-coincidently activated inputs. In this way, dorsal horn neurons may attain and retain restricted RFs in the face of a spatially dispersed afferent input