Presented are 1986 data and trend data (1974-86) on the use and cost of home health agency services rendered to aged and disabled Medicare beneficiaries. Since 1974, reimbursements for these services have grown more rapidly than overall Medicare expenditures. From 1974 to 1986, Medicare expenditures for these services increased from $141 million to $1.8 billion, an average annual rate of 24 per...

Introduction Health insurance premiums in California are increasing much faster than most other areas of the state’s economy. Between 2002 and 2007, premiums rose 86 percent compared to an overall inflation rate for the state of less than 20 percent.1 At the same time, policymakers and the public are eager to identify ways to address rising health care costs, often pointing to health plan admin...

The activity of cefotetan against 430 strains of anaerobic bacteria was compared with that of cefoxitin, ceftizoxime, clindamycin, metronidazole, and chloramphenicol. Percent susceptible values for the Bacteroides fragilis group were 60, 80, 29, 86, 100, and 100%, respectively. Percent susceptible values for the B. fragilis species were 91, 92, 46, 98, 100, and 100%, respectively. Non-B. fragil...

BACKGROUND The global initiative to eradicate bancroftian filariasis currently relies on mass treatment with four to six annual doses of antifilarial drugs. The goal is to reduce the reservoir of microfilariae in the blood to a level that is insufficient to maintain transmission by the mosquito vector. METHODS In nearly 2500 residents of Papua New Guinea, we prospectively assessed the effects...

The TCAR team developed multiple information retrieval based entity linking systems in a matter of weeks for the TAC-KBP evaluation task. We focused primarily on developing entity linking algorithms that do not require Wikipedia text and correctly detect when a given entity does not exist in Wikipedia (NIL). Without using Wikipedia text, the system achieves an overall TAC 2010 score of 67 perce...