Sir, On May 31, 2011, Hans Hogerzeil, Director of Essential Medicines and Pharmaceutical Policies, World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, received a touching sendoff from the staff and colleagues of WHO, an agency which he had served for 26 years. Hans received his medical degree from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and spent his early years as a doctor in India, working in a lepro...

Many studies have been done to document drug use patterns, and indicate that overprescribing, multi-drug prescribing, misuse of drugs, use of unnecessary expensive drugs and overuse of antibiotics and injections are the most common problems of irrational drug use by prescribers as well as consumers. Improving drug use would have important financial and public health benefits. Many efforts have ...

Recoding--the repurposing of genetic codons--is a powerful strategy for enhancing genomes with functions not commonly found in nature. Here, we report computational design, synthesis, and progress toward assembly of a 3.97-megabase, 57-codon Escherichia coli genome in which all 62,214 instances of seven codons were replaced with synonymous alternatives across all protein-coding genes. We have v...

OBJECTIVE To identify markers for loss of control of hypertension. DESIGN Questionnaire administered to patients who had been monitored for 18 months and had had their blood pressure (BP) measured many times. SETTING Fifty family practices in southeastern Ontario. PARTICIPANTS Three hundred eighty-five adults with essential hypertension that was initially stable and controlled by medicati...

Essential tremor (ET) still remains a clinical diagnosis. Nonetheless, it is misdiagnosed in 30 to 50% of cases. There are a number of areas of diagnostic uncertainty. One of these is isolated head tremor, on which published data are limited and at variance. We studied the prevalence of isolated head (i.e., neck) tremor in ET in two population-based studies (Turkey and New York) and a large cli...

Incontinentia pigmenti is a rare, dominantly X-linked genodermatosis characterized by multisystemic involvement that is lethal prenatally in the majority of affected males and shows great clinical variability when it is expressed in women. Recently it has been shown that mutations of the gene NEMO/IKK-g located in Xq28 cause the expression of the disease, being only one mutation responsible for...

The present study investigates the effectiveness of hypnosis in reducing mild essential hypertension. Thirty participants were randomly assigned to hypnosis (standardized, individual 8-session hypnosis treatment) or to a control group (no treatment). Results show that hypnosis is effective in reducing blood pressure in the short term but also in the middle and long terms. We did not find any re...

BACKGROUND In 2009, China implemented the national essential medicines system by enacting the National Essential Medicines List 2009. According to the policy of this system, primary health care institutions can only stock and use essential medicines on the prescribed List. Meanwhile, each province can choose to make its own list of supplemented medicines. The goal of the study is to provide sug...