The Australia antigen and role of the late Philadelphia General Hospital in reducing post-transfusion hepatitis and sequelae.

Baruch Blumberg, who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the Australia antigen, died on April 5, 2011. Arguably, that discovery has been the most important advance in the field of Hepatology. It led to the virtual elimination of transfusion related hepatitis B in most parts of the world and was essential to the identification of hepatitis A, C, D and E viruses.

Development of family medicine education in Moldova with Carelift International.

Background: As in other former Soviet republics, Moldova's health system has been dependent upon multispecialty and hospital care. The government has undertaken a planning process to develop a primary care-based system utilizing family physicians. Carelift International and Moldova State Medical and Pharmaceutical University joined together to design an educational program to help create a family medicine specialty in the country.

Lessons learned from six years of international administrations of the ECFMG's SP-based clinical skills assessment.

Purpose: The Educational Commission on Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) conducted international clinical skills assessments (CSAs) to evaluate the readiness of foreign medical graduates to enter U.S. residency programs, to validate national medical examinations in other countries, and to introduce other countries to new methods of evaluating medical students.

Women in US medicine: the comparative roles of graduates of US and foreign medical schools.

The feminization of US medicine has occurred historically through two separate phenomena: the increase in the number of female graduates of US medical schools and the in-migration of female graduates of foreign medical schools. Reported here are the findings regarding gender on specialty choice, employment setting, and specialty board certification of 55,031 and 191,723 graduates of foreign medical schools and US medical schools, respectively. Graduates of foreign schools were subdivided into those who were foreign-national international medical graduates (IMGs), naturalized US citizen IMGs, and native-born US citizen IMGs at the time of entry into the US medical system.