The Road Less Traveled

As I look down the hill through the editorial office’s window, I notice a sprout developing on a pine tree blooming nearby. I then pat myself on the back thinking of the last 3 months I have gone through. It was snowing when I first began the managing editorship for Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives. The first issue has already been published, with its glossy cover now reflecting in the sunshine. This is a crystal of pains of scientists in this ‘five-pine’, or Osong techno-polis. As we grow older, we discover that what seemed at one time an absorbing interest, was in reality a passion that had swept over us before passing on. Finally, we come to realize that our life has no more continuity than a rock-pool filled by a crashing wave before it is then emptied. This journal might be nothing more than another passion of mine when I consider it in retrospect sometime in the future. But I would also like to say that I have taken the less traveled path of two roads diverging in the woods, and that has made all the difference. As I calculate the chance of radioactive fall-out from our neighboring country’s Fukushima nuclear plants in this weekend’s rain, I am also looking at the corrected manuscripts for this issue on my desk, simultaneously dialing the numbers for authors who have yet to submit a revised article. As our journal aims and scope reveal, this issue covers the full spectrum of epidemiological research, basic and applied disease-related research, a national survey, and a cohort study. In this issue, we discover that cottons rats can be used for the study of influenza virus pathogenesis for human influenza A (H1N1) [1], and the differences in phenotypic susceptibility assays between Korean highly active anti-retroviral therapy-experienced HIV-1 infected and highly active anti-retroviral therapy-naı̈ve patients [2]. Lyme borreliosis is also described in Korea [3]. Furthermore, we see that hepatitis E was more prevalent in rural areas than urban areas (odds ratio 3.22, 95% confidence interval: 1.46e7.10) based on a national survey [4], and the first serological evidence for dengue