Identification and containment of an outbreak of SARS in a community hospital.

Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is continuing to spread around the world. All hospitals must be prepared to care for patients with SARS. Thus, it is important to understand the transmission of this disease in hospitals and to evaluate methods for its containment in health care institutions.

Clinical features and short-term outcomes of 144 patients with SARS in the greater Toronto area.

Context: Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is an emerging infectious disease that first manifested in humans in China in November 2002 and has subsequently spread worldwide.

Objectives: To describe the clinical characteristics and short-term outcomes of SARS in the first large group of patients in North America; to describe how these patients were treated and the variables associated with poor outcome.

Design, Setting, And Patients: Retrospective case series involving 144 adult patients admitted to 10 academic and community hospitals in the greater Toronto, Ontario, area between March 7 and April 10, 2003, with a diagnosis of suspected or probable SARS.

Dopamine D4 receptor variant, D4GLYCINE194, in Africans, but not in Caucasians: no association with schizophrenia.

Because antipsychotic drugs selectively block dopamine receptors and since dopamine D4 receptors are elevated sixfold in postmortem schizophrenia brain, we searched for possible abnormalities in the coding region of the genomic DNA sequence for the dopamine D4 receptor in control and schizophrenia tissues. The DNA sequence for the first 250 bases of exon 3 of this receptor was examined in the genomic DNA from 296 control individuals and 58 schizophrenics. Twenty-three out of 183 control blacks (12.