The health care industry is a major contributor to environmental pollution. Through the processes of waste disposal, including incineration, the health care industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental dioxin and mercury. Mercury contamination of our waterways has created the conditions by which a significant number of fish are sufficiently mercury-laden so as to pose a human he...

The workflow map development for an organization is a highly complex process. Therefore, the workflow map should be tested and validated before it is implemented (into a WfMS). Most current workflow systems deal with this validation issue by using simulation modules that “execute” the model and examine the possible problems before it is truly “executed” and implemented. Although these simulatio...

Large systems are built from smaller parts. We present a method for deducing properties of a system by reasoning about its components. We show how to represent an individual component Πi by a formula Si so that the parallel composition usually denoted cobegin Π1 ‖ . . . ‖Πn coend is represented by the formula S1 ∧ . . . ∧ Sn. Composition is conjunction. We reduce composition to conjunction not ...

Understanding the toxicity of chemicals to organisms requires considering the molecular mechanisms involved as well as the relationships between exposure concentration and toxic effects with time. Our current knowledge about such relationships is mainly explained from a toxicodynamic and toxicokinetic perspective. This paper re-introduces an old approach that takes into account the biochemical ...

The toxic actions of scrapie prion protein (PrP(sc)) are poorly understood. We investigated the ability of the toxic PrP(sc) fragment 106-126 to interfere with evoked catecholamine secretion from PC-12 cells. Prion protein fragment 106-126 (PrP106-126) caused a time- and concentration-dependent augmentation of exocytosis due to the emergence of a Ca(2+) influx pathway resistant to Cd(2+) but se...

Understanding the molecular mechanism of the interaction of amphipathic and antimicrobial peptides with membranes is of fundamental interest, especially because of the potential of amphipathic peptides as therapeutics. The most studied amphipathic peptides in this context are certainly melittin, magainin and alamethicin, of which melittin is the only one to exhibit a powerful hemolytic and ther...

The notion of speci®cation frameworks transposes the framework approach from software development to the level of formal modeling and analysis. A speci®cation framework is devoted to a special application domain. It supplies reusable speci®cation modules and guides the construction of speci®cations. Moreover, it provides theorems to be used as building blocks of veri®cations. By means of a suit...

We discuss a patient with cocaine intoxication in whom the initial presentation was that of asystole and ventricular fibrillation. Cocaine has a direct toxic action on the heart and also sensitizes cardiac tissue to the action of catecholamines. Cocaine intoxication should be considered in any patient with unexplained cardiac arrest or ventricular arrhythmias.

Studies of structure-activity relationships and molecular mechanisms of action are fundamental to our understanding of the harmful effects of chemicals on the environment and their more direct effects on human health. It is important to identify factors that determine toxicological effects of foreign chemicals in biological systems and to assess our knowledge about chemical mechanisms of toxici...

The narcosis target lipid model (TLM) was developed to predict the toxicity of chemicals to aquatic organisms that act via narcosis. It is based on the hypothesis that target lipid is the site of toxic action within the organism, that octanol is the appropriate surrogate, and that target lipid has the same physical-chemical properties in all organisms. Here the TLM is extended to available fres...