OVERVIEW The plasma supply for pharmaceutical manufacturing consists of surplus plasma recovered from whole blood collection and source plasma from plasmapheresis in Korea. Shortages are typically covered by importation. The total plasma supply for fractionation was 608,352 liters in 2009, of which 430,267 liters were supplied domestically. The self-sufficiency rate was, therefore, about 71% in...

Richard Cruess, of the Centre of Medical Education at McGill University, recently observed that “Lots of people are terribly worried about what is happening in medicine and what it is forcing physicians to do”, adding that it’s time that doctors assert “This is who we are and this is what we do.” This call to reaffirm our professional identity is prompted by the many challenges confronting mode...

serendipitously stumbled on the moving poetry from Paul Simon's signature song, The Sounds of Silence. It happens , ironically — and previously unbeknownst to me — that this moving elegy was composed during Simon's period of mourning after Kennedy's assassination. The last stanza speaks eloquently to the sounds that now reverberate in this maturing cardiologist's mind: And the people bowed and ...

It is increasingly important for clinicians to know whether prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is detectable or undetectable in serum of a patient being treated for prostate cancer.' The lower the PSA falls after treatment, the more sensitive the cancer is to that therapy and the longer the patient is likely to live. However, clinicians are faced with a bewildering series of reports from different...

Modern industrial development commenced in Shanghai in the late 19th century, with the incursion of Western settlements. Soon afterwards cultural activities associated with a modern industrial society made their appearance. While determined by economic forces, the formation of Shanghai’s urban culture at the time involved the growth of both socioeconomic institutions and new forms of cultural a...

Book Review/Science in the Media T he place of genetically modified crops in sustainable agriculture has been the subject of heated debate for decades. A new book takes an innovative approach to this debate by presenting the perspectives of an unlikely pair of co-authors [1]. Pam Ronald is a plant molecular biologist, genetic engineer, and supporter of genetically engineering crops for the bene...

265 Editorial In this day and age, every aspect of society has already been com­ mercialized. It seems that anything can be regarded as a commo­ dity. Due to influences from many directions, medical practice has not been an exception, and in fact, it is sometimes a prime example of such commercialism. Physicians' open commercial advertising has gone beyond a social problem to become a me­ dia e...

It is evident that the practice of cardiac catheterization has undergone, and continues to undergo, marked change. Most prominent are the recent very rapid proliferation of catheterization laboratories in general and the development of newer types of catheterization laboratory. No uniform definitions exist for these newer laboratories, so meaningful communication is difficult. The new settings ...

In a World Report about the pros and cons of a regulated market for organ donation in the USA (Oct 17, p 1315), Priya Shetty explores other solutions for tackling organ shortage. When analysing the situation in Europe, she states that “Spain, which introduced presumed consent in 1990, has seen donations double...” The real fact is that Spain has not changed its transplantation law since 1979. O...

I n the November issue of the CJASN, Jagbir Gill et al. present a University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) series of 33 patients that underwent kidney transplantation in a foreign country and returned to the United States for post-transplant care. “Transplant tourists” are traveling to established destinations to obtain readily accessible organs for transplantation, available from the poor o...