[Cost awareness at emergencies: multicentric survey among prescribers].

Aim: Regular increasing of health-care expense brought about the development of medical implication in prescription control and the will to give more responsibility to prescribers. Emergency departments account for a large part of hospital expenses. This study was carried out to evaluate cost awareness among French emergency physicians.

[The campaign against sexually transmissible diseases and endemic treponematoses].

From the moment WHO was established in 1948, the control of venereal diseases was felt to deserve highest priority, together with activities to control malaria and tuberculosis. International action was needed in view of the high morbidity and mortality from venereal diseases, their serious human and social consequences, and the prevalence of congenital syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhoea, chancroid, venereal lymphogranulomatosis, granuloma inguinale). WHO immediately set up a global programme for the control of STDs and, with the participation of other agencies, especially UNICEF, furnished countries with assistance in the form of personnel, equipment and funds for the operation of programmes to assess the extent and impact of STDs and to plan and implement practical measure of control.

The control of endemic treponematoses.

In the 1950s and 1960s, following a decision by the Second World Health Assembly in 1949, mass treatment campaigns against the endemic treponematoses were undertaken with the support of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund. The control policy was based on recognition of the importance of screening at least 90% of the target population; of conducting periodic resurveys and treating missed, new, and imported cases; of treating the entire treponemal reservoir (including latent cases and contacts); and of using adequate dosages of long-acting penicillin (minimal dosages were recommended). Later, policies on the extent of contact treatment at different levels of endemicity were established.

Worldwide microbial resistance to antimicrobial agents.

The resistance of microbial pathogens to antimicrobial agents is a crucial health-related problem. The inappropriate use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine, along with the widespread use of these agents in animal breeding and in agriculture, has favored the selection of multiply resistant microbial strains. The policies employed for the monitoring of such microbial resistance must be reviewed, and new policies designed to retard and combat the emergence of resistance must be implemented.

Immunization during a cerebrospinal meningitis epidemic in the Mongolian People's Republic, 1974-75.

An epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) in the Mongolian People's Republic, starting in 1969, reached its peak in 1974. In that year and in early 1975, 65 000 children in the 0-8-years age group in the main towns and in the provinces were immunized with meningococcal vaccine of serogroup A. The morbidity rates due to CSM were 12 times higher in the non-immunized than in the immunized children.

[Surveillance of sexually transmitted diseases: practical approach (author's transl)].

Even today we still do not have enough precise information either on the number of diseases which should be included in this collective concept or on the frequency of the diseases and their complications. Information is also lacking on methods for measuring these frequencies and assuring satisfactory surveillance. Various methods of gauging the frequency of these diseases are examined and evaluated and a practical surveillance programme is suggested.

[Laboratory methods used for the screening and the control of sexually transmitted diseases (author's transl)].

The most currently used methods by laboratories for the screening of sexually transmitted diseases were reviewed by the authors and their comparative reliability and sensitiivity examined. The authors endeavoured to give guidance to physicians and bacteriologists in the choice of available techniques as regards collection sites, transport of specimens, choice of transport media, serological tests for syphilis screening and diagnostic methods for urethritis or non-gonococcal vaginitis.

Chlamydiae as agents of sexually transmitted diseases.

Chlamydiae are being increasingly recognized as an important cause of human disease. The known geographical distribution of lymphogranuloma venereum and the role of chlamydiae as agents of sexually transmitted diseases are reviewed. The presence of chlamydiae in the urethra and the cervix, and their etiological relationship to genital infections, first recognized in connexion with ocular infections, have been proved in a number of studies in selected populations in a few countries.