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The majority of inmates in the United States are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. It is important that the technology used to test for controlled substances be accurate and reliable. For [...]

Objective: This study investigated the immunisation knowledge, attitudes and practices among health professionals in two regional Area Health Services of NSW with low and high immunisation rates. It also compared these factors between the areas and between the health professional groups. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was posted in 2006 to health professionals, located within the North Coast and Hunter New England Area Health Services, whose practice could include immunisation. This included general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, community nurses, hospital nurses and midwives. Results: Out of 926 surveys sent, 434 were returned (47%). The great majority of the health professionals (97%) believed that vaccines were safe, effective and necessary. However, in approximately one-third of respondents, there were specific concerns about additives, immune system overload and the number of vaccines. Significantly more health professionals in the North Coast area believed that additives in vaccines may be harmful and that adding more vaccines to the schedule would make immunisation too complex. Among GPs, over half felt uncomfortable about giving more than two injections at the one visit. Conclusions: Health professionals in this study had overall confidence in vaccines but had specific concerns about the number of vaccines given to children and vaccine content. These unfounded concerns may reduce parental confidence in immunisation. Implications: There is value in governments and immunisation support workers continuing their efforts to maintain up-to-date knowledge among health professionals and support the delivery of appropriate and targeted information to address concerns about vaccines. Keywords: Health Care Surveys; Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; Vaccination; Australia; Health Personnel; Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccine

Long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) remain widely accepted vertebrate models for the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie synaptic changes during learning and memory. Although LTD is a phenomenon that occurs in many regions of the CNS, it is clear that the mechanisms recruited in its induction and expression can vary, depending on many factors, including brain region and developmental time point. LTD in the hippocampus and cerebellum is probably the best characterized, although there are also other brain areas where mechanisms of LTD are well understood, and where it is thought to have a functional role.

Objective: To retrospectively review the performance of a near real-time Emergency Department (ED) Syndromic Surveillance System operating in New South Wales for identifying pneumonia outbreaks of public health importance. Methods: Retrospective data was obtained from the NSW Emergency Department data collection for a rural hospital that has experienced a cluster of pneumonia diagnoses among teenage males in August 2006. ED standard reports were examined for signals in the overall count for each respiratory syndrome, and for elevated counts in individual subgroups including; age, sex and admission to hospital status. Results: Using the current thresholds, the ED syndromic surveillance system would have trigged a signal for pneumonia syndrome in children aged 5-16 years four days earlier than the notification by a paediatrician and this signal was maintained for 14 days. Conclusion: If the ED syndromic surveillance system had been operating it could have identified the outbreak earlier than the paediatrician's notification. This may have permitted an earlier public health response. Implications: By understanding the behaviour of syndromes during outbreaks of public health importance, response protocols could be developed to facilitate earlier implementation of control measures. doi: 10.1111/j.1753-6405.2008.00255.x

Turbo codes with long frame lengths are usually constructed using a randomly chosen interleaver. Statistically, this guarantees excellent bit-error rate (BER) performance but also generates a certain number of low weight codewords, resulting in the appearance of an error floor in the BER curve. Several methods, including using an outer code, have been proposed to improve the error floor region of the BER curve. In this paper we study the effect of an outer BCH code on the frame-error rate (FER) of turbo codes. We show that additional coding gain is possible not only in the error floor region but also in the waterfall region. Also, the outer code improves the iterative APP decoder by providing a stopping criterion and alleviating convergence problems. With this method, we obtain codes whose performance is within 0.6 dB of the sphere packing bound at an FER of [10.sup.-6]. Index Terms--BCH codes, convolutional codes, frame-error rate, sphere packing bound, turbo codes.