Care of the critically ill is a team effort where doctors and nurses heavily depend on laboratory measurements. The mortality rate of such patients is between 30 to 40%. The authors are, appropriately, an anaesthetist, a medical microbiologist and a clinical scientist, all of whom are key specialists that would make up the team. Their stated goal is to enable laboratory personnel to understand ...

We report an outbreak of laboratory-acquired Brucella abortus infection originating in the accidental breakage of a centrifuge tube. A total of 12 laboratory workers were infected (attack rate of 31%), with an incubation time ranging from 6 weeks to 5 months. Antibody titers were evaluated weekly in all personnel exposed, allowing the diagnosis of the infection in most cases before the onset of...

Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, monkeypox, and Ebola virus diseases of humans have all been recognized since 1967. These are examples of some of the exotic virus diseases which through importation may present a potential public health problem in the United States. Some of these viruses are also highly hazardous to laboratory and medical personnel. This paper is a review of the general chara...

Biosafety is an important part of the know-how of all clinical laboratory professionals. Biosafely must have high priority in the design and use of analytical systems. Attention should be focused on reducing the handling of biological specimens, reducing biohazards to laboratory personnel, and on improving the labelling and containment of biohazardous materials. In this paper, biosafety issues ...

We give a simple explicit formula for turnover reduction when a large number of alphas are traded on the same execution platform and trades are crossed internally. We model turnover reduction via alpha correlations. Then, for a large number of alphas, turnover reduction is related to the largest eigenvalue and the corresponding eigenvector of the alpha correlation matrix.

More police reduces crime but little is know about the mechanism. Does more police deter crime by reducing its attractiveness, or is the reduction driven by an incapacitation of recurrent criminals? This paper exploits micro-level data on single robberies together with redeployments of two police forces within a city, providing first evidence of (negative) incapacitation that is driven by reduc...

Issue: When benchmarking (as in engagement, work‐ stress, safety, or performance‐related applications), the use of normative scores can be a big mistake. Because if the norm group characteristics change in any way, the entire benchmarking process is rendered problematic. More importantly, if score magnitudes are considered related to performance, then it is the actual score which carries that r...