[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.