Study of the Regeneration Cleaning of Used Mineral Oils – Ecotoxicological Properties and Biodegradation

The aim of the study was to establish and compare the model of the biodegradability and ecotoxicological properties of oil samples in aqueous environment.The unused new mineral oil Turbinol and used (after 1 year of usage) recovered oil Turbinol purified by the electrostatical method were the tested samples. For the determination of the ecotoxicological properties, the test organisms used were seeds of Sinapis alba L. and the small aquatic crustaceans Daphnia magna. Preliminary tests were positive and determined the acute toxicity with the values of IC50 and EC50. Biodegradability was determined by the manometric method, in tests which lasted 28 days. Tests of toxicity were positive, and the samples were found to be hard to biodegrade. Determination of the oil composition by gas chromatography with mass detection (GC – MS); found that the composition of the electrostatically cleaned oil is comparable to the new oil, which is confirmed by the results obtained with the response inhibition in selected tests. Regeneration extends the oil life, reducing the cost of disposal of waste oils, saving fossil raw materials, thus belonging to the environmentally friendly techniques. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Post discharge medicines use review service for older patients: recruitment issues in a feasibility study

Background The community pharmacy medicines use review (MUR) service in England has been identified as a way of providing support with medication to recently discharged patients; however initial uptake of post-discharge MUR has been low. Objective To identify barriers to recruitment into a randomised controlled feasibility study of a hospital referral system to older patients’ regular community pharmacists. Method Ward pharmacists at Southport District General Hospital identified patients aged over 65 to be approached by a researcher to assess eligibility and discuss involvement in the trial. Participants were randomised to referral for a post discharge MUR with their regular community pharmacist, or to standard discharge care. Reasons for patients not participating were collected. Results Over a 9-month period 337 potential participants were identified by ward pharmacists. Of these, 132 were eligible and 60 were recruited. Barriers to recruitment included competing priorities among ward pharmacists, and national restrictions placed on MURs e.g. housebound patients and those requiring carer support with medication. Lack of expected benefit resulted in a high proportion of patient refusals. Conclusion The current provisions for post discharge MURs exclude many older people from participation, including those possibly in greatest need. Unfamiliarity with the role of the pharmacist in transitional care may have affected patients’ perceived ‘cost-benefit’ of taking part in this study

Global study of social odor awareness

Olfaction plays an important role in human social communication, including multiple domains in which people often rely on their sense of smell in the social context. The importance of the sense of smell and its role can however vary inter-individually and culturally. Despite the growing body of literature on differences in olfactory performance or hedonic preferences across the globe, the aspects of a given culture as well as culturally universal individual differences affecting odor awareness in human social life remain unknown. Here, we conducted a large-scale analysis of data collected from 10,794 participants from 52 study sites from 44 countries all over the world. The aim of our research was to explore the potential individual and country-level correlates of odor awareness in the social context. The results show that the individual characteristics were more strongly related than country-level factors to self-reported odor awareness in different social contexts. A model including individual-level predictors (gender, age, material situation, education and preferred social distance) provided a relatively good fit to the data, but adding country-level predictors (Human Development Index, population density and average temperature) did not improve model parameters. Although there were some cross-cultural differences in social odor awareness, the main differentiating role was played by the individual differences. This suggests that people living in different cultures and different climate conditions may still share some similar patterns of odor awareness if they share other individual-level characteristics

Preferred interpersonal distances: a global comparison

Human spatial behavior has been the focus of hundreds of previous research studies. However, the conclusions and generalizability of previous studies on interpersonal distance preferences were limited by some important methodological and sampling issues. The objective of the present study was to compare preferred interpersonal distances across the world and to overcome the problems observed in previous studies. We present an extensive analysis of interpersonal distances over a large data set (N = 8,943 participants from 42 countries). We attempted to relate the preferred social, personal, and intimate distances observed in each country to a set of individual characteristics of the participants, and some attributes of their cultures. Our study indicates that individual characteristics (age and gender) influence interpersonal space preferences and that some variation in results can be explained by temperature in a given region. We also present objective values of preferred interpersonal distances in different regions, which might be used as a reference data point in future studies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The role of the pharmacist in optimizing pharmacotherapy in older people

Prescription of medicines is a fundamental component of the care of older people, but evidence suggests that pharmacotherapy in this population is often inappropriate. Pharmacists have been involved in different approaches for the optimization of prescribing and rational medication use in older people. This article describes the different models of care in which pharmacists are involved in the optimization of pharmacotherapy in older people, and reviews the impact of these approaches on both process and outcome measures. The provision of pharmaceutical care, medication reviews and educational interventions by pharmacists in the nursing home, ambulatory and acute care settings are discussed. We selected systematic reviews, reviews and original studies, and for the latter, we focused more specifically on European publications published between 2001 and 2011.From the literature reviewed, it is clear that when pharmacists play a proactive role in performing medication reviews and in the active education of other healthcare professionals, pharmacotherapy for older patients is improved. However, the evidence of the impact of pharmacists interventions on health outcomes, quality of life or cost effectiveness of care is mixed. Better results have been reported when pharmacists are skilled and work in the context of a multidisciplinary team. Opportunities remain for multicentre, European-based, pharmacist-intervention trials in all settings, to determine the effectiveness and economic benefit of pharmacist involvement in the optimization of pharmacotherapy in older people. © 2012 Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved