Treatment of paediatric burns with a nanocrystalline silver dressing compared with standard wound care in a burns unit: A cost analysis

Burns are a leading cause of non-natural death in South African infants and children. Conventional care of partial-thickness burns often requires painful, time consuming and costly twice-daily dressing changes to clean the wound and apply antimicrobial topical agents. A new topical nanocrystalline silver-coated (NS) dressing (Acticoat; Smith & Nephew) has been developed and is the first-line treatment of choice in many burn centres. However, because of its cost the Department of Health has been reluctant to introduce it as a standard of care. We retrospectively studied 4 randomly selected paediatric burn patients, calculating the cost associated with the use of NS dressings and comparing this with the projected costs of three previously standard burn wound treatment regimens. NS dressings were changed every 3 days based on their sustained and slow release of silver ions over 72 hours. Using NS clearly saved costs compared with the three other regimens. The demonstrated cost savings resulted primarily from the decreased number of dressings, and the presumed shorter hospital stay

Research Notes: U.S. Regional Soybean Laboratory and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chief\u27, a very tall Maturity Group IV variety, was used as a donor parent in backcrossing to \u27Clark\u27 to transfer Np (a gene for high phosphorus tolerance). In the field in 1963, I grew progenies from 40 selected Np F2 plants from Clark BC5 and was surprised to see 2 of the progenies uniformly very tall and 3 of them segregating approximately 1/4 tall plants. The Np gene appears to have no effect on field-grown plants in normal soils

Memories of Past Presidents

Six of NODA's past presidents shared their thoughts about NODA's history in a recent leadership survey compiled by Maria Sedotti of the University of Connecticut. Their responses help to convey a sense of how NODA developed over the past 30 years into a strong association which serves the diverse needs of students and orientation practitioners. The presidents responding identified professional leadership opportunities, travel to annual conferences, life-long friendships, and encouragement from colleagues as the rewards of their NODA involvement. We than them, and those who preceded and followed them, for their contributions to building the foundation of NODA