The treatment of burns and scalds

1. A review has been made of 116 cases of burns and scalds treated by coagulation with 1 per cent. gentian violet and 10 per cent. silver nitrate. 2. The average number of burned and scalded children admitted to hospital per month was fairly constant until the winter months of 1939-40 when an increase occurred, the number being nearly doubled; reasons for this rise have been suggested. 3. Of 101 patients under the age of 12 years, 40 per cent. were aged 1-2 years, 67 per cent. 1-3 years and 74 per cent. under 6 years. 4. The circumstances under which the injury was sustained show that carelessness and lack of supervision on the part of parents or guardians were in the majority of cases the chief causal factors. Any attempt to reduce the number of injuries will meet with difficulties, and the only approach considered likely to yield results is by widespread propaganda and education of the public in the causes and dangers of such injuries. 5. The first aid treatment applied to the cases of this series was unsatisfactory; a scheme of instruction has been drawn up for inclusion in the propaganda suggested above. 6. Of 105 cases 39 per cent. were admitted within one hour of injury, 65 per cent. within 2 hours and 75 per cent. within 3 hours. There is still a proportion of cases which arrive at hospital only after attempts at treatment at home have been made and abandoned. 7. In 78 per cent. of the patients the extent of injury was less than 20 per cent. of the body surface; in 7 per cent. it was 50 per cent. or more. Extent of injury per se is not now as lethal a factor as formerly. 8. Initial shock was infrequent and showed no constant relation to the extent of the injury. Secondary shock was common and its severity was related to the extent of injury and the duration of local treatment. Gum saline and plasma saline had beneficial effects on the shock when given in adequate amounts. The administration of cortical hormone proved beneficial in a number of cases. In 5 cases death was due to secondary shock; in certain of these treatment was inadequate. The importance of the combination of general resuscitatory treatment with local treatment of the burn has been emphasised. 9. In 39 consecutive cases healing was complete in an average time of 19.2 days and the stay in hospital was 20 days. In some cases healing was complete in from 8 to 14 days; in others it took many weeks, the time depending on such factors as depth and site. 10. Investigation of the blood chemistry has confirmed previous observations; it has been suggested that there may be a change in the selective permeability of capillary walls in and near the burned area as a result of the injury, and that this change is at least in part responsible for the alteration in the relative amounts of certain constituents of the circulating blood. 11. The mortality rate in this series of 116 patients was 6.9 per cent. (8 deaths), which compares favourably with that in other series in which tannic acid was used as the coagulant. 12. The nursing of burns and scalds is of the greatest importance. Unremitting care and a deep interest in the problems peculiar to the injury are essential. Much of the credit for the successful treatment of these injuries by the coagulation method must be given to the nursing staff whose part is greater than in almost any other surgical condition

Frequency-sweep examination for wave mode identification in multimodal ultrasonic guided wave signal

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Ultrasonic guided waves can be used to assess and monitor long elements of a structure from a single position. The greatest challenges for any guided wave system are the plethora of wave modes arising from the geometry of the structural element which propagate with a range of frequency-dependent velocities and the interpretation of these combined signals reflected by discontinuities in the structural element. In this paper, a novel signal processing technique is presented using a combination of frequency-sweep measurement, sampling rate conversion, and Fourier transform. The technique is applied to synthesized and experimental data to identify different modes in complex ultrasonic guided wave signals. It is demonstrated throughout the paper that the technique also has the capability to derive the time of flight and group velocity dispersion curve of different wave modes in field inspections. © 2014 IEEE

ARCS, The Arcminute Radio Cluster-lens Search - I. Selection Criteria and Initial Results

We present the results of an unbiased radio search for gravitational lensing events with image separations between 15 and 60 arcsec, which would be associated with clusters of galaxies with masses >10^{13-14}M_{\sun}. A parent population of 1023 extended radio sources stronger than 35 mJy with stellar optical identifications was selected using the FIRST radio catalogue at 1.4 GHz and the APM optical catalogue. The FIRST catalogue was then searched for companions to the parent sources stronger than 7 mJy and with separation in the range 15 to 60 arcsec. Higher resolution observations of the resulting 38 lens candidates were made with the VLA at 1.4 GHz and 5 GHz, and with MERLIN at 5 GHz in order to test the lens hypothesis in each case. None of our targets was found to be a gravitational lens system. These results provide the best current constraint on the lensing rate for this angular scale, but improved calculations of lensing rates from realistic simulations of the clustering of matter on the relevant scales are required before cosmologically significant constraints can be derived from this null result. We now have an efficient, tested observational strategy with which it will be possible to make an order-of-magnitude larger unbiased search in the near future.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 12 pages, 29 included PostScript figure

NICMOS and VLBA observations of the gravitational lens system B1933+503

NICMOS observations of the complex gravitational lens system B1933+503 reveal infrared counterparts to two of the inverted spectrum radio images. The infrared images have arc-like structures. The corresponding radio images are also detected in a VLBA map made at 1.7 GHz with a resolution of 6 mas. We fail to detect two of the four inverted radio spectrum components with the VLBA even though they are clearly visible in a MERLIN map at the same frequency at a different epoch. The absence of these two components could be due to rapid variability on a time-scale less than the time delay, or to broadening of the images during propagation of the radio waves through the ISM of the lensing galaxy to an extent that they fall below the surface brightness detectability threshold of the VLBA observations. The failure to detect the same two images with NICMOS is probably due to extinction in the ISM of the lensing galaxy.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to MNRA

A survey of polarization in the JVAS/CLASS flat-spectrum radio source surveys: I. The data and catalogue production

We have used the very large JVAS/CLASS 8.4-GHz surveys of flat-spectrum radio sources to obtain a large, uniformly observed and calibrated, sample of radio source polarizations. These are useful for many investigations of the properties of radio sources and the interstellar medium. We discuss comparisons with polarization measurements from this survey and from other large-scale surveys of polarization in flat-spectrum sources.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. 8 pages, 5 figures. Full version of Table 2 available at http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~njj/classqu_po

Lattice Model of Sweeping Interface for Drying Process in Water-Granule Mixture

Based on the invasion percolation model, a lattice model for the sweeping interface dynamics is constructed to describe the pattern forming process by a sweeping interface upon drying the water-granule mixture. The model is shown to produce labyrinthine patterns similar to those found in the experiment[Yamazaki and Mizuguchi, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. \textbf{69} (2000) 2387]. Upon changing the initial granular density, resulting patterns undergo the percolation transition, but estimated critical exponents are different from those of the conventional percolation. Loopless structure of clusters in the patterns produced by the sweeping dynamics seems to influence the nature of the transition.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Synchrotron Polarization at High Galactic Latitude

We present preliminary results from mapping the high-latitude Galactic polarization with the Effelsberg Telescope at $\lambda$21 cm. Structures on the resulting maps are mostly on the scale of several degrees. The results show detection of polarization over most of the field, at the level of tens of percent of the synchrotron emission. The evidence of more structure in Stokes Q and U rather than in $\sqrt{Q^2+U^2}$ suggests the existence of Faraday rotation.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive