Case report. Toxoplasma encephalitis after initiation of HAART.

HIV therapy has advanced greatly in the past couple of decades. Along with advances in treatment have come new adverse effects associated with therapy. We present a case of Toxoplasma encephalitis following initiation of HAART consistent with the emerging syndrome known as immune restoration disease.

Primary cutaneous aspergillosis: case report and review of the literature.

Primary cutaneous aspergillosis is an uncommon entity that may occur in immunosuppressed hosts, usually resulting from contact with contaminated medical devices used in patient care. The infection spreads locally with subsequent skin necrosis due to angioinvasion and thrombosis. We report primary cutaneous aspergillosis following contact with contaminated gauze, and we review the relevant literature.

Management of the transplant recipient with pulmonary infection.

Pneumonia is a common and potentially fatal complication of transplantation. The clinical approach to this problem requires a multipronged attack. Thorough evaluation of the donor and recipient reduces the risk of infection while pointing to likely infectious complications to be anticipated posttransplant. Careful attention to infection control measures with emphasis on handwashing, high efficiency particulate air filtration, and aggressive outbreak investigation minimizes nosocomial pneumonias. Appropriate use of vaccines and prophylactic antimicrobial therapies decreases posttransplant morbidity and mortality. Once pneumonia occurs, a rapid, thorough diagnostic evaluation increases the likelihood of survival for the individual patient and focuses attention on environmental risks that may pose a hazard to the other transplant recipients in the clinician's institution.

Postnatal ontogeny of cholecystokinin receptors in rat brain.

The postnatal ontogeny of cholecystokinin receptors and cholecystokinin was determined in rat brain. The binding of cholecystokinin (CCK) to rat forebrain receptors was very low at 1-2 days of age, rose to a maximum at 12 days (Bmax = 31 fmol/mg protein, Kd = 1.47 nM), and declined to adult levels by 26 days (Bmax = 17 fmol/mg protein, Kd = 1.39 nM). In contrast, forebrain concentrations of CCK measured by radioimmunoassay rose monotonically through day 27. Possible implications of the transient developmental peak of CCK receptors are discussed.

Toward a differentiation of descriptive and psycholinguistic language models: perceptual and orthographic/phonological analysis of spelling strategies.

Linguistic concepts of the principles and rule systems composing language are instantiated in the models known as grammars. These grammars, typically generative in format, are descriptions of those representatives of universal rule processes found in the particular language being described. Many psycholinguists are now becoming concerned with how to determine to what extent such formal descriptive language models also embody psychologically valid descriptions of speaker processes. It is this issue to which the current article is addressed. The psycholinguistic validity of a language model may be studied by experimental investigation of the degree to which speaker behaviors follow the patterns dictated by linguistic theory. In this article, English phonology, specifically the nature of phonological units in internalized phonological representations, was chosen as the area for study. The choice was made because English phonology is particularly well described by the standard theory, and because this theory contains explicit predictions about how English speakers' phonological knowledge will be realized in their control of English orthography, e.g., in spelling. The present article discusses a series of studies designed to determine whether speakers' spelling behavior follows the supposed patterns of phonological competence, wherein any divergences may lie, and to what processes they may be attributed. The results of the studies suggest the necessity for differentiating a formal description of English phonology from a psycholinguistic model.

Syntactic complexity and information transmission in first-graders: A cross-cultural study.

Some differences between child and adult communication are due to general developmental immaturity and some to language-specific factors. The Piagetan concept of syncretism exemplifies an hypothecated universal of psycholinguistic development, and it results in child texts characterized by minimally structured temporal, causal, and logical connections. A different sort of problem is that, within a specific language, certain syntactic items may fail to mature in children at the expected rate, because of structural oddities of the constructions. English has several such constructions, generally peculiar in their conflict between surface- and deep-structure subject of the main verb. It is predictable that a syncretistic child attempting to deal with such items in a text will analyze them according to the surface-structure analogic method which defines verbal syncretism, and so will fail to make sense of them. Finally, cutting across these child language features are others peculiar to the language of specific groups of children, such as the putative communication impairment of the disadvantaged black child, whose language has been described by some researchers as less efficient and slower to mature than that of others. Clearly, if this is so, then black children's language should at any young age show more evidence of syncretistic communicative immaturity as well as slower development of adult syntactic patterns. The present paper, then, investigates on a cross-cultural basis the dual hypotheses of syncretism and faulty mastery of difficult syntax, by means of an experimental story-repeating format first used by Piaget. Hypotheses are examined for the cause of children's distinctive communication technique, and the whole question of the significance of black/white differences in communicative style and verbal maturity is discussed.