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Background: Oral streptococci represent the causing microorganism for infective endocarditis (IE) in many patients. The impact of oral infections is questioned, and it has been suggested that bacteraemia due to daily routines may play a bigger part in the aetiology of IE. The aim of this study was to examine the association between oral health and infective endocarditis caused by oral bacteria in comparison with bacteria of other origin than the oral cavity. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted at Haukeland University Hospital from 2006- 2015. All consecutive adult patients admitted to hospital for treatment of IE and subjected to an oral focus screening including orthopantomogram, were included. The clinical, radiological and laboratory characteristics of the patients, collected during oral infectious focus screening, were analysed. Patient survival was calculated using Kaplan–Meier and mortality rates were compared using Cox-regression. Results: A total of 208 patients were included, 77% (n = 161) male patients and 23% (n = 47) female, mean age was 58 years. A total of 67 (32%) had IE caused by viridans streptococci. No statistically significant correlation could be found between signs of oral infection and IE caused by viridans streptococci. The overall mortality at 30 days was 4.3% (95% CI: 1.6–7.0). There was no statistical difference in mortality between IE caused by viridans streptococci or S. aureus (HRR = 1.16, 95% CI: 0.57–2.37, p = 0.680). Conclusion: The study indicates that the association between origin of the IE causing bacteria and findings during oral infection screening might be uncertain and may suggest that the benefit of screening and elimination of oral infections in patients admitted with IE might be overestimated. However, the results should be interpreted with caution and further studies are needed before any definite conclusions can be drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims. There are limited analytical descriptions of the assistive device situation in Norway for patients with ALS and other motor neuron diseases. This study is aimed at investigating how patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals (occupational therapists and physiotherapists) experience the assistive device situation. Methods. Twenty-four interviews were conducted with patients with motor neuron disease, caregivers, and healthcare professionals involved in procurement and adaptation of assistive devices. Systematic text condensation was used to analyse the interviews. Results. The majority of patients and caregivers had positive experiences of follow-up by the specialist healthcare service. Several found follow-up by the primary health service to be deficient owing to inadequate expertise, continuity, and resources. Healthcare professionals reported having a proactive approach to identifying needs for assistive devices, but for various reasons, application processes were often delayed. Several patients indicated a reluctance to use assistive devices and were ambivalent regarding proactivity. The availability of assistive devices for some functional impairments was described as inadequate. Some patients felt there was too little focus on sexuality in the follow-up. The respondents had a number of suggestions for improving the assistive device situation. Conclusions. Multidisciplinary ALS teams are found to ensure follow-up expertise and continuity. Healthcare professionals wish to take a proactive approach to assistive devices, but a number of bureaucratic obstacles occur. The study findings are preliminary and should be validated through a prospective national quality registry for motor neuron diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family Marseilleviridae was the second family of giant viruses that was described in 2013, after the family Mimiviridae. Marseillevirus marseillevirus , isolated in 2007 by coculture on Acanthamoeba polyphaga , is the prototype member of this family. Afterward, the worldwide distribution of marseilleviruses was revealed through their isolation from samples of various types and sources. Thus, 62 were isolated from environmental water, one from soil, one from a dipteran, one from mussels, and two from asymptomatic humans, which led to the description of 67 marseillevirus isolates, including 21 by the IHU Méditerranée Infection in France. Recently, five marseillevirus genomes were assembled from deep sea sediment in Norway. Isolated marseilleviruses have ≈250 nm long icosahedral capsids and 348–404 kilobase long mosaic genomes that encode 386–545 predicted proteins. Comparative genomic analyses indicate that the family Marseilleviridae includes five lineages and possesses a pangenome composed of 3,082 clusters of genes. The detection of marseilleviruses in both symptomatic and asymptomatic humans in stool, blood, and lymph nodes, and an up-to-30-day persistence of marseillevirus in rats and mice, raise questions concerning their possible clinical significance that are still under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "The Assistive Device Situation for ALS Patients in Norway," published in the previous issue is presented.

