[Open doors, closed ports: can medicine suggest something to society?].

Western countries are today experiencing a profound mutation of their immigration policies. Integration and hospitality have been taken over by closure and rejections. The policy of "closed ports" gained ground as never before.

Intravenous Endotoxin Challenge in Healthy Humans: An Experimental Platform to Investigate and Modulate Systemic Inflammation.

Activation of inflammatory pathways represents a central mechanism in multiple disease states both acute and chronic. Triggered via either pathogen or tissue damage-associated molecular motifs, common biochemical pathways lead to conserved yet variable physiological and immunological alterations. Dissection and delineation of the determinants and mechanisms underlying phenotypic variance in response is expected to yield novel therapeutic advances.

Stimulated Whole Blood Cytokine Release as a Biomarker of Immunosuppression in the Critically Ill: The Need for a Standardized Methodology.

Objective: Reduced ex vivo lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulated whole blood pro-inflammatory cytokine release is a hallmark of immunosuppression in the critically ill and predicts adverse clinical outcomes. No standard technique for performing the assay currently exists. The impact of methodological heterogeneity was determined.

May thrombopoietin be a useful marker of sepsis severity assessment in patients with SIRS entering the emergency department?

Background: Thrombopoietin (TPO), a growth factor primarily involved in regulating thrombopoiesis, has been recently implicated in the pathogenesis of sepsis. TPO levels are, indeed, greatly increased in patients with sepsis compared to control subjects, and correlate with sepsis severity. The aim of this study was to evaluate TPO as predictive biomarker of sepsis and of sepsis severity in patients entering the emergency department (ED) with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS).