[Severe vaginal discharge following rectal surgery]. / Ernstige fluor vaginalis na rectumresectie.

BACKGROUND: Almost 50% of women who have had rectal surgery subsequently develop vaginal discharge. Due to the recurrent and unexpected nature of this heavy discharge, they often experience it as very distressing. Many of these women undergo extensive diagnostic tests that are mainly focused on identifying fistula formation. If no fistula is found, in most cases no other cause for severe vaginal discharge can be demonstrated. CASE DESCRIPTION: In our practice, we saw three patients (49-, 54- and 74-years-old, respectively) with similar severe vaginal discharge after rectal surgery and in whom no explanation for the vaginal discharge could be found. For this reason we conducted a literature search into this condition. CONCLUSION: Anatomical changes appear to be responsible for heavy vaginal discharge following rectal surgery. Changes in pelvic floor muscles and compression of the distal part of the vagina may lead to pooling of fluid in the proximal part of the vagina, resulting in severe discharge. Symptomatic treatment may reduce the symptoms.

[Horse milking industry in The Netherlands and Flanders]. / De paardenmelkerij in Nederland en Vlaanderen: productie en gezondheidsaspecten.

The horse milking industry is expanding in The Netherlands and Flanders. Horse milk has become popular due to its (supposed) health-enhancing properties. A horse-milking farm is not a common client for the Dutch veterinarian. When giving advice in this circumstance it should be recognised that these horses are production animals and that their milk is for human consumption. A review of the literature is given together with the results of an extensive enquiry amongst 13 horse-milking farms in The Netherlands and Flanders.

A glycoprotein E deletion mutant of bovine herpesvirus 1 is avirulent in calves.

A marker vaccine elicits an antibody response in the host that can be distinguished from the antibody response induced by a wild-type strain. To obtain a bovine herpesvirus 1 (BHV-1) marker vaccine, we constructed a glycoprotein E (gE) deletion mutant. This was obtained by removing the complete gE coding region from the BHV-1 genome. To attenuate the gE deletion mutant further, we also introduced a small deletion in the thymidine kinase (TK) gene. We selected three mutants: the gE deletion mutant, a TK deletion mutant and a gE/TK double deletion mutant, and examined their virulence and immunogenicity in calves. After intranasal inoculation, the TK deletion mutant showed some residual virulence, whereas the gE and gE/TK deletion mutants were avirulent. The calves inoculated with the deletion mutants were protected against disease after challenge exposure and shed significantly less virus than control calves. Deleting the gE gene, therefore, has little effect on the immunogenicity of BHV-1, but is sufficient to reduce the virulence of BHV-1 in calves. These findings led us to conclude that the gE deletion mutant is a good candidate for a modified live BHV-1 marker vaccine.

Cerebral disconnection in multiple sclerosis. Relationship to atrophy of the corpus callosum.

Left ear suppression to dichotically presented verbal stimuli has been observed in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Rubens and coworkers have suggested that a disconnection of the auditory callosal pathways may account for this finding. To examine this proposal, we compared the performance of 28 MS patients with significant corpus callosum atrophy (CCA) on midsagittal magnetic resonance scans, 16 MS patients without significant CCA, and 64 demographically matched normal control subjects on two laterality tasks: verbal dichotic listening (consonant-vowel syllables) and tachistiscopic object-naming latency. Results indicated that left ear suppression was found only in the MS patients with CCA. Likewise, patients in the MS group with CCA were slow in responding to stimuli presented in the left visual field; this effect was not observed in patients without CCA. These findings support the hypothesis that efficiency of cross-callosal information flow is reduced in MS patients with CCA.

DNA supercoiling in gyrase mutants.

Nucleoids isolated from Escherichia coli strains carrying temperature-sensitive gyrA or gyrB mutations were examined by sedimentation in ethidium bromide-containing sucrose density gradients. A shift to restrictive temperature resulted in nucleoid DNA relaxation in all of the mutant strains. Three of these mutants exhibited reversible nucleoid relaxation: when cultures incubated at restrictive temperature were cooled to 0 degree C over a 4- to 5-min period, supercoiling returned to levels observed with cells grown at permissive temperature. Incubation of these three mutants at restrictive temperature also caused nucleoid sedimentation rates to increase by about 50%.