Situational Awareness of Opioid Consumption: The Missing Link to Reducing Dependence After Surgery?

A tool for collecting and analyzing morphine milligram equivalents (MMEs) can be used to overcome barriers to situational awareness around opioid utilization in the setting of multimodal pain management. Our software application (App) has facilitated data collection, analysis, and benchmarking in a manner that is not logistically feasible using manual methods. Real-time postoperative tracking of MME over the course of an episode of care can be prohibitively labor-intensive, and teams must have practical strategies to overcome this obstacle.

Botulism from drinking pruno.

Foodborne botulism occurred among inmates at 2 prisons in California in 2004 and 2005. In the first outbreak, 4 inmates were hospitalized, 2 of whom required intubation. In the second event, 1 inmate required intubation.

A primitive Y chromosome in papaya marks incipient sex chromosome evolution.

Many diverse systems for sex determination have evolved in plants and animals. One involves physically distinct (heteromorphic) sex chromosomes (X and Y, or Z and W) that are homozygous in one sex (usually female) and heterozygous in the other (usually male). Sex chromosome evolution is thought to involve suppression of recombination around the sex determination genes, rendering permanently heterozygous a chromosomal region that may then accumulate deleterious recessive mutations by Muller's ratchet, and fix deleterious mutations by hitchhiking as nearby favourable mutations are selected on the Y chromosome.