THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMERGING NATIONS

International Development,

Clinical use of probiotics: A survey of physicians’ beliefs and practice patterns

Background: Probiotics have the potential to be used as a preventive agent or adjuvant therapy for various medical conditions, and recent research is beginning to illuminate some of the associated benefits. Some clinicians currently prescribe probiotics in practice. Understanding physicians’ beliefs and practice patterns regarding the use of probiotics will help identify current practices, barriers preventing their acceptance, and the sources of information that impact clinical practice. Objective: To identify and describe physicians’ beliefs and practice patterns regarding the use of probiotics. Methods: A cross-sectional online questionnaire was administered to 130 physicians employed by or affiliated with Danville Regional Medical Center, a 350- bed, acute care facility located in Danville, VA. Data were analyzed using descriptive frequencies, Pearson’s chi-square, and the Student’s t-test. Results: Of the 27 valid responses (20.8%), 55.6% of physicians reported using probiotics in clinical practice (n = 15). Those who used probiotics were significantly more likely to agree that probiotics have clinically beneficial effects (p \u3c 0.017) and pose minimal risk (p \u3c 0.003) than those who don’t use probiotics (n = 12, 44.4%). Physicians using probiotics were also less likely to agree that more clinical evidence is needed to support the benefits of probiotics for their specialty (p \u3c 0.012), and more likely to indicate “peer practice patterns” (p \u3c 0.032) as prompting their use, whereas those not using probiotics were more likely to choose “original research ii i articles” (p \u3c 0.006) as a source of information that would potentially change their practice with regard to probiotics. Conclusions: Physicians’ beliefs regarding the use of probiotics differ between those who recommend their use in clinical practice and those who do not. Physicians not using probiotics feel that more evidence-based research is needed to support their use in clinical practice

Institutional change and the quality of life: two decades of economic transformation in a rural community

This study utilizes insights from the new institutional economics to understand the endogenous demand the Orma are suddenly experiencing for institutional change. A number of factors in their environment have created pressure for new contractual arrangements and new property rights, which in turn have necessitated that the Orma draw upon the institutional resources of the national government to provide third party monitoring and enforcement. According to the theory, if such institutional change does indeed lead to decreased transaction costs for the Orma and more efficient allocation of economic resources, the stage could be set for a period of economic growth, even in the absence of technological change. As such processes are undoubtedly underway in many other societies all over the developing world, this study should have important general implication for economic development. What makes this an unusual case study is the existence of a large quantitative database for the period just before the most recent institutional changes. Together with the restudy, these data will afford the rare opportunity not only to document the extent of changes in production, consumption, and social structure, but to actually measure their impact upon the quality of life of the population. As there appears to be widespread ideological support for the institutional changes, it proposed that they have benefitted a large sector of the population. The analysis will provide specific data on the extent to which this holds for all subsectors of the population and all measures of the quality of life. The data will also indicate the strength of specific relationships between important economic, nutritional and health variables, thus allowing government policy planners to more effectively allocate scarce resources to social services

Homo Æqualis: A Cross-Society Experimental Analysis of Three Bargaining Games

Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game-played in 15 societies are presented. The societies range from USundergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers. Behaviour within the games varies markedly across societies. The paper investigates whether this behavioural diversity can be explained solely by variations in inequality aversion. Combining a single parameter utility function with the notion of subgame perfection generates a number of testable predictions. While most of these are supported, there are some telling divergences between theory and data: uncertainty and preferences relating to acts of vengeance may have influenced play in the Ultimatum and Third- Party Punishment Games; and a few subjects used the games as an opportunity to engage in costly signalling.Bargaining Games, cross-cultural experiments, inequality aversion

Concerto For Piano vs. Orchestra: Can Tax and Financial Accounting Harmonize on Hedges?

