Medical abortion for Australian women: it's time

Medical termination of pregnancy with mifepristone, a progesterone antagonist, is available to women in North America, the United Kingdom, much of Western Europe, Russia, China, Israel, New Zealand, Turkey and Tunisia, but not Australia. Experience of mifepristone use in around two million abortions has shown that it is safe, effective, cheap to produce, and highly acceptable to women. Mifepristone is usually used in combination with a prostaglandin analogue, such as misoprostol; these drugs have been added to the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines for developing countries. Availability of this drug in Australia might largely overcome many of the inequities of access to abortion, and is critical for many women in rural areas and women in some ethnic groups whose access to surgical abortion is limited.     

Abuse of residents: it's time to take action.

The scientific study of the sexual dynamics that come into play during residency training seems to both fascinate and repel trainees and their supervisors. One of the more provocative and shameful dimensions of this area of inquiry, the abuse of residents, causes a good deal of distress. How do we respond to findings of significant psychological abuse, discrimination on the basis of sex or sexual orientation and sexual harassment in medical settings? How can we ignore over a decade of research? How can we not heed the experience of so many young physicians? Given the uncertain times in Canadian medicine and the insecurity in our professional and personal lives, we must work together to improve the culture of our teaching institutions and implement measures nationally and locally to close this dark chapter.     

Infanticide for handicapped infants: sometimes it's a metaphysical dispute.

Since 1973 the practice of infanticide for some severely handicapped newborns has been receiving more open discussion and defence in the literature on medical ethics. A recent and important argument for the permissibility of infanticide relies crucially on a particular concept of personhood that excludes the theological. This paper attempts to show that the dispute between the proponents of infanticide and their religious opponents cannot be resolved because one side's perspective on the infant is shaped by a metaphysics that is emphatically rejected by the other. In such a situation philosophical argument is powerless to bring about a resolution because there can be no refutation of one side by the other.     

医疗活动中医患双方的利益诉求及其实现限度

多数医疗纠纷源于医患双方缺乏诚信,缺少人文关怀.实现医患和谐需要政府、医院、医务人员和患者的共同努力,在价值选择和制度安排上促进医患和谐.市场经济条件下的医疗保健服务具有无私利他的道德责任和追求利益的需求,为病人的最大利益着想是医务人员最根本的的道德责任.     

Mainstreaming the metabolic syndrome: a definitive definition

This new definition should assist both researchers and clinicians.     

Medical education: time for a change

The system of medical education has not changed much over the years. This article discusses the present method of teaching of medical students. Suggestions for change in the methods have been suggested in order to produce better doctors.     

Bionimbus: a cloud for managing,analyzing and sharing large genomics datasets

Background

As large genomics and phenotypic datasets are becoming more common, it is increasingly difficult for most researchers to access, manage, and analyze them. One possible approach is to provide the research community with several petabyte-scale cloud-based computing platforms containing these data, along with tools and resources to analyze it.

Methods

Bionimbus is an open source cloud-computing platform that is based primarily upon OpenStack, which manages on-demand virtual machines that provide the required computational resources, and GlusterFS, which is a high-performance clustered file system. Bionimbus also includes Tukey, which is a portal, and associated middleware that provides a single entry point and a single sign on for the various Bionimbus resources; and Yates, which automates the installation, configuration, and maintenance of the software infrastructure required.

Results

Bionimbus is used by a variety of projects to process genomics and phenotypic data. For example, it is used by an acute myeloid leukemia resequencing project at the University of Chicago. The project requires several computational pipelines, including pipelines for quality control, alignment, variant calling, and annotation. For each sample, the alignment step requires eight CPUs for about 12 h. BAM file sizes ranged from 5 GB to 10 GB for each sample.

Conclusions

Most members of the research community have difficulty downloading large genomics datasets and obtaining sufficient storage and computer resources to manage and analyze the data. Cloud computing platforms, such as Bionimbus, with data commons that contain large genomics datasets, are one choice for broadening access to research data in genomics.     

建立儿童超重和肥胖的国际标准定义：世界性调查

目的 :确立一个国际上可广泛接受的儿童超重和肥胖的定义 ,并就测定指标、参考人群、不同年龄和性别的诊断标准进行探讨。研究设计 :对 6个国家大规模有代表性的横断面生长研究进行国际化综合研究。数据来源 :巴西、英国、香港、荷兰、新加坡以及美国。研究对象 :自出生至 2 5岁的 97876名男性和 94 851名女性。主要结果的测定指标 :体质指数 (体重 /身高2 )。结果 :采用目前广泛使用的成人超重和肥胖标准 ( 2 5ｋｇ/ｍ2 和 3 0ｋｇ/ｍ2 ) ,确定每项调查中 1 8岁时所处的百分位数 ,并以此百分位数作出跨越各年龄的体质指数百分位数曲线。根…