How good is the quality of health care in the United States?

Studies over the past decade show that some people are receiving more care than they need, and some are receiving less. Simple averages from a number of studies indicate that 50 percent of people received recommended preventive care; 70 percent, recommended acute care; 30 percent, contraindicated acute care; 60 percent, recommended chronic care; and 20 percent, contraindicated chronic care. These studies strongly suggest that the care delivered in the United States often does not meet professional standards. Efforts to measure quality and report routinely on the results to the public at large would allow more definitive assessments of the status of the nation's health care and would enable us to single out the areas in need of improvement.     

The sexual practices of Asian and Pacific Islander high school students

The less common methods of medication administration that used to be used only in the hospital are also now used in alternate settings. Understanding the treatment modalities, care requirements, and complications of these alternate routes of administration is important for nurses who participate in the care of patients receiving infusions. Several alternate routes of administration are discussed, with emphasis on the more commonly used methods: intra-arterial, intraspinal, intraventricular, intraperitoneal, intraosseous, and several other routes.     

Efficacy of novel antimicrobials against clinical isolates of opportunistic amebas

Using atomic force microscopy (AFM), we have investigated neutron-induced DNA double-strand breaks in plasmids in aqueous solution. AFM permits direct measurement of individual DNA molecules with an accuracy of a few nanometers. Furthermore, the analysis of the DNA fragment size distribution is non-parametric, whereas other methods are dependent on the model. Neutron irradiation of DNA results in the generation of many short fragments, an observation not made for damage induced by low-LET radiation. These data provide clear experimental evidence for the existence of clustered DNA double-strand breaks and demonstrate that short DNA fragments may be produced by such radiations in the absence of a nucleosomal DNA structure.     

The integrative hospital explored via acupuncture

The nature of the inhibition of camel retina acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity by tetrahydro-aminoacridine (THA, tacrine) has been investigated in the present study. The non-significant change of the percent inhibition of AChE by THA with respect to various lengths of the preincubation period showed the type of the reversible inhibition. THA reversibly inhibited AChE activity in a concentration dependent manner; IC50 was 0.23 microM while the IC100 was 14.22 microM. The K(m) for the hydrolysis of acetylthiocholine iodide was found to be 62.6 microM in the control system; a value increased in the THA treated systems. The Vmax was 0.472 mumole/min/mg protein for the control system, while it decreased in the THA treated systems. Dixon, as well as Lineweaver-Burk, plots and their secondary replots indicated that the nature of the inhibition is of the linear mixed type, which is considered to be a partial competitive and pure non-competitive mixture. The values of Ki(slope) and K'i(intercept) were estimated as 0.068 microM and 0.181 microM, respectively. The K'i was greater than Ki indicating that THA has a greater affinity of binding for the peripheral site than the active site of the camel retina AChE. The use of camel retina as a good experimental animal model may open new avenues for studying acetylcholine and AChE metabolism.     

Archaebacterial DNA polymerases tightly bind uracil-containing DNA

We show that archaebacterial DNA polymerases are strongly inhibited by the presence of small amounts of uracil-containing DNA. Inhibition appears to be competitive, with the DNA polymerase exhibiting approximately 6500-fold greater affinity for binding the inhibitor than a DNase I-activated DNA substrate. All six archaebacterial DNA polymerases tested were inhibited, while no eubacterial, eukaryotic, or bacteriophage enzymes showed this effect. Only a small inhibition resulted when uracil was present as the deoxynucleoside triphosphate, dUTP. The rate of DNA synthesis was reduced by approximately 40% when dUTP was used in place of dTTP for archaebacterial DNA polymerases. Furthermore, an incorporated dUMP served as a productive 3'-primer terminus for subsequent elongation. In contrast, the presence of an oligonucleotide containing as little as a single dUrd residue was extremely inhibitory to DNA polymerase activity on other primer-template DNA.     

Association rule mining in peer-to-peer systems

We extend the problem of association rule mining--a key data mining problem--to systems in which the database is partitioned among a very large number of computers that are dispersed over a wide area. Such computing systems include grid computing platforms, federated database systems, and peer-to-peer computing environments. The scale of these systems poses several difficulties, such as the impracticality of global communications and global synchronization, dynamic topology changes of the network, on-the-fly data updates, the need to share resources with other applications, and the frequent failure and recovery of resources. We present an algorithm by which every node in the system can reach the exact solution, as if it were given the combined database. The algorithm is entirely asynchronous, imposes very little communication overhead, transparently tolerates network topology changes and node failures, and quickly adjusts to changes in the data as they occur. Simulation of up to 10,000 nodes show that the algorithm is local: all rules, except for those whose confidence is about equal to the confidence threshold, are discovered using information gathered from a very small vicinity, whose size is independent of the size of the system.