Case presented by: A Davison, FRCP, consultant physician at Southend General Hospital D Mulvey, FFARCS, clinical research fellow Chairman: M Green, FRCP, consultant physician Collator: D Currie, MRCP, senior registrar Discussion group: D M Denison, FRCP, consultant physician in respiratory physiology T Clark, FRCP, consultant physician in respiratory medicine K F Chung, MRCP, senior lecturer in...

Atypical mycobacteria, or more correctly nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) species, are a ubiquitous group of environmental organisms that have potential to cause pathological presentations, varying from skin and superficial infections to deeper infections with or without systemic dissemination. Many NTM species are well-recognised pathogens, whereas others are newly emerging and their pathoge...

David Skae was resident physician of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum (hereafter REA) from 1846 to 1872. Despite a pioneering article about him by Frank Fish, Skae remains a liminal figure in the history of psychiatry. He is usually seen as an asylum-based practical medical instructor of more important figures such as Thomas Clouston. Although he lectured on insanity in the Edinburgh extra-academical...

Scientific and technological advances in our understanding of the nature and consequences of human genetic variation are now allowing genetic determinants of susceptibility to common multifactorial diseases to be defined, as well as our individual response to therapy. I review how genome-wide association studies are robustly identifying new disease susceptibility loci, providing insights into d...

This paper presents a hybridization of a Constraint Programming (CP) model and search techniques with Local Search (LS) and some ideas borrowed from Genetic Algorithms (GA). The context is the physician rostering problem, whose instances can vary greatly and for which almost no general tool has been developed. It is hoped that the combination of the three techniques will lead to an algorithm th...