The article examines organizational change in the Norwegian state administration in the post‐World War II period, based on data from the Norwegian State Administration Database. The main focus is on different types of foundings and terminations of state agencies. The importance of international and national administrative doctrines and party constellations in government for organizational change are analyzed. To some extent, the pattern of change is found to reflect global trends in new public management (NPM) and post-NPM administrative reforms, but national doctrines, party constellations, and agency-specific characteristics like the form of organization and the extent of specialization are also relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses possible answers to the question of what constitutes different types of change of state organizations. Drawing upon contributions from organization theory and public administration, classifications of different types of births, survivals, and deaths, are discussed and outlined, providing a mapping of organizational change in state administration along the horizontal as well as the vertical dimension. As an illustration, the article also shows how a detailed classification has been used in the Norwegian State Administration Database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stated purpose of the Norwegian Media Ownership Act is to promote freedom of expression. Its true purpose is to restrict the political impact of making expressions. The discrepancy between the stated and true purpose is the issue discussed in the article. It explains the act as a result of the party system having lost its historical control over the media system. Rather than regulating the freedom of expression the act therefore regulates the right to influence public opinion. The parties saw no need to regulate political influence at the time they monopolized it. That need emerged when the media became independent and started challenging the influence of the parties. The result is therefore a Media Ownership Act favouring political influence via state-controlled broadcast media answerable to the political system, and restricting political influence via a privately controlled daily press answerable to the market. An act really promoting the freedom of expression would not regulate the right to influence public opinion, but restrict the opportunities of both public and private media to censor the expressions of the citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to Hallin and Mancini's (2004) request for studies to follow up their comparison of media systems. They argue for structural-functionalist differentiation theory, and the article reviews the Norwegian Labor Press from that perspective. It also demonstrates the necessity of employing all of structural-functionalism when studying party press parallelism. By doing so, the Norwegian study leads to other conclusions concerning commercialization and autonomy, parallelism and political change, professionalization and instrumentalization, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the media policy objectives of the Norwegian state as they appear in earlier research ( H. Østbye, 1988/1995 ; T. Syvertsen, 2004 ) and in the government's own main media political documents. The review identifies 3 identical media policy value chains serving different societal purposes: politics, culture, and economics. Equipped with this analysis, the article challenges J. van Cuilenburg and D. McQuail's (2003) theory of a media policy paradigm shift redefining the public interest from politics to economics, and comments on D. C. Hallin and P. Mancini's (2004) models of media and politics, according to which Norway should be in transition from democratic corporatism to liberalism. Contrary to them, the article argues that the state has reinforced its political interpretation of the public interest, not despite the media having changed their own interests from politics to profit but precisely for that reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, the commercialisation of the media in Norway has prompted two opposing theories concerning the impact of commercial news criteria; the first suggests it restrains, the second that it stimulates, investigative journalism. But the two theories draw the same normative conclusion, namely that commercialisation has negative implications for the contribution of media to democracy. This article presents the two theories, and puts their empirical assumptions to the test, using the distribution of awards for outstanding investigative journalism as a yardstick. The test results are discussed in the light of economic theory. It seems that critics of media commercialisation have placed too much emphasis on the cost-cutting aspect of a capitalist economy, and too little on capitalism as “the free-market innovation machine”. The conclusion is that commercial news criteria stimulate investigative journalism more than they restrain it, and that investigative journalism's contribution to democracy is more positive than negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samples of Norway spruce (Picea abies [L.] Karst) were dendrochronologically investigated in order to detect infestations by Dendroctonus micans (Kug.), the great spruce bark beetle (Col. Scolytidae), a relatively recent introduction to France. Uninfested natural forests located in the north-eastern French Alps and heavily infested plantations in the Ardèche region (Massif Central) were compared. The penetration holes bored in trunks by the bark beetle induced visible marks on wood, such as extreme ring width reductions, locally missing rings and crescent-shaped resin patches between consecutive rings that make possible a post-infestation dating.The outbreak began in 1979, 5 years prior to first insect visual detection by foresters. In the infested forest, tree basal area growth was not as sustained as in uninfested natural stands, but showed an inflection point at an unusually young tree age (from 30 to 40 years). Ring widths showing extreme synchronous radial growth reductions were caused either by excessively cold periods (e.g. in 1948, 1980, 1984, 1992) or by summer drought (as in 1986). Most of these weak growth years were shared with uninfested sites. In healthy forests, the consequences of extremely cold years were usually recorded only in high elevation stands, especially near the timberline, whereas summer drought effects were mostly visible in low altitude forests. By contrast, both phenomena were recorded in the infected Ardèche plantation. An analysis of tree-rings and monthly climate confirmed that Norway spruce growth in Ardèche plantations was reduced by excessively low minimum temperature during most parts of the year prior to ring formation, by higher than average maximum temperature during current spring and summer, and by drought in winter, spring and summer. Thus, the regional Ardèche climate with both cold winters and dry summers (especially in July) seems to weaken spruce trees planted there. Moreover, tree sensitivity to climate was found to be greatly enhanced by insect infestation. Such interactions between climatic stress and insect outbreak led to forest dieback in a 15–20-year period, when trees were still young (less than 70 years), and without any tree recovery. Therefore, in that region spruce plantations should be replaced by non-host species of Dendroctonus micans, especially where soil conditions may exacerbate drought effects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]