ABSTRACT
Answering the spiritual as well as religious needs of patients has for years been seen as the province of the hospital chaplain, because spirituality has been regarded as the province of religion. As chaplains in the NHS we hope in this paper to raise awareness of the importance of spiritual care in the health service as a whole. Although there seems to be a large amount of interest in this area there are few tangible means of identifying and assessing spiritual need. Within the limits of this paper we aim to define spiritual care, to outline how we can identify spiritual distress, and suggest ways of evaluating spiritual care. Although we realise the difficulty of the task, we wish to 'Transcend vagueness and come to a more comfortable understanding of spirituality.' (Price et al 1995)
Subject(s)
Models, Organizational , Pastoral Care/organization & administration , Religion , Spiritual Therapies/organization & administration , State Medicine , Communication , Cultural Characteristics , Death , Grief , Holistic Health , Humans , Love , Morale , Semantics , Stress, Psychological/prevention & control , Stress, Psychological/psychology , United KingdomABSTRACT
Waters adjacent to the County of Los Angeles (CA) receive untreated runoff from a series of storm drains year round. Many other coastal areas face a similar situation. To our knowledge, there has not been a large-scale epidemiologic study of persons who swim in marine waters subject to such runoff. We report here results of a cohort study conducted to investigate this issue. Measures of exposure included distance from the storm drain, selected bacterial indicators (total and fecal coliforms, enterococci, and Escherichia coli), and a direct measure of enteric viruses. We found higher risks of a broad range of symptoms, including both upper respiratory and gastrointestinal, for subjects swimming (a) closer to storm drains, (b) in water with high levels of single bacterial indicators and a low ratio of total to fecal coliforms, and (c) in water where enteric viruses were detected. The strength and consistency of the associations we observed across various measures of exposure imply that there may be an increased risk of adverse health outcomes associated with swimming in ocean water that is contaminated with untreated urban runoff.
Subject(s)
Swimming , Water Microbiology , Water Pollution , California , Cohort Studies , Enterobacteriaceae/isolation & purification , Humans , Leisure Activities , Oceans and Seas , SewageABSTRACT
Well-preserved Lower Cretaceous fossil copepods related to the super-family Dichelesthioidea have been collected from the gill chamber of the ichthyodectid fish Cladocyclus gardneri. The fossils provide conclusive evidence suporting recent theories that link caligid copepods, which are parasitic on fish, to the invertebrate-associated siphonostomes. This is the first discovery of fossil parasitic copepods, and they are by far the oldest copepods of any sort known.
