Another threat to clinical research.

Over-regulation of clinical research: a threat to public health.

Clinical research is subject to increasing regulation by research ethics committees and research and development offices which are responding to social and political pressures, as well as to new legislation, both European and national, some of which is still being worked out. The resulting bureaucracy, expense and confusion are putting insuperable hurdles in the way of clinical research and cli...

Lassa fever: another threat from West Africa

Lassa fever, a zoonotic viral infection, is endemic in West Africa. The disease causes annual wide spread morbidity and mortality in Africa, and can be imported by travelers. Possible importation of Lassa fever and the potential for the use of Lassa virus as an agent of bioterrorism mandate clinicians in Israel and other countries to be vigilant and familiar with the basic characteristics of th...

Another reason for opening access to research.

Much of the debate about open access has focused on the principle of access for scientists and the economics of such a change. There is a second principle to consider: the full power of new technological approaches such as text mining, collaborative filtering, and semantic indexing, are not resulting in powerful new public resources. Despite real success in the open access movement,most scholar...

Continuous variable transformation in anesthesia: useful clinical shorthand, but threat to research.

Anesthesiology, V 123 • No 3 504 September 2015 M ANY variables (outcome or predictor) in anesthesia are measured on a continuous scale: age, height, weight, body mass index, systolic blood pressure (SBP), and duration of surgery or anesthesia are but a few common examples. However, for routine clinical use and clinical research, continuous variables are often transformed to categorical variabl...

Burkholderia cepacia: another twist and a further threat.