[Case Study - A Successful Cooperation of Clinic Pharmacist and Pharmacies in Home Palliative Care with PCA Pump].

To make a good end at home and provide good palliative care for patients with cancer are urgent issues in Setagaya ward, as shown by certain statistics. Medical opioids are greatly needed for palliative care; as patient controlled analgesia(PCA) develops, it can lead to decisions by patients and their families to receive end-of-life care at home because the patient can choose to receive the same advanced palliative care received at the hospital. With in-home palliative care, given the rapid change in the medical condition of the patient and the sentiment of the family, the role of pharmacists is to quickly and reliably supply the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment that doctors need. The following are important in order to enable this; 1 ) a pharmacy stocked with medicalopioids in accordance with needs, 2 ) a pharmacy with a system that can provide support quickly, 3 ) the presence of people who understand the area of resources, and 4 ) a constant face-to-face relationship. The "Sakura-HOPPS(Sakurashinmachi Homecare Pharmacists PartnershipS)"is a group intended to provide exchange and cooperation of pharmacists beyond the framework of organizationalaffil iation, and authors hope to encourage the participation of increasingly more pharmacists to develop a close-cooperation system of acute care hospitals and community medical/home care.

Monitoring of environmental arsenic by cultures of the photosynthetic bacterial sensor illuminated with a near-infrared light emitting diode array.

Recombinant Rhodopseudomonas palustris, harboring the carotenoid-metabolizing gene crtI (CrtIBS), and whose color changes from greenish yellow to red in response to inorganic As(III), was cultured in transparent microplate wells illuminated with a light emitting diode (LED) array. The cells were seen to grow better under near-infrared light, when compared with cells illuminated with blue or green LEDs. The absorbance ratio of 525 to 425 nm after cultivation for 24 h, which reflects red carotenoid accumulation, increased with an increase in As(III) concentrations. The detection limit of cultures illuminated with near-infrared LED was 5 microgram/l, which was equivalent to that of cultures in test tubes illuminated with an incandescent lamp. A near-infrared LED array, in combination with a microplate, enabled the simultaneous handling of multiple cultures, including CrtIBS and a control strain, for normalization by the illumination of those with equal photon flux densities. Thus, the introduction of a near-infrared LED array to the assay is advantageous for the monitoring of arsenic in natural water samples that may contain a number of unknown factors and, therefore, need normalization of the reporter event.