Impaired clearance of ceftizoxime and cefotaxime after orthotopic liver transplantation.

The pharmacokinetics of ceftizoxime (CZX) and of cefotaxime (CTX) were studied in five children and five adults after orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT). Delayed clearance of CZX (clearance of 0.21 to 1.26 ml/min per kg [body weight]) and CTX (clearance of 0.40 to 1.49 ml/min per kg) occurred in 7 of the 10 OLT patients. We conclude that abnormal CZX and CTX clearance is common after OLT and may be associated with minimal change in serum creatinine

How general practitioners and aged care workers perceive incidences of elder abuse

As the Australian population is expanding and ageing, there is an associated need for a focus to be placed on the Individual rights of elderly people, and for the general populus to be made more aware of areas related to our older generation. Elder abuse, as an area of concern, developed as an offshoot of investigations into child abuse and general domestic violence, and initially surfaced in the 1970s and 80s. Some sections of the medical profession were made specifically aware of the problem initially in 1975, through a letter that was sent to the British Medical Journal. However, throughout some of the literature, GPs have been criticised about their level of awareness of the issue of elder abuse, and for their lack of involvement in this area. The purpose of this study was to explore how General Practitioners and Aged Care workers perceive incidences of elder abuse. Due to the limited amount of research which has been undertaken on elder abuse within Australia, the study looked at exploring the issue rather than trying to measure its cause, or trying to identify the extent of the problem. The study investigated the perceptions of general practitioners (GPs) toward the area of elder abuse, and looked further to explore how general practitioners were perceived by aged care workers. The approach used for data collection consisted of circulating 100 mailed out questionnaires to general practitioners within metropolitan Perth, and follow up face-to-face interviews with some of the respondents to this questionnaire. Additionally, face-to-face interviews were also held with key informants who worked in the aged care industry, to ascertain their perceptions of elder abuse. The mailed questionnaires were analysed by adding the frequencies of responses given to each question. The data from the face-to-face doctor interviews and the key informant interviews were transcribed verbatim from the tape recordings and then assessed by looking for consistent regularities from each response made, therefore using a cross-case analysis. From this analysis, patterns emerged in the data, from which themes were developed. The recommendations from the data suggest that a clear and concise definition of elder abuse needs to be developed, to assist in clearly Identifying the prevalence of the problem. The data further recommended the need for an awareness campaign on the area of elder abuse to be undertaken. This should focus on raising the awareness of the possible characteristics of individuals who are vulnerable to being abused, as well as the characteristics of likely perpetrators of abuse. This study also recommended that a coordinated approach to dealing with the area of elder abuse should be developed, which should include the development of specific roles that should be undertaken by professional and non-professionals. Training of people across the Human Services field in the area of elder abuse, and in particular, GPs, social workers and paraprofessionals who work with elderly people, was identified as a recommendation of the study. Areas of training should include: awareness of the problem\u27s existence; providing people with the required skills to detect cases of abuse; providing insight to referral agencies who may be able to assist; having a clear and exhaustive list of interventions to use to assist with addressing the problem; and having knowledge of the characteristics that abused individuals, and perpetrators are likely to have. This study also Identified that more research is required to ascertain if the amount of time which GPs spend with elderly people, is sufficient for them to identify cases of elder abuse, and if the allocated time from Medicare is adequate for GPs to Identify elder abuse

Hacking the Archives: the 2012 Olympic Legacy, Fun Palaces and Game Theatre

Archival material pertaining to Clive Barker is interrogated to assess Barker's legacy in the future tense by arguing that the concept of the Fun Palace can hack the neoliberal politics of the 2012 Olympic legacy

The Progressive Case for Populism

BOOK REVIEWED: Performing Left Populism: Performance, Politics and the People, edited by Goran Petrovic Lotina and Théo Aiolfi. London: Methuen Drama, 2023

Dreams of a Fourth World: Performance After Capitalism in the Work of Javaad Alipoor and Tim Crouch

The instability of the present political juncture makes the future a difficult place to imagine. Javaad Alipoor’s intermedial performance Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2022) frames the Internet as an analogue for a possible postcapitalist future. The dramaturgy resonates with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s concept of the Fourth World: a ‘conceptual place’ with ‘no place for static identities, fixed nationalities, or sacred cultural traditions’ (1993). The intermedial scenography makes the political struggles that effectuate revolutionary change visible through the expression of what Alipoor calls subaltern knowledge: the experience of living in the space between the world we want to live in and the world we are forced to live in. Taking an explicitly oppositional position to technological mediation in performance, Tim Crouch’s performative evocation of virtual reality through text in Truth’s A Dog Must to Kennel (2023) acts as a memorial for collaborative acts of imagining worlds into being through live, embodied performance. This aspect of the theatrical event is described in the play as a vision of democracy that risks being effaced by digital social atomisation and the concomitant decline of communal experiences. This paper will discuss how both pieces situate digital technology as the generative material of all possible futures, utopian and dystopian alike. Despite their antipathetic ideological positions, I argue that Alipoor and Crouch narrativise a postcapitalist democracy as one characterised by transcultural interconnectivity either engendered or inhibited by digital technology, respectively. Theories of Fourth World aesthetics (de León 2021) will contextualise my analysis of the heterodox narrative of futurity Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel claim as theatre’s cardinal social responsibility in our age of permacrisis. The conflicting visions of Alipoor and Crouch act as valuable case studies to investigate how theatre can represent a refuge from and incubator of digital democracy

Wandering Games by Melissa Kagen, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2022, 216 pp., £20.10 (paperback), ISBN 978-0262544245

Book revie

Different Times, Same Culture War: Performing Otherness and the War on Woke

The ‘war on woke’ is the latest iteration of a rightwing culture war that has raged for decades. Performance artists and other non-conforming identities find themselves being demonised by political gatekeepers to leverage control of expressions of cultural identity. Performance can provide a new horizon for resistance to assimilationist policies by locating otherness within a relational field not dependent on logocentric modes of expression to be meaningful

Internet theatre and the historical consciousness of the Covid-19 era

The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021) are used as case studies in this article to show how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human. This analysis is contextualised from the historical perspective of the post-Cold War period when anxieties about cultural homogeneity and assimilation were prominent themes in theatre and performance discourse in the absence of any viable alternative teleology to Western capitalism