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Background: Central venous catheterization (CVC) is a critical clinical procedure. To avoid complications, possessing good knowledge regarding the CVC care bundle and skills for the proper insertion and maintenance of CVC are important. Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention and the use of an interactive response system in enhancing the CVC bundle care and insertion skills of medical students undergoing critical care medicine training. Materials and Methods: Sixth-year medical students (equivalent to fourth-year students in the United States) engaged in didactic lessons, interactive demonstrations, and simulator training facilitated by a CVC team comprising three thoracic and two vascular surgeons (all with a minimum 5 years of experience in central venous access) during their intensive care unit (ICU) rotation. Self-reported knowledge and confidence levels were assessed using pre-and posttests administered through the Zuvio App, an interactive response system. Results: A total of 60 students underwent the educational intervention, of which 54 completed the pretest and 40 completed the posttest. In the posttest, significant improvement was found in the CVC bundle care competency and understanding (P = 0.002), preprocedural preparation (P = 0.002), insertion procedures (P = 0.004), complications (P = 0.003), and insertion depth decisions (P = 0.001). Staff and students reported that assessment and interaction via the Zuvio App were valuable, practical, and feasible in a clinical setting, providing trainees with an individual competency portfolio of receiving precise medical education. Conclusions: Integrating the training provided by a specialized team with an interactive response system enhanced the knowledge and competency level in CVC insertion among medical students in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecstasy use is a growing problem in the United States. Techniques to demonstrate and characterize the toxicity associated with its use have been limited and employed infrequently. In this study, we compare the deleterious effects of ecstasy use in rats with that of methamphet-amine and traumatic brain injury. Specifically, we investigate the degradation of structural proteins αII-spectrin and tau by the pro-necrotic calpain and pro-apoptotic caspase systems. Ecstasy-induced neurotoxicity is shown after 24 hours, although to a much lesser extent than that of metham-phetamine or traumatic brain injury. Neurotoxicity is still evident after 72 hours. Furthermore, apoptosis of the liver is seen 72 hours after ecstasy use. Use of protease inhibitors may be useful in preventing ecstasy-induced toxicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the collaboration between the Airlift Command of the U.S. Air Force with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop and deploy the Airlift Deployment Analysis System. The system provided a set of decision support tools to manage information on cargo and passengers to be moved and the available resources as well as tools to schedule missions. The challenge is to schedule aircraft, crew and mission support resources to maximize the on-time delivery of cargo and passengers. The result of the partnership between developers and flow planners was an integrated system that flow planners could use to enter and evaluate cargo- and passenger-movement requests; to allocate airlift resources, including aircraft availability, aircraft characteristics, crews, airfield resources and airlift network configurations.