Has the incidence of empyema in Scottish children continued to increase beyond 2005?

Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.Peer reviewedPostprin

30 years on: A brave new world or an unfolding disaster?

In this short essay, the focus is on social and political aspects of  forced migration. It is argued that policies designed to restrict access to developed countries have, rather like the American “prohibition”, produced a thriving criminal market for smugglers, in this case of people. Making travel more difficult increases both their profits and the sophistication of their methods. Provision of targeted, properly controlled, support for refugees in countriesneighbouring conflict zones might help to reduce the pressure on travel to Europe and could be both more successful and more humanitarian. For those who do reach developed countries, there is scope to improve the legal decision-making process. Psychologicalinput should include scientific investigation of legal assumptions, and the provision of relevant expert literature reviews, for exampleconcerning modern knowledge of memory. Trust is the first casualty of repressive violence, and mistrust among opposition groups is probably one of the key mechanisms of its success. We need to make sure that we do not provide further grounds for this sort of reaction. Although there is no brave or new world ahead, we must continue to confront ignorance and prejudice, as we seek to avoid more humanitarian disasters. It is now just over thirty years since we published a potential framework for understanding how survivors of organised state violence react to complex and severe trauma (Turner & Gorst-Unsworth, 1990). We argued that no single psychological process underpins the reactions to this experience, and therefore, there can be no unitary torture syndrome, but rather a series of understandable psychological pathways activated to varying degrees by different experiences, leading to diversity of emotional response, with implications for recovery and treatment. We also asked family doctors about health needs of refugees  (Ramsay & Turner, 1993), and it is wonderful to see how the evidence on treatment options has developed since then, especially in recent years. In this paper, looking back over the last thirty years, in celebration of the anniversary of Torture journal, I will focus on political, legal and forensic aspects of forced migration.

Regulation of MUC1-specific immunity by CD4+ T cells

MUC1 is a large glycoprotein that is expressed on ductal epithelial cells and also the majority of epithelial adenocarcinomas. Dysregulated expression of aberrantly glycoslyated MUC1 in carcinomas allows tumor-specific recognition of MUC1-derived epitopes by antibodies and T lymphocytes. However, despite the ability of CTL to specifically recognize and kill MUC1+ tumor cells, immune responses in cancer patients fail to prevent tumor progression. The failure of patients' immune systems to eradicate MUC1+ tumors has been linked with their inability to mount MUC1-specific helper T cell responses.Here we show that CD4+ T cells play a central role in both the enhancement and suppression of MUC1-specific immune responses. Using MUC1-Tg mice as a model for tolerance to self-expressed MUC1, we show that MUC1-specific regulatory T cells (Tregs) respond to stimulation with MUC1 in the absence of a CD4+ T helper response. The Treg:Th imbalance in MUC1-Tg mice causes the suppression of MUC1-specific immunity. This suppression can be overcome by providing functional Th cells from WT mice. To focus our studies on MUC1-specific CD4+ T cells, we created a TCR-transgenic mouse whose CD4+ T cells are specific for an MHC Class II-restricted epitope derived from unglycosylated MUC1. Using these mice, we have confirmed that adoptive transfer of MUC1-specific CD4+ T replaces the MUC1-specific T cell help that is missing in MUC1-Tg mice and restores their ability to respond to MUC1 vaccines. This work shows that the generation of CD4 helper T cell responses is critical to establishing effective immunity to MUC1+ cancers

Reconsidering the calculation and role of environmental footprints

Following the recent Copenhagen Climate Change conference, there has been discussion of the methods and underlying principles that inform climate change targets. Climate change targets following the Kyoto Protocol are broadly based on a production accounting principle (PAP). This approach focuses on emissions produced within given geographical boundaries. An alternative approach is a consumption accounting principle (CAP), where the focus is on emissions produced globally to meet consumption demand within the national (or regional) economy1. Increasingly popular environmental footprint measures, including ecological and carbon footprints, attempt to measure environmental impacts based on CAP methods. The perception that human consumption decisions lie at the heart of the climate change problem is the impetus driving pressure on policymakers for a more widespread use of CAP measures. At a global level of course, emissions accounted for under the production and consumption accounting principles would be equal. It is international trade that leads to differences in emissions under the two principles. This paper, the second in this special issue of the Fraser Commentary, examines how input-output accounting techniques may be applied to examine pollution generation under both of these accounting principles, focussing on waste and carbon generation in the Welsh economy as a case study. However, we take a different focus, arguing that the ‘domestic technology assumption’, taken as something of a mid-point in moving between production and consumption accounting in the first paper, may actually constitute a more useful focus for regional policymakers than full footprint analyses

Responsibility for regional waste generation: A single region extended input-output analysis with uni-directional trade flows

The paper uses a regional input-output (IO) framework and data derived on waste generation by industry to examine regional accountability for waste generation. In addition to estimating a series of industry output-waste coefficients, the paper considers two methods for waste attribution but focuses first on one (trade endogenised linear attribution system (TELAS)) that permits a greater focus on private and public final consumption as the main exogenous driver of waste generation. Second, the paper uses a domestic technology assumption (DTA) to consider a regional ‘waste footprint’ where local consumption requirements are assumed to be met through domestic production.waste attribution; regional economy; input-output analysis; Wales

Creation of an open source master person index from proprietary code: the open source "care data exchange" project

posterFrom 1998 to 2004 the ""Care Data Exchange"" (CDE) software was developed as a proprietary product by CareScience for the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF). In 2005 CHCF asked Forrester Research to study the feasibility of releasing the CDE software assets under a free, open source license. The Forrester report articulated relationships between proprietary and nonproprietary components in the CDE Information Architecture (CIA)

Photometric Variability in Earthshine Observations

The identification of an extrasolar planet as Earth-like will depend on the detection of atmospheric signatures or surface non-uniformities. In this paper we present spatially unresolved flux light curves of Earth for the purpose of studying a prototype extrasolar terrestrial planet. Our monitoring of the photometric variability of earthshine revealed changes of up to 23 % per hour in the brightness of Earth's scattered light at around 600 nm, due to the removal of specular reflection from the view of the Moon. This variability is accompanied by reddening of the spectrum, and results from a change in surface properties across the continental boundary between the Indian Ocean and Africa's east coast. Our results based on earthshine monitoring indicate that specular reflection should provide a useful tool in determining the presence of liquid water on extrasolar planets via photometric observations.Comment: To appear in Astrobiology 9(3). 17 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

P1_1 Could Bruce Willis Save the World?

The film Armageddon (1998) puts forward the possibility of using a nuclear weapon buried deep within an Earth-bound asteroid to split the asteroid in two, each half clearing opposite sides of the Earth with only relatively minor damage. This article investigates the feasibility of such a plan and shows that even using the largest nuclear weapon made to date, the bomb comes over 9 orders of magnitude short of the yield required