The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering restricting or banning morcellation in minimally invasive hysterectomies and myomectomies (removal of fibroids) because of new reports of higher incidence of undiagnosed sarcoma in women undergoing these procedures. Research now links morcellation to the spread, or upstaging, of undetectable gynecological cancers. In July, FDA convened a 2-da...

BACKGROUND It is argued that use of the term "accident" has a negative effect on prevention efforts as the term implies that such events are due to chance. AIM To test the hypothesis that use of "injury" in place of "accident" can influence professional attitudes towards "accident/injury" prevention. SETTING Leeds Health Authority area serving the population (n=740,000) of the city of Leeds...

Often the answer to a serious problem does not lie in the results of even more complicated research or in the acquisition of ever larger databases. Rather, it involves the ability to accept the truth, assume a responsible and moral attitude towards it and act accordingly. This may very well appear self-evident, but in reality, as in the case of the tobacco advertising and promotion ban, it beco...

80 February 2015, Vol. 105, No. 2 Implications of Cochrane Review on restricting or banning alcohol advertising in South Africa To the Editor: A letter in The Lancet in June 2014 reported on delays in legislating an alcohol advertising ban in South Africa (SA).[1] These delays resulted from the addition of an independent regulatory impact assessment due to be completed in 2014. A Cochrane Revie...

Bans on menthol cigarettes have been recommended by the World Health Organization, adopted throughout European Union, and proposed United States Food Drug Administration (FDA), primarily due to concerns that enable youth smoking. Yet there is almost no direct evidence their effects using real-world policy variation. We provide first comprehensive evaluation of this studying Canada where seven p...

A multipatch model is proposed to study the impact of travel on the spatial spread of disease between patches with different level of disease prevalence. The basic reproduction number for the ith patch in isolation is obtained along with the basic reproduction number of the system of patches, Re(0). Inequalities describing the relationship between these numbers are also given. For a two-patch m...