Thursday, June 28, 2007

Health information for all by 2015 - campaigning lists

INVITATION TO JOIN HIFA2015 & CHILD2015

Some information supplied by Neil Pakenham-Walsh.

Two dynamic email groups working towards 'Healthcare Information For All by 2015'

HIFA2015 is a global email discussion group with a focus on the information and learning needs of healthcare providers in developing countries. The main focus is at the local level: households and communities, primary health workers, and health professionals working in district hospital facilities. Its goal is linked with the Millennium Development Goals:

"By 2015, every person worldwide will have access to an informed healthcare provider."

CHILD2015 focuses specifically on the information and learning needs of people responsible for the healthcare of the newborn, infants and children. Its goal: "By 2015, every child worldwide will have access to an informed healthcare provider."

HIFA2015 & CHILD2015 are open to anyone with an interest in improving healthcare in developing countries and membership is free.

Why join?

* Be part of a worldwide community of more than 800 people dedicated to meet the information and learning needs of healthcare providers
* Learn from others
* Share your experience
* Make new contacts and collaborations
* Let others know about your interests, activities, services, publications
* Find out about funding and training opportunities, useful websites, new publications...
* Collaborate to achieve common goals

Join today: send an email to HIFA2015-admin@dgroups.org and/or CHILD2015-admin@dgroups.org with:
1. your name
2. your organization and country of residence 3. a brief description of your professional interests.
To post a message, email: HIFA2015@dgroups.org or CHILD2015@dgroups.org
HIFA2015 email archive: www.dgroups.org/groups/hifa2015
CHILD2015 email archive: www.dgroups.org/groups/hifa2015
HIFA2015 Campaign website: www.hifa2015.org

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Fair Trade Football Petition

Fair Trade Football Petition

I discovered this through Facebook (have been experimenting in Facebook), where a Fair Trade Football group comes up if you view the most popular groups. And on the petition site there is a link that says "share via Blogger". So I clicked it, and here it is!

Genomics database for humanities and social sciences

Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (based at the University of Exeter) has produced this online bibliography of material dealing with genomics, but annotated to make it more accessible to social scientists, philosophers, and so on.

The database is at http://www.centres.ex.ac.uk/egenis/bibliodata/

Thanks to a posting from Frank Norman (picking up on something in the PHG Foundation Newsletter) to the lis-genome list for this.

Infection control in health care settings

A posting from Peg Allen to the MEDLIB-L list alerts me to this new CDC publication:

Guideline for Isolation Precautions: Preventing Transmission of Infectious Agents in Healthcare Settings 2007

which can be seen at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/gl_isolation.html

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability

STEPS is a new centre at the University of Sussex, looking at science and development. There is an article in the Guardian today.

>>Read the Guardian article

Friday, June 22, 2007

Fifth World Congress on Vaccines, Immunisation and Immunotherapy - influenza

Vaccine, vol. 25, no. 16, 2007, contains papers from the Fifth World Congress on Vaccines, Immunisation and Immunotherapy, held in Montreal. Several papers relate to influenza. One is a useful looking overview:

Poland GA, Jacobson RM, Targonski TV. Avian and pandemic influenza: An overview. Vaccine 2007; 25(16): 3057-3061.

Genome of Aedes aegypti mosquito - updated

The genome of this beastie is published online in Science (17th May) - as a Science Express paper that we cannot access with our subscription. Once it is published in the print journal, we will have access and I will put the details here.

Aedes aegypti is the primary vector for yellow fever and dengue.

The abstract is viewable at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1138878v1

Update>> The full paper is now available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5832/1718?etoc to University of Leicester members.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Cystic fibrosis: patients' experience

An interesting article appears in the BMJ today:

Wicks E. A patient's journey: cystic fibrosis. BMJ 2007; 334(7606): 1270-1.

DOI: 10.1136/bmj.39188.741944.47

Two things especially caught my eye:

1 - when the author was diagnosed, her parents went to the library, having had no information about CF from the hospital. This was in the days before the Internet, so was some time ago. They found a 15 year old book, which advised that they should bond with their new baby too much. There are areas where books do get very out of date!

2 - "Patients need access to information about cystic fibrosis. If professionals do not provide the right information at the right time, patients will go and look for themselves. Plenty of good quality information is available, but there is just as much incorrect information, too, especially on the internet. Patients need to be able to filter out misleading facts, or have access to people who can guide them. " And so do students, and health professionals!

Friday, June 08, 2007

Space Shuttle Atlantis launches later - updated

Atlantis launches later on mission STS117, to take things to the International Space Station. Launch time is scheduled to be 7.38 pm EDT.

I think this must be 00.38 BST tomorrow (Saturday). There are two countdown clocks on the NASA website. The one which I think is giving the actual time to launch is saying (at 2320 BST Friday) that there is 1 hour and 17 minutes to go. The other clock (saying 20 minutes or so) includes all the holds that take place in the countdown.

Anyway, I am watching on NASA TV, so will be able to tell you, if I am still awake!

There is mission information at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts117/index.html with links to a blog (not active yet) and information about NASA-TV coverage. You can watch NASA-TV on the web.

>>Later additions - the blog is now active.

