Physicians are drawn into diverse leadership roles in academic medicine, but little in our education and training prepares us for these responsibilities. Fortunately, there is growing convergence in the literature on the attributes of successful leaders for knowledge-based organisations. Top-performing leaders seem to be self-effacing team-builders who eschew rapid-cycle strategic planning and ...

Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli serotype O157:H7 is a pathotype of diarrheagenic E. coli that produces one or more Shiga toxins, forms a characteristic histopathology described as attaching and effacing lesions, and possesses the large virulence plasmid pO157. The bacterium is recognized worldwide, especially in developed countries, as an emerging food-borne bacterial pathogen, which causes ...

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) belong to a group of bacteria known as attaching and effacing (A/E) pathogens that cause disease by adhering to the lumenal surfaces of their host's intestinal epithelium. EPEC and EHEC are major causes of infectious diarrhea that result in significant childhood morbidity and mortality worldwide. Recent advances in in...

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC), first described in the 1940's and 1950's, remain an important cause of severe infantile diarrhoea in many parts of the developing world. EPEC do not produce enterotoxins and are not invasive; instead their virulence depends upon exploitation of host cell signalling pathways and the host cell cytoskeleton both as a means of colonizing mucosal surfaces of...

Food poisoning is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the world. Citrobacter rodentium is an enteric pathogen which attaches itself to enterocytes and induces attachment and effacing (A/E) lesions. The ability of the bacterium to cause infection requires subversion of the host actin cytoskeleton. Rac-dependent actin polymerization is activated by a guanine nucleotide exchang...

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC), like many bacterial pathogens, employ a type III secretion system to deliver effector proteins across the bacterial cell. In EPEC, four proteins are known to be exported by a type III secretion system_EspA, EspB and EspD required for subversion of host cell signal transduction pathways and a translocated intimin receptor (Tir) protein (formerly Hp90) wh...

Respected on both sides of the Atlantic for questioning the tenets underlying the pathophysiology of diabetes and its complications, Trevor Orchard continues to influence the fields of epidemiology and medicine. With a self-effacing style that might be described as typically British, he remains provocative and prominent among the research community. An Englishman educated in Wales and living in...

he history of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale” is complicated, as is the narrative itself. Part love story, part saint’s life, Chaucer’s tale of the extremely pious, self-effacing Custance exhibits a pathos that is little appreciated by modern readers. While literary audiences in the medieval period were “unusually receptive” to deeply emotional tales (Frank 179), since the late nineteent...

A 3-year-old, intact, male Beagle dog developed clinical signs of pleurothotonus and altered head position to the right, neck pain, nystagmus, hyperreflexia of the left forelimb, and hyperextension of both forelimbs. Magnetic resonance imaging enabled a tentative diagnosis of thalamic neoplasia with incidental hydromyelia at the level of the second cervical vertebra. The animal was euthanatized...

Acute diarrheal illness is a global health problem that may be exacerbated by concurrent infection. Using Citrobacter rodentium, a murine model of attaching and effacing diarrheagenic Escherichia coli, we demonstrate that persistent Helicobacter hepaticus infection modulates host responses to diarrheal disease, resulting in delayed recovery from weight loss and from tissue damage. Chronic colit...