Nurses\u27 Alumnae Association Bulletin - Volume 5 Number 8

Calling All Nurses Financial Report Calendar of Events Lest You Forget! Attention Review of the Alumnae Association Meetings President\u27s Report Barton Memorial Division Oxygen Therapy Welcome, White Haven Alumnae Clinical Use of Penicillin in Infections of the Ears, Nose and Throat Address - Graduation of Nurses, 1945 Miscellaneous Items The Blood that Kills The Story of Malaria Program Prizes - May, 1946 Capping Exercises The Economic Security Program of the Pennsylvania State Nurses\u27 Association The Clara Melville Scholarship Fund Card of Thanks The Poet\u27s Corner The Hospital Pharmacy Jefferson Medical College Hospital School of Nursing Faculty Jefferson Hospital Gray Lady Unite, A.R.R. The Volunteer Nurses\u27 Aides Salute Jefferson Nurses Changes in the Staff at Jefferson Hospital Red Cross Recruits Did You Know That The Pennsylvania Nurse Medical College News Magazine and Newspaper Items Central Dressing Room and Transfusion Unit Rules Concerning Central Dressing Room Radios and Electrical Appliances Attending College Nurses in Anesthesia Condolences Marriages New Arrivals Deaths The Bulletin Committee Attention, Alumnae New Addresse

Single-day therapy: an expert opinion on a recent development for the episodic treatment of recurrent genital herpes

One common method for treating recurrent genital herpes outbreaks is 3–5 day episodic therapy with nucleoside analogues. However, since maximum viral replication occurs within 24 h after the onset of symptoms, short-term patient-initiated episodic therapy started at prodromal onset or at the first appearance of lesions in patients without a prodrome may represent an important option. In a recent randomized trial, single-day famciclovir treatment decreased lesion healing time and the duration of pain and other symptoms by approximately 2 days compared to placebo, and prevented progression to a full outbreak in almost one in four patients. Because single-day treatment is more convenient than traditional therapies, it may lead to improved patient compliance and better overall management of recurrent genital herpes outbreaks

Some considerations in the design and interpretation of antimalarial drug trials in uncomplicated falciparum malaria

BACKGROUND: Treatments for uncomplicated falciparum malaria should have high cure rates. The World Health Organization has recently set a target cure rate of 95% assessed at 28 days. The use of more effective drugs, with longer periods of patient follow-up, and parasite genotyping to distinguish recrudescence from reinfection raise issues related to the design and interpretation of antimalarial treatment trials in uncomplicated falciparum malaria which are discussed here. METHODS: The importance of adequate follow-up is presented and the advantages and disadvantages of non-inferiority trials are discussed. The different methods of interpreting trial results are described, and the difficulties created by loss to follow-up and missing or indeterminate genotyping results are reviewed. CONCLUSION: To characterize cure rates adequately assessment of antimalarial drug efficacy in uncomplicated malaria requires a minimum of 28 days and as much as 63 days follow-up after starting treatment. The longer the duration of follow-up in community-based assessments, the greater is the risk that this will be incomplete, and in endemic areas, the greater is the probability of reinfection. Recrudescence can be distinguished from reinfection using PCR genotyping but there are commonly missing or indeterminate results. There is no consensus on how these data should be analysed, and so a variety of approaches have been employed. It is argued that the correct approach to analysing antimalarial drug efficacy assessments is survival analysis, and patients with missing or indeterminate PCR results should either be censored from the analysis, or if there are sufficient data, results should be adjusted based on the identified ratio of new infections to recrudescences at the time of recurrent parasitaemia. Where the estimated cure rates with currently recommended treatments exceed 95%, individual comparisons with new regimens should generally be designed as non-inferiority trials with sample sizes sufficient to determine adequate precision of cure rate estimates (such that the lower 95% confidence interval bound exceeds 90%)

Going That Extra Mile: Individuals Travel Further to Maintain Face-to-Face Contact with Highly Related Kin than with Less Related Kin

The theory of inclusive fitness has transformed our understanding of cooperation and altruism. However, the proximate psychological underpinnings of altruism are less well understood, and it has been argued that emotional closeness mediates the relationship between genetic relatedness and altruism. In this study, we use a real-life costly behaviour (travel time) to dissociate the effects of genetic relatedness from emotional closeness. Participants travelled further to see more closely related kin, as compared to more distantly related kin. For distantly related kin, the level of emotional closeness mediated this relationship - when emotional closeness was controlled for, there was no effect of genetic relatedness on travel time. However, participants were willing to travel further to visit parents, children and siblings as compared to more distantly related kin, even when emotional closeness was controlled for. This suggests that the mediating effect of emotional closeness on altruism varies with levels of genetic relatednes

Evolving uses of oral reverse transcriptase inhibitors in the HIV-1 epidemic: From treatment to prevention

The HIV epidemic continues unabated, with no highly effective vaccine and no cure. Each new infection has significant economic, social and human costs and prevention efforts are now as great a priority as global antiretroviral therapy (ART) scale up. Reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the first licensed class of ART, have been at the forefront of treatment and prevention of mother to child transmission over the past two decades. Now, their use in adult prevention is being