Undergraduate radiology teaching from the student's perspective.

Objectives: To obtain medical students' evaluation of the quality of undergraduate radiology teaching received, preferred teaching methods and resources. This is a follow-up project to an earlier study of junior doctors who felt that radiology teaching left them ill prepared for medical practice.

Methods: A questionnaire to third and fifth year medical students undertaking clinical rotations at Newcastle University, UK.

Analysis of hazardous material releases due to natural hazards in the United States.

Natural hazards were the cause of approximately 16,600 hazardous material (hazmat) releases reported to the National Response Center (NRC) between 1990 and 2008-three per cent of all reported hazmat releases. Rain-induced releases were most numerous (26 per cent of the total), followed by those associated with hurricanes (20 per cent), many of which resulted from major episodes in 2005 and 2008. Winds, storms or other weather-related phenomena were responsible for another 25 per cent of hazmat releases.

Empirical estimation of the conditional probability of natech events within the United States.

Natural disasters are the cause of a sizeable number of hazmat releases, referred to as "natechs." An enhanced understanding of natech probability, allowing for predictions of natech occurrence, is an important step in determining how industry and government should mitigate natech risk. This study quantifies the conditional probabilities of natechs at TRI/RMP and SICS 1311 facilities given the occurrence of hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods.

Accidental hazardous material releases with human impacts in the United States: exploration of geographical distribution and temporal trends.

Objective: To investigate the circumstances and geographic and temporal distributions of hazardous material releases and resulting human impacts in the United States.

Method: Releases with fatalities, injuries, and evacuations were identified from reports to the National Response Center between 1990 and 2008, correcting for data quality issues identified in previous studies.

Results: From more than 550,000 reports, 861 deaths, 16,348 injuries and 741,427 evacuations were identified.

Petroleum and hazardous material releases from industrial facilities associated with Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina struck an area dense with industry, causing numerous releases of petroleum and hazardous materials. This study integrates information from a number of sources to describe the frequency, causes, and effects of these releases in order to inform analysis of risk from future hurricanes. Over 200 onshore releases of hazardous chemicals, petroleum, or natural gas were reported.

GvHD-associated cytokine polymorphisms do not associate with Omenn syndrome rather than T-B- SCID in patients with defects in RAG genes.

Recombinase activating genes 1/2 (RAG1/2) deficiency, critical to initiate gene rearrangement encoding lymphocyte receptors, causes T-B- severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) and Omenn syndrome (OS), characterised by erythroderma, hepatosplenomegaly, lymphadenopathy, activated, clonal T cell expansions with restricted TCRVbeta family usage, and opportunistic infection. Many features of OS resemble graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). Frequency of GvHD-associated cytokine gene polymorphisms (CGPs) with OS was investigated to explain phenotypic differences between T-B- SCID and OS.

A geographic sampling strategy for studying relationships between human activity and malaria vectors in urban Africa.

This paper describes a geographic sampling strategy for ecologic studies and describes the relationship between human activities and anopheline larval ecology in urban areas. Kisumu and Malindi, Kenya were mapped using global positioning systems, and a geographic information system was used to overlay a measured grid, which served as a sampling frame. Grid cells were stratified and randomly selected according to levels of planning and drainage.