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Athletic trainers, team physicians, coaches, athletics directors, and senior administrative staff — as well as the institution — each face potential liability for the overall health care provided to student-athletes.

The competitive nature of intercollegiate athletics is an alluring feature for fans, alumni and the media. This places great pressure for success on athletics departments, coaches and student-athletes. This pressure may even extend into the medical care and well-being of student-athletes. The competitive nature of coaches and student-athletes may color their reactions to medical decisions made by sports medicine staff members and team physicians, who base their decisions on the long-term well-being of the student-athletes.

When collegiate sports medicine staff, other athletics department staff and institutions fail to properly address student-athlete safety and welfare issues, you can bank on facing potential liability.

Mycobacterium ulcerans is the causative agent of the debilitating skin disease Buruli ulcer, which is most prevalent in Western and Central Africa. M. ulcerans shares >98% DNA sequence identity with Mycobacterium marinum, however, M. marinum produces granulomatous, but not ulcerative, lesions in humans and animals. Here we report the differential expression of a small heat shock protein (Hsp18) between strains of M. ulcerans (Hsp18(+) ) and M. marinum (Hsp18(-) ) and describe the molecular basis for this difference. We show by gene deletion and GFP reporter assays in M. marinum that a divergently transcribed gene called hspR_2, immediately upstream of hsp18, encodes a MerR-like regulatory protein that represses hsp18 transcription while promoting its own expression. Naturally occurring mutations within a 70 bp segment of the 144 bp hspR_2-hsp18 intergenic region among M. ulcerans strains inhibit hspR_2 transcription and explain the Hsp18(+) phenotype. We also propose a biological role for Hsp18, as we show that this protein significantly enhances bacterial attachment or aggregation during biofilm formation. This study has uncovered a new member of the MerR family of transcriptional regulators and suggests that upregulation of hsp18 expression was an important pathoadaptive response in the evolution of M. ulcerans from a M. marinum-like ancestor.

The first American missionary to Burma, Adoniram Judson was born on August 9, 1788 in Malden, Massachusetts. Adoniram demonstrated remarkable abilities even while very young. His mother taught him to read in one week when he was only 3 years old. When he was 10 he learned navigation from a retired sea captain; and he could read classical Greek by the time he was 12. Keywords: Judson, Adoniram (1788–1850); andover theological seminary; outpouring of spiritual interest; reaching people with the gospel

A Baptist theologian who resisted Hyper-Calvinism in favor of an evangelical position, Fuller was born in Wicken, Cambridgeshire, England on February 6, 1754. His parents were farmers by trade and raised their gifted son in the Soham Particular Baptist Church. The Soham Particular Baptist Church was known for its “hyper” or “high” Calvinism. That is, the church was opposed to evangelism in an open and indiscriminate manner, as it was believed to undermine the sovereignty of God. This variety of Hyper-Calvinism so stressed the sovereignty of God that it was believed that non-Christians would be saved apart from any means and without the involvement of any mortal. Hence, any attempt to carry the gospel to other lands was deemed to undermine God's salvific purpose in the world. Keywords: Fuller, Andrew (1754–1815); baptist theologian, resisting hyper-calvinism; soham particular baptist church; the gospel worthy of all acceptation; fuller, wrestling with gravity of sin; trusting fully in christ; fully rejecting, hyper-calvinism of his upbringing; adopting, evangelical form of calvinism

John Owen was perhaps the most prolific and influential English Puritan. Following the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Puritans sought to continue spiritual renewal and reformation within the Church of England and the Elizabethan settlement. Spanning from roