The Food and Drug Administration issued a final rule in May 2002 to permit the Agency to approve drugs or license biological products on the basis of animal efficacy studies for use in ameliorating or preventing serious or life-threatening conditions caused by exposure to lethal or permanently disabling toxic biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear substances. Only two drugs were approve...

The study by Rubinson et al reported in this issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness estimating the number and distribution of mechanical ventilators in the United States has been much anticipated and is important to emergency preparedness.1 It is surprising to many that this information was not previously known, but, in fact, no attempt to comprehensively count and characteri...

BACKGROUND The recent spread of avian influenza in wild birds and poultry may be a precursor to the emergence of a 1918-like human pandemic. Therefore, stockpiles of human pre-pandemic vaccine (targeted at avian strains) are being considered. For many countries, the principal constraint for these vaccine stockpiles will be the total mass of antigen maintained. We tested the hypothesis that lowe...

In the height of student-centered learning, nurse educators are consistently challenged to incorporate innovative— and often creative—active learning strategies within didactic interactions. Educational gaming is one technique that can enhance learning by stimulating student interest and motivation through social interactions with educational content. From a theoretical perspective, group educa...

Consumers who react to a promotional offer might switch from their preferred brand to the promoted brand, they might stockpile the promoted brand, or they might switch and stockpile. We model the implications of such consumer responses for a manufacturer's profit. Conditions under which a profit maximizing manufacturer should promote its product are then inferred from the aggregated response fu...

The ripe ovarian o6cyte contains a large stockpile of informational RNA's, a direct legacy of the intense gene activity which occurs during the lampbrush chromosome stage of o6genesis. The RNA synthesized at this stage is accumulated so that in Xenopus some 47 mlig of lampbrush-synthesized, template-active RNA is finally present in the mature o6cyte.' Estimated by comparing the template activit...