Disclaimer: Mention of any company or product does not constitute endorsement by NIOSH. Employers of health care workers should implement the use of improved engineering controls to reduce needlestick injuries: • Eliminate the use of needles where safe and effective alternatives are available. • Implement the use of devices with safety features and evaluate their use to determine which are most...

To the Editor: Despite safety recommendations, the increased availability of personal protective equipment, and the implementation of improved disposal systems, high-risk needlestick injuries continue to occur in unacceptably high numbers in healthcare settings.1 Design features of needle devices are relevant to their high injury risk. For example, butterflytype devices with needle-shielding fe...

UNLABELLED This clinical trial aimed at comparing the intensity of pain and bruising by subcutaneous and intramuscular injections using and retractable fixed syringes and needles and syringes with no needles combined, at a public hospital in Sao Paulo, for six months. We evaluated the perception of pain in case of intramuscular (n=1000) and subcutaneous injections (n=240). In subcutaneous appli...

It has been suggested by Dwek (2004) that iron needles could explain the submillimetre emission from the Cas A supernova remnant (SNR) with only a very small total mass. We investigate whether a similar model holds for the Kepler supernova remnant, and find that its emission could indeed be explained by a dust mass of less than 10M⊙, dependent on the axial ratio l/a of the needles which we cons...

OBJECTIVE To use CT scanning to evaluate the precision with which acupuncture needles can be inserted into sacral foramina to establish sacral nerve modulation by electroacupuncture. METHODS The subjects were five adult women (mean age 71.6 years). These five cases were divided into two groups. In the first three subjects (group A) the intention was to insert acupuncture needles in the S3 and...

The Scots pine is often used in the biomonitoring of forests. Studies on the chemical composition plus variability of its needles morphological structure allow for an assessment of the state of environmental pollution. However, in their natural populations, the response of individual trees to stress differs. This study reports on the influence of long-term soil contamination with trace elements...

Very fine needle-electrode arrays potentially offer both low invasiveness and high spatial resolution of electrophysiological neuronal recordings in vivo. Herein we report the penetrating and recording capabilities of silicon-growth-based three-dimensional microscale-diameter needle-electrodes arrays. The fabricated needles exhibit a circular-cone shape with a 3-μm-diameter tip and a 210-μm len...

Concentrations of accumulated heavy metals were compared between the terrestrial bryophyte Pohlia nutans and needles and bark of Larix decidua collected on a dump situated in the vicinity of cokeand sulphuric acid-producing factories and a municipal thermal-electric power station. The dump consisted of heavily polluted mine and smelter wastes located near Walbrzych (southwestern Poland). The pl...

We show that a simple approach to building small computationally inexpensive clusters offers insights on specific structural motifs that stabilize the electronic structure of ZnO. All-electron calculations on ZniOi needle (i = 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18) and plate (i = 9 and 18) clusters within the density functional theory (DFT) formalism show a higher stability for ZnO needles that increases with l...

AIM To examine the current status of standardization of endodontic irrigation needles produced by different manufacturers. METHODOLOGY Measurements of needle internal and external diameter were conducted under scanning electron microscopy and stereoscopic microscopy to determine the incidence and degree of deviation from ISO 9,626:1991 and ISO 9,626:1991/Amd 1:2001 specification. RESULTS No...