The preference for fair value accounting, for marking items to market for financial reporting or tax purposes, has been particularly strong in the last decade, and has become almost doctrine among accounting standards setters as the preferred method of accounting for financial instruments. Though a similar trend can be documented for tax accounting, the longstanding preference for correlating tax liability with realization events continues to prevent consistency. Also preventing consistency are the myriad difficulties in distinguishing capital gain from ordinary income (where embedded derivatives seem to make the result almost arbitrary), those equally subtle difficulties in distinguishing debt from equity (where derivatives appear often to be neither or both), and, particularly recently, the differences between tax systems of different countries in which transactions are made to occur (with some countries still struggling to educate tax officials about derivatives). These inconsistencies, which in the fertile imaginations of tax lawyers become tax shelters, would largely disappear if fair value accounting were universal in the tax law. One could argue for a sort of global marking to market on December 31 -a single calendar year for all taxpayers would also be helpful-with all countries agreeing to tax the difference from the year before at 28 percent, allocating the result between themselves under some universally applied transfer pricing formula. Assuming that this approach is politically impossible in every country, and that even if a few countries agreed to it, others would not, one can still validly ask whether the advances that have recently been made in financial accounting hold any lessons for tax accounting. To be somewhat more limited, can the Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 133 (SFAS 133), Accounting for Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities, provide any guidance for Congress as to some appropriate alterations of the U.S. tax system? It will be. the purpose of this paper to review the deferral system provided by the hedge accounting allowed by SFAS 133, and to compare this system against those tax deferrals that can be obtained under the U.S. tax system

Lactobacillus Metabolite-Mediated Induction of Bacteriophage

Once considered sterile in the absence of an infection, the female urinary tract is home to a diverse community (microbiota) of bacterial species and bacteriophage (phage), viruses that infect bacteria A dominant member of the female urinary microbiota is the bacterial genus Lactobacillus. Several Lactobacillus species are even associated with urinary health. Phage infectious of bacteria in the urinary tract tend to replicate through one of two life cycles: the lytic (active) life cycle or the lysogenic (dormant) life cycle. Temperate phage can switch from the lysogenic life cycle to the lytic life cycle in the presence of an environmental cue. This process is called induction. Within the urinary tract, Lactobacillus species naturally produce several of the inducing agents used in the lab; they release lactic acid, reducing the pH of their environment, and hydrogen peroxide as part of the glycolytic pathway. This observation motivated the investigation into how Lactobacillus metabolites induce phage in other urinary bacteria species. Eight communities, each containing either a Lactobacillus jensenii or Lactobacillus mulieris strain and at least two other community members, were selected for analysis. The genomes of all community members were sequenced and screened for the presence of phage. The pH and hydrogen peroxide outputs were measured for each of the L. jensenii and L. mulieris isolates. Other taxa in the community were grown in media adjusted to Lactobacillus-relevant pH levels based up on the Lactobacillus strain in their community. These cultures were screened for the presence of induced phage. Finally, community members were grown with varying concentrations of their community\u27s Lactobacillus strain\u27s spent media. These cultures were sequenced, and the sequences were screened for the presence of induced phage. 106 individual phage were induced during this process. These results suggest that Lactobacillus is inducing phages in other community members in the urinary tract. Thus, the beneficial effects of Lactobacilli in the urinary tract and/or the dominance of Lactobacillus in the female urinary tract may be a result of induction and lysis of other bacterial taxa

A Study of a High Delinquency Area

This is a report of an ecological study of delinquency in a Chicago neighborhood having the fifth highest rate of delinquency compared with the 75 other neighborhood communities in the city. Ecology, broadly defined, is the study of the interrelationships between organism and the immediate environment in which it lives. In sociology, some ecological studies have been concerned with total urban areas. Others have investigated smaller areas such as neighborhoods or census tracts. The unit areas are compared with one another in terms of certain characteristics considered to be the independent variables such as housing, income, and mobility and certain conditions considered to be dependent variables. The prevalence of mental illness or juvenile delinquency are examples of the latter