Near miss and minor injury information--can it be used to plan and evaluate injury prevention programmes?

AIM: To assess the usefulness of collecting information on near miss and minor injuries for use in planning and evaluating injury prevention programmes for children aged under 5 years in the home environment. METHOD: The research was set within the context of a controlled intervention study based in 36 general practices across Nottingham. All parents of children aged between 3 and 12 months who had completed the intervention study questionnaire (n = 1594) were used as the sampling frame for the diary study. A diary, developed specifically for the main intervention study, was administered to a systematically assigned sample of 434 parents. Information provided by the Home Accident Surveillance System on 252 randomly selected children, of the same age and sex, who had attended an accident and emergency department, was used to compare the circumstances surrounding near miss and minor injuries with those of medically attended injuries. The children whose parents had completed a diary were followed over a two year time period. The children who had had a medically attended injury were identified from a search of the child's general practice records and the Queens Medical Centre accident and emergency records. The definition of a near miss used in the study was: A near miss incident is something your child does or that happened to your child which could have resulted in him/her being hurt, but fortunately it did not. RESULTS: Overall two hundred and thirty one (53%) diaries were completed and returned. Three hundred and fifty incidents were recorded of which 207 were near misses and 143 minor injuries. The circumstances surrounding near miss and minor injuries, although not identical when compared to medically attended injuries, were very similar. The relationship between the occurrence of near miss, minor injuries and future medically attended injuries appeared weak, for all categories the negative predictive value was higher than the positive predictive value. CONCLUSION: Although the circumstances surrounding all the incident categories were similar, the numbers were too small to see whether specific injury mechanisms predict future injuries of the same type. It appeared that near miss and minor injuries are of limited use in predicting medically attended injuries, however this hypothesis needs to be tested on a much larger sample.     

On rejecting emotional lures created by phonological neighborhood activation.

The authors conducted 2 experiments to assess how phonologically related lures are rejected in a false memory paradigm. Some phonological lures were emotional (i.e., taboo) words, and others were not. The authors manipulated the presence of taboo items on the study list and reduced the ability to use controlled rejection strategies by dividing attention and forcing a short response deadline. The results converge on the idea that participants reduce false alarms to emotional lures by setting more stringent recognition criteria for these items based on their expected memorability. Additionally, emotional lures are less familiar than nonemotional lures because emotional lures have affective and semantic features that mismatch studied nonemotional items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Large modulation depth, single-moded quantum well waveguide modulator operating around 1.57 mu m

The performance of long wavelength single-mode waveguide modulators suitable for monolithic integration with a quantum well laser is reported. The device operated between 1.560 mu m and 1.570 mu m. The guiding layer was formed by a 0.27 mu m quaternary layer at the centre of which were four 50 AA In/sub 0.53/Ga/sub 0.47/As quantum wells separated by 100 AA InP barrier layers. Lateral confinement was obtained by etching ridges in the top InP contact layer. For devices of 500 mu m length, a modulation depth of 19 dB was obtained at a wavelength of 1.568 mu m with a reverse bias voltage of only 3 V and an internal loss of 2.5 dB.<>     