Science for April 20th - updated

The 20th April issue of Science is a special issue on germ cells. Read the table of contents

There is a report that the research team that published the "controversial" Lancet study into deaths in Iraq have released their data, but have apparently set some conditions over who can access it, in terms of the requestor's expertise.

Added information, 8th June>> A letter in Science, 8th June 2007, suggests that this is true, but that the authors have not been releasing data to "persons or groups with connections to pro-war or anti-war organizations".

Reed Elsevier to exit defence exhibitions - updated

An email from Rizwana Zafar of the Kostoris Medical Library at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, to the lis-medical list alerted me to this announcement from Reed Elsevier: http://www.reed-elsevier.com/index.cfm?articleid=2084

This goes to show that things can change for the better if enough people make it so. It is also good to see that a large company like Reed Elsevier are listening and can change what they do: well done to them.

Added information>> The BMJ's report of this is here.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Journal of Perioperative Practice - June 2007

The June 2007 issue of this journal includes articles on:

Safety (an opinion piece);
Clinical pathway in fluid management;
Decontamination and traceability of flexible endoscopes;
HCAIs

There is also a summary of a Cochrane review on drugs to prevent postoperative nausea and vomiting, and a piece by Harold Ellis on the history of the Hopkins rod-lens system, a fibre optic system used in endoscopes. Harold Hopkins, I notice, was born in Leicester, although he worked at the University of Reading. You can read a DNB article about him, and see the results of a PubMed search for articles about him.

This Library has the journal in print. There is no online version, although it is available to the NHS in England through Proquest - go to http://journals.library.nhs.uk/frames.asp and search for the word "perioperative". You will need an NHS Athens username and if you are one of "my" ODP students reading this, you can ask me for a reminder about this! The June issue is not in Proquest yet.

Heelys (or should that be heelies?)

I don't have any, but an online only study in Pediatrics looks at injuries sustained by children travelling by heely (roller shoe, street glider - some of these are trade names, I think). There has certainly been coverage in the media in the UK, with some towns and shopping centres banning them.

The study reports 67 cases of injury, reported to a hospital in Dublin, Ireland. 56 were girls, and most injuries were sustained when using the things for the first time.

Genes and disease - Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium

The media today is reporting the first results from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, which aims to find the genes associated with common diseases. Some results for Crohn's disease, diabetes (type 1 and type 2), bipolar disorder, coronary heart disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis .

The Study as a whole has a webpage at http://www.wtccc.org.uk/

>>Read a report in the Guardian

The results are published in Nature and Nature Genetics (a letter and a brief communication).

And there is a report on the Biochemist e-volution news site as well (mentioned in an email from Frank Norman at the NIMR to a discussion list).

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

ClinicalTrials.gov

JAMA (May 16, 2007) includes a paper on the present state of affairs with ClinicalTrials.gov, the registry of clinical trials, maintained by the NLM. The article includes a list of other registries, and outlines some of the present challenges - the need for unambiguous names for trials, the need for a good search engine, and the need to avoid duplicate registration.

>>Read the paper.

Nockels

I was experimenting with Scientific Commons, a search engine for open access material being developed at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. It includes the content of Leicester Research Archive, our institutional repository, and has rather a nice interface that displays references to material on the right hand side of the screen, and details of where the reference is from, on the left, when you point.

I searched, rather pompously, for myself, using just surname. I did find me but also:

Cheryl Elizabeth Ferris Nockels, who was the first female graduate in animal nutrition at Colorado State University, in 1957. A search of the CSU site for Nockels finds other Nockels, as well;

Christiane Nockels, a student on the history of medicine and science program at Yale, and originally from Luxembourg (previous Googlings for Nockels have found some in Luxembourg, some of whom, I think from memory, went to Iowa)

and (stretching things a little):

Jens Uwe Nockel (or Noeckel), at the University of Oregon.

Greetings to you all! And now back to work.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

HEALTHMap

I'd been meaning to mention this, having found out about through ResourceShelf, but appear not to have done.

So, here it is!

HEALTHMap comes from the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Boston, MA, and Harvard and MIT. It presents data on the incidence of several important infectious diseases, but in graphical form. Information is fed from a number of sources including Promed-Mail, and Euro Surveillance, and you can select the diseases you are interested in. You can also look at a particular country in detail.

Read about HEALTHMap in ResourceShelf
Look at HEALTHMap

Monday, June 04, 2007

Encyclopedia of Life

This is a project to create an electronic page of information for each known species on Earth, with partners including the Natural History Museum. A pilot site is now up, at http://www.eol.org/home.html, with some demonstration pages.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Maritime history of Massachusetts

This - http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/maritime/ - is lovely and nothing to do with work! Thanks to the Internet Scout Project for this one.

Management of fever

NICE have issued guidance on assessment and initial management of fever in the under 5s, and you can read about it in the BMJ and read the thing itself here.

Journal of Infection: June 2007

Some of the articles in this issue are:

Assessing the burden of influenza and other respiratory infections in England and Wales;
Meningococcal disease deaths and the frequency of antibiotic administration delays;

My eye was caught by:

Family saliva sharing behaviors and age of human herpesvirus-6B infection

[A new way, it seems, to describe kissing your children]

Online only papers include:

A large outbreak of tinea capitis in a primary school

Everything is available to University of Leicester users via http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01634453