Controlled expedient disposal of excess gun propellant.

The expedient field disposal of excess gun propellants on the ground is an integral part of live-fire training in many countries. However, burning excess propellant in the field will leave significant quantities of energetic residues and heavy metals in the environment. Compounds such as dinitrotoluene and nitroglycerin and metals such as lead will leach into the soil column, eventually migrating to groundwater. Contamination of the environment will lead to high remediation costs and the possible loss of the training facility. After investigating the contamination at several propellant disposal sites, a portable propellant burn pan was developed and tested. The pan was transported to training sites where excess propellant was loaded and burned in a controlled manner. Up to 120 kg of excess single-base propellant charges have been burned during two series of tests at a consumption rate of greater than 99.9%. Less than 0.03% of the energetic material was recovered outside the burn pan. Recovered lead is largely contained within the pan. The turnover rate for burns is 15 min. The residues can be collected following cool-down for proper disposal.

CFD modeling of pharmaceutical isolators with experimental verification of airflow.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models have been developed to predict the airflow in a transfer isolator using a commercial CFD code. In order to assess the ability of the CFD approach in predicting the flow inside an isolator, hot wire anemometry measurements and a novel experimental flow visualization technique consisting of helium-filled glycerin bubbles were used. The results obtained have been shown to agree well with the experiments and show that CFD can be used to model barrier systems and isolators with practical fidelity. This indicates that CFD can and should be used to support the design, testing, and operation of barrier systems and isolators.

An ectopic maxillary second molar.

A rarely encountered ectopic and dilacerate maxillary second molar is described. The tooth was found to attached to the medial wall of the maxillary sinus. Its location is thought to be due to ankylosis consequent to injury sustained during infancy.

A test of the concept of "underlying depressive illness" in the treatment of anxiety states.

In order to test the validity of the concept of anxiety states masking an underlying depressive illness, patients clinically diagnosed as suffering from anxiety or tension states were treated on a random double-blind basis for 4 weeks with either a pure anxiolytic, lorazepam, or an anxiolytic/antidepressant preparation, fluphenazine with nortriptyline. Patients' self-ratings were very similar to the physicians' ratings which showed that fluphenazine/nortriptyline was associated with significantly greater overall improvement(p less than 0.01), as well as significantly greater improvements in the group of symptoms specifically related to depression(p less than 0.05). These results suggest that a depressive element is present in an appreciable proportion of patients presenting with apparent anxiety states, and antidepressant as well as anxiolytic treatment is required. Patients selected on the basis that they had improved satisfactorily at the end of the 4-weeks' treatment were followed up for a further 3 months without medication, and the relapse rate was 24%, irrespective of previous treatment. More of the patients treated with lorazepam had to be excluded from the follow-up because of failure to improve, and these probably represented the proportion (19%) of this population with an appreciable depressive element to their illness.

Treatment of anxiety/depressive conditions in the elderly: a double-blind comparative study of Motival and amitriptyline.

A double-blind two-group comparison of fluphenazine/nortriptyline (F/N) with amitriptyline in 72 patients aged 65 or over suffering from mixed states of anxiety and depression, each treated for four weeks, showed F/N to be significantly superior to amitriptyline by Day 7 in terms of patients' self-ratings and clinicians' ratings. Patients' preference for F/N was even more pronounced by Day 28 (P less than 0.001), when the improvement in symptoms relating to depression was rated by the clinicians as significantly greater for the patients receiving F/N (P less than 0.025). The incidence of drowsiness was significantly greater (P less than 0.05) in the amitriptyline group than the F/N group. The implications of these results for the treatment of emotional disturbances in the elderly are discussed.