Chronic Viral Infection and Primary Central Nervous System Malignancy

Primary central nervous system (CNS) tumors cause significant morbidity and mortality in both adults and children. While some of the genetic and molecular mechanisms of neuro-oncogenesis are known, much less is known about possible epigenetic contributions to disease pathophysiology. Over the last several decades, chronic viral infections have been associated with a number of human malignancies. In primary CNS malignancies, two families of viruses, namely polyomavirus and herpesvirus, have been detected with varied frequencies in a number of pediatric and adult histological tumor subtypes. However, establishing a link between chronic viral infection and primary CNS malignancy has been an area of considerable controversy, due in part to variations in detection frequencies and methodologies used among researchers. Since a latent viral neurotropism can be seen with a variety of viruses and a widespread seropositivity exists among the population, it has been difficult to establish an association between viral infection and CNS malignancy based on epidemiology alone. While direct evidence of a role of viruses in neuro-oncogenesis in humans is lacking, a more plausible hypothesis of neuro-oncomodulation has been proposed. The overall goals of this review are to summarize the many human investigations that have studied viral infection in primary CNS tumors, discuss potential neuro-oncomodulatory mechanisms of viral-associated CNS disease and propose future research directions to establish a more firm association between chronic viral infections and primary CNS malignancies

Documenting the quick and the dead: a study of suicide case files in a coroner's office

In keeping with recent critiques of literature on the body and the life course, the argument of this paper is that social identities can, to a certain extent, be constructed post-mortem and in the absence of a living body. The authors make this case with reference to a sociological autopsy study of a hundred suicide case files in a coroner's office in a medium-sized British city. The research draws on ethnographic approaches to the study of documents. There is discussion of some of the diverse artefacts in the coroners' files: medical reports, witness statements and suicide notes. The identity work revealed in these sources is as much about the living as the dead and is especially bound up in the process of avoiding blame

Portable software for distributed readout controllers and event builders in FASTBUS and VME

We report on software developed as part of the PAN-DA system to support the functions of front end readout controllers and event builders in multiprocessor, multilevel, distributed data acquisition systems. For the next generation data acquisition system we have undertaken to design and implement software tools that are easily transportable to new modules. The first implementation of this software is for Motorola 68K series processor boards in FASTBUS and VME and will be used in the Fermilab accelerator run at the beginning of 1990. We use a Real Time Kernel Operating System. The software provides general connectivity tools for control, diagnosis and monitoring. 17 refs., 7 figs