Update on the campylobacter epidemic from chicken meat in New Zealand: The urgent need for an upgraded regulatory response.

New Zealand has a long-running campylobacter infection (campylobacteriosis) epidemic with contaminated fresh chicken meat as the major source. This is both the highest impact zoonosis and the largest food safety problem in the country. Adding to this burden is the recent rapid emergence of antibiotic resistance in these campylobacter infections acquired from locally-produced chicken. Campylobacteriosis rates halved in 2008, as compared with the previous 5 years, following the introduction of regulatory limits on allowable contamination levels in fresh chicken meat, with large health and economic benefits resulting. In the following decade, disease rates do not appear to have declined further. The cumulative impact would equate to an estimated 539 000 cases, 5480 hospitalisations, 284 deaths and economic costs of approximately US$380 million during the last 10 years (2009-2018). Additional regulatory interventions, that build on previously successful regulations in this country, are urgently needed to control the source of this epidemic.

Outbreak of influenza A(H1N1)v without travel history in a school in the Toulouse district, France, June 2009.

In June 2009, for the first time in France, a confirmed outbreak of influenza A(H1N1)v without history of travel occurred in a secondary school in Toulouse district. A total of 15 cases were confirmed among students of which three were asymptomatic. This report describes the outbreak and its public health implications.

The myth of the replacement child: parents' stories and practices after perinatal death.

Parents bereaved by perinatal death adapt to their losses in different ways. When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses. This qualitative interview study examines the family stories told by bereaved parents, with particular attention to how parents represent the dead child and subsequent children in the current family structure. We categorized parents' stories as those which suggested that parents replaced the loss by an emphasis on parenting subsequent children, or maintained a connection to the dead child through storytelling and ritual behavior. The two ways in which parents maintained the connection were to preserve the space in the family that the dead child would have inhabited, or to create an on-going relationship with the dead child for themselves and their subsequent children. There seem to be multiple paths to parenting through bereavement. The place of rituals and memorial behavior is also examined.

Orienting task effects on memory for presentation modality in children, young adults, and older adults.

Children (7 to 10 years), young adults (17 to 24 years), and older adults (55 to 77 years) were asked to learn three lists of words that were of mixed modality (half the words were visual, and half the words were auditory). With one list the subjects were asked a semantic orienting question; with another, a nonsemantic orienting question; and with a third, no orienting question. Half the subjects in each age group were also asked to remember the presentation modality of each word. Older adults remembered less information about modality than children and young adults did, and the variation in the type of orienting question--or the lack of one--affected modality identification. However, there was no Orienting Task x Age interaction for modality identification. The results of this study suggest that encoding modality information does not take place automatically--in any age group--but that explanations focusing on encoding strategies and effort are not likely to account for older adults' difficulties in remembering presentation modality.

Cognitive effort in modality retrieval by young and older adults.

A secondary task methodology was used to determine whether the retrieval of modality information is more cognitively effortful for older adults than younger ones. Young (M age = 20 years) and older (M age = 68 years) adults were asked to learn a mixed modality (auditory and visual) list of nouns. During recall of words and modality, subjects were asked to respond to a randomly presented light signal. Cognitive effort for the primary task (recall) was measured by interference with the signal detection task. Adding a modality identification task to word retrieval did not significantly increase cognitive effort for either age group, although young adults were better at both word and modality recall and word recall itself was more effortful for older adults. Results suggest that age decements in modality learning cannot be explained by greater cognitive effort during retrieval of information about modality.

The effects of prolonged exercise on spinally injured subjects.

The effects of prolonged exercise on paraplegics have not been reported. Seven male paraplegic subjects with spinal lesions from T4 - T12 - L1 underwent an incremental wheelchair treadmill test to exhaustion. Heart rate (HR), VO2max, and VESTPD were recorded and calculated. One week later, subjects exercised in their wheelchairs at approximately 50% (mean = 52 +/- 2%) of VO2max for 60 min on a motorized treadmill. Approximately 10 ml venous blood was withdrawn both 10 min and immediately prior to the prolonged exercise, at 20, 40, and 60 min of the exercise period, and at 10 min post-exercise. Venous blood was analyzed for glucose, hemoglobin, lactate, Na+, K+, Cl-, and plasma protein. Hematocrit was recorded and plasma volume changes calculated VO2, VE, and HR were recorded at 17, 37, and 57 min of the prolonged exercise. The mean VO2max was 29.5 +/- 2.7 ml.kg-1.min-1, with a mean max VESTPD and HR of 61.86 +/- 4.98 1.min-1 and 174 +/- 4 b.min-1, respectively. The changes in VO2 and VE during the prolonged wheelchair exercise were not significant. Significant changes occurred in venous lactate and plasma glucose concentrations during prolonged wheelchair exercise. Plasma volume changes were similar to those seen in able-bodied subjects. A notable finding was the pre-exercise hemodilution. Present data indicate that paraplegics can exercise at approximately 50% VO2 for 60 min, producing responses similar to those in able-bodied subjects.