Odour detection in children and young people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities.

Background: Olfaction provides information on very important dimensions of the environment; however the olfactory abilities of children and young people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) remain largely unknown. This within-subjects study explores olfactory detection abilities in children with PIMD.

Method: Twenty-two children and young people with PIMD (7-18 years) were presented with 18 medium intensity odours and an odourless control stimulus.

Advance directives and end-of-life decisions in Switzerland: role of patients, relatives and health professionals.

Background: Little is known in Europe about end-of-life (EOL) decisions and advance directives (AD), particularly in patients with severe advanced disease. Switzerland is a multicultural and multilingual federal country and has the particularity of being divided into four linguistic and cultural regions OBJECTIVE: To understand better in different regions of Switzerland which specific patient's characteristics could have an impact on their decision to complete AD or not.

Design/setting/participants: Prospective study conducted in four palliative care units.

Development of a risk management tool for prioritizing chemical hazard-food pairs and demonstration for selected mycotoxins.

We developed a simple tool for ranking chemical hazard-food pairs to assist policy makers and risk managers selecting the hazard-food pairs that deserve more attention and need to be monitored during food safety inspections. The tool is based on the derivation of a "Priority Index" (PI) that results from the ratio of the potency of the hazard and the consumer exposure. The potency corresponds to a toxicity reference value of the hazard, whereas the exposure results from the combination of the concentration of the hazard in the food, and the food consumption.

[Palliative Care in Nursing Homes: Characteristics and Specificities].

Elderly patients in palliative situations residing in a nursing home present characteristics and specificities that clearly distinguish them from patients with advanced cancer. Besides the difficulty to define a precise prognosis, their many comorbidities, their communication difficulties because of cognitive disorders, their high sensitivity to primary and secondary effects of drugs render their management a real challenge for physician and caregivers. Accompanying these patients at the end of their life also raises many ethical problems, especially when they are no longer able to express their wishes and have not previously expressed advance directives.

Glass transition associated with the jamming of vibrated granular matter.

We investigate a vibrated granular system composed of millimeter-size glass beads. When the system is submitted to a perturbation with decreasing intensity, below the fluidization limit, it evolves in a way similar to glass-forming liquids until it reaches an amorphous jammed state. This jamming transition is observed by the means of an immersed oscillator, either in the free or forced mode, while the granular medium is submitted to an external perturbation at a fixed frequency or within a frequency band.