Nasal decolonization of Staphylococcus aureus with mupirocin: strengths, weaknesses and future prospects

Staphylococcus aureus in the nose is a risk factor for endogenous staphylococcal infection. UK guidelines recommend the use of mupirocin for nasal decolonization in certain groups of patients colonized with methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). Mupirocin is effective at removing S. aureus from the nose over a few weeks, but relapses are common within several months. There are only a few prospective randomized clinical trials that have been completed with sufficient patients, but those that have been reported suggest that clearance of S. aureus from the nose is beneficial in some patient groups for the reduction in the incidence of nosocomial infections. There is no convincing evidence that mupirocin treatment reduces the incidence of surgical site infection. New antibiotics are needed to decolonize the nose because bacterial resistance to mupirocin is rising, and so it will become less effective. Furthermore, a more bactericidal antibiotic than mupirocin is needed, on the grounds that it might reduce the relapse rate, and so clear the patient of MRSA for a longer period of time than mupirocin

Perception Naturalised: Relocation and the Sensible Qualities

This document is the Accepted Manuscript of the following article: Paul Coates, ‘Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities’, Synthese, September 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 12 September 2018. the final publication is available at Springer via: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-017-1556-z.This paper offers a partial defence of a Sellarsian-inspired form of scientific realism. It defends the relocation strategy that Sellars adopts in his project of reconciling the manifest and scientific images. It concentrates on defending the causal analysis of perception that is essential to his treatment of sensible qualities. One fundamental metaphysical issue in perception theory concerns the nature of the perceptual relation; it is argued that a philosophical exploration of this issue is continuous with the scientific investigation of perceptual processes. Perception, it is argued, can, and should be naturalised. A challenge for any account of perception arises from the fact that a subject's experiences are connected with particular objects. We need to supply principled grounds for identifying which external physical object the subject stands in a perceptual relation to when they have an experience. According to the particularity objection presented in the paper, naive realism (or disjunctivism) does not constitute an independently viable theory since, taken on its own, it is unable to answer the objection. In appealing to a 'direct experiential relation', it posits a relation that cannot be identified independently of the underlying causal facts. A proper understanding of one central function of perception, as guiding extended patterns of actions, supports a causal analysis of perception. It allows us to draw up a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for perceiving that avoids well-known counterexamples. An analysis of this kind is congruent with the scientific account, according to which experiences are interpreted as inner states: sensible qualities, such as colours, are in the mind (but not as objects of perception). A Sellarsian version of the relocation story is thus vindicated.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Properhood

A history of the notion of PROPERHOOD in philosophy and linguistics is given. Two long-standing ideas, (i) that proper names have no sense, and (ii) that they are expressions whose purpose is to refer to individuals, cannot be made to work comprehensively while PROPER is understood as a subcategory of linguistic units, whether of lexemes or phrases. Phrases of the type the old vicarage, which are potentially ambiguous with regard to properhood, encourage the suggestion that PROPER is best understood as mode of reference contrasting with SEMANTIC reference; in the former, the intension/sense of any lexical items within the referring expression, and any entailments they give rise to, are canceled. PROPER NAMES are all those expressions that refer nonintensionally. Linguistic evidence is given that this opposition can be grammaticalized, speculation is made about its neurological basis, and psycholinguistic evidence is adduced in support. The PROPER NOUN,asa lexical category, is argued to be epiphenomenal on proper names as newly defined. Some consequences of the view that proper names have no sense in the act of reference are explored; they are not debarred from having senses (better: synchronic etymologies) accessible during other (meta)linguistic activities