Mathematical models for motile bacterial transport in cylindrical tubes

Mathematical models considering motile bacterial transport within a geometrically restrictive cylindrical tube were developed. Two macroscopic transport parameters, the random motility coefficient as a self-diffusion coefficient of the cell population and the chemotactic velocity as a chemical-induced velocity, were derived. The three-dimensional cell balance equation was reduced to forms similar to Segel's one-dimensional phenomenological cell balance equations with additional modifications for bacteria-wall interactions. Two conceptually different approaches accounting for such interactions were presented. The first approach parallels treatments in the gas kinetic theory by viewing bacterial interactions with walls as collisions and subsequent diffusive/specular reflections, which led to the Bosanquet formula for the bacterial diffusion coefficient. Based on the experimental observation that bacterial swimming motion is guided by a straight tube, the second approach considered modifications in the bacterial swimming orientation as a consequence of various long-range interactions with the tube surface. A phenomenological turning model capable of aligning bacterial motion along a tube axis was proposed. The model predicts that under the geometrical restriction of a small cylindrical tube, the macroscopic bacterial transport resulting from the proposed turning model can exhibit behavior that ranges from dimensionally reduced diffusion to pure wave propagation, depending on the influence of the tube diameter on the reversal probability in the bacterial swimming motion. Our theoretical model provides explicit equations that explain how such a transition can occur. The predicted results were then qualitatively compared with experimental data from the literature. As a preliminary comparison, we concluded that bacterial transport in cylindrical tubes of diameter 10 micrometers remains in the mode of a dimensionally reduced diffusion, and shifts to a wave motion when the tube diameter decreases to 6 micrometers.     

Influence of zeolite on electrochemical and physicochemical properties of polyethylene oxide solid electrolyte

A composite polymer electrolyte of polyethyleneoxide-LiBF₄ containing fine particles of zeolite was studied using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry, differential scanning calorimetry, infrared spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. When compared with the polymer electrolyte without zeolite, the specific conductivity of the composite electrolyte film is higher by about two orders of magnitude at room temperature. The increase in specific conductivity is explained as due to increased amorphocity which is reflected in the thermal studies. The nature of the cyclic voltammograms and infrared spectra is discussed.Part of this work was presented at the Electrochemical Society Meeting, Honolulu, Hawai (May 1993).     

A PC-based software test for measuring alcohol and drug effects in human subjects

A new software-based visual search and divided-attention test of cognitive performance was developed and evaluated in an alcohol dose-response study with 24 human subjects aged 21-62 years. The test used language-free, color, graphic displays to represent the visuospatial demands of driving. Cognitive demands were increased over previous hardware-based tests, and the motor skills required for the test involved minimal eye movements and eye-hand coordination. Repeated performance on the test was evaluated with a latin-square design by using a placebo and two alcohol doses, low (0.48 g/kg/LBM) and moderate (0.72 g/kg/LBM). The data on 7 females and 17 males yielded significant falling and rising impairment effects coincident with moderate rising and falling breath alcohol levels (mean peak BrALs = 0.045 g/dl and 0.079 g/dl). None of the subjects reported eye-strain or psychomotor fatigue as compared with previous tests. The high sensitivity/variance relative to use in basic and applied research, and worksite fitness-for-duty testing, was discussed. The most distinct advantage of a software-based test that operates on readily available PCs is that it can be widely distributed to researchers with a common reference to compare a variety of alcohol and drug effects.     

Adjuvant chemotherapy for patients with resected Dukes' C and high-risk B2 colon cancer with fluorouracil and levamisole

Carcinoma of the large bowel is the second leading cause of cancer mortality in Singapore. Although the great majority of patients are discovered at a stage where resection with curative intent is possible, almost half of the patients afflicted will die of it. The combination of 5-fluorouracil + levamisole used in patients with curatively resected high risk Dukes B2 and all Dukes' C colon cancers has been shown to reduce cancer recurrence rate and improve overall survival. Since 1990 adjuvant chemotherapy has been recommended for this group of patients. This report describes patients treated in Singapore, their toxicities and their outcome. A total of 341 patients were treated between 1990 and 1996. Treatment compliance was 71.8%. Toxicity was moderate with mainly grade 1-2 nausea and vomiting, diarrhoea, stomatitis, alopecia, and neutropenia. There was 1 treatment-related death. Median recurrence-free interval was 81 months and median survival was not reached at 90 months. This regimen is tolerable. Until further randomised reports comparing 5-fluorouracil + levamisole to other combinations are available, this combination chemotherapy is recommended to patients after surgical resection of the high risk Dukes' B2 and Dukes' C colon cancer to reduce cancer recurrence and improve overall survival.