Disaster-readiness of medical facilities in Aichi Prefecture

One month following the Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 17, 1995, we conducted a survey of 173 hospitals in Aichi Prefecture to pinpoint problems related to their actual disaster-readiness and the medical backup systems in place to deal with such disasters. This study revealed that staff at 50% of the surveyed hospitals could reach the hospital within an hour, but that communication is almost entirely dependent on phone lines, suggesting that cordless/portable/mobile phones, radio systems, Internet, communications satellites and the like should be studied in the days to come for possible use as effective communication alternatives in times of disaster. Whereas 92% of the surveyed hospitals had manuals dealing with fire outbreaks, other areas were less well represented. For example, only 36.9% of surveyed hospitals had manuals for earthquakes, 31.7% had manuals for power outages and 14.2% had manuals to deal with flooding and water disasters. New manuals must be developed incorporating the key points garnered from experience (especially Hanshin) and be ready for use immediately. It is the time for each hospital to seriously rethink the measures it should take to deal with disasters.     

Very low threshold graded-indexseparate-confinement-heterostructure strained InGaAsPsingle-quantum-well lasers

A low threshold current density of ~100 A/cm² has been obtained at 1.55 μm using a graded-index separate-confinement-heterostructure strained InGaAsP single-quantum-well laser. The design of the laser structure is based on results calculated from the viewpoint of effective carrier injection into the well     

Nonpigmented fixed drug eruption from pseudoephedrine

The biotransformation of oxazepam by Bifidobacterium bifidum was studied. The major metabolite was purified by chromatographic methods and found to be desmethyldiazepam using NMR, IR and other physicochemical data.     

The structure and management of service level agreements innetworks

The paper proposes a structure for quality-of-service (QoS)-centered service level agreements (SLA), and a framework for their real-time management in multiservice packet networks. The SLA is structured to be fair to both parties, the service provider and their customer. The SLA considered here are for QoS assured delivery of aggregate bandwidth from ingress to egress nodes; however, the control and signaling is for the more granular flows or calls. A SLA monitoring scheme is presented in which revenue is generated by the admission of flows into the network, and penalty incurred when flows are lost in periods when the service provider is not SLA compliant. In the SLA management scheme proposed, the results of a prior off-line design are used, in conjunction with measurements taken locally at ingress nodes, to classify the loading status of routes. The routing and resource management are based on virtual partitioning and its supporting mechanism of bandwidth protection. The effectiveness of SLA management is measured by the robustness in performance in the presence of substantial diversity in actual traffic conditions. A simulation testbed called D'ARTAGNAN has been built from which we report numerical results for a case study. The results show that the SLA management scheme is robust, fair and efficient over a broad range of traffic conditions     

Direct evidence of high DNA binding activity of transcription factor AP-1 in rheumatoid arthritis synovium

Green fluorescent protein (GFP) is increasingly being used in plant biology from the cellular level to whole plant level. At the cellular level, GFP is being used as an in vivo reporter to assess frequency of transient and stable transformation. GFP has also proven to be an invaluable tool in monitoring trafficking and subcellular localization of protein. At the organ level and up, many exciting applications are rapidly emerging. The development of brighter GFP mutants with more robust folding properties has enabled better macroscopic visualization of GFP in whole leaves and plants. One interesting example has been the use of GFP to monitor virus movement in and among whole plants. GFP is also emerging as a powerful tool to monitor transgene movement and transgenic plants in the field. In a proof-of-concept study, tobacco was transformed with a modified version of the GFP gene controlled by a constitutive (35S) promoter. GFP expression in progeny plants ranged from 0% to 0.5%, and approximately 0.1% GFP was the minimal amount needed for unambiguous macroscopic detection. GFP is the first truly in vivo reporter system useful in whole plants, and we project its usefulness will increase even further as better forms of GFP genes become available.     

Neurochemical studies of schizophrenia in Japan

Neurobiological research in schizophrenia has been hampered by several confounding factors such as the heterogeneity of the illness and the paucity of biological markers. Recent progress in research methods, however, has enabled the improvement in our understanding its pathophysiology. This paper reviews recent neurochemical investigations of schizophrenia and its animal models which were conducted in Japan in the last decade. The research areas reviewed are (i) monoamine and their metabolites in body fluids, (ii) phospholipids and prostaglandins, (iii) neurochemistry in autopsy brains, (iv) immunological measures, (v) magnetic resonance spectroscopy, (vi) regional cerebral blood flows (rCBF), (vii) molecular genetics, and (viii) animal models. It is worth noting that there exist abnormalities of amino acidergic (glutamatergic and GABAergic) neurotransmission as well as monoaminergic (dopaminergic and serotonergic) one in postmortem schizophrenic brains. These abnormalities and also the findings of altered rCBF indicate the existence of disturbed neuronal circuits that contribute to the diverse symptoms of schizophrenia. Also, dysfunction of membrane phospholipids derived from studies on magnetic resonance spectroscopy may underlie negative symptoms in schizophrenia. Given that schizophrenia is considered to comprise a group of disorders with a diverse heterogeneity of etiologies, research in the next decade is expected to identify putative genes that are involved in vulnerability to schizophrenic phenotype.     

Molecular medicine and population control

As we uncover the physiological and molecular mechanisms behind human reproduction, we gain the potential to exert more control over our reproductive capabilities. In the past two decades, the prospects for 'infertile' women to bear children, or 'sterile' men to father them, have improved dramatically; recently, women have given birth in their sixties, well beyond their natural menopause. Thanks to developments in contraception, couples can now enjoy an active sex-life without a significant risk of pregnancy, and more accurately control the size and timing of their families. But these new freedoms have a price: they also have the potential to cause demographic distortions, medical harm to individuals and abuse of human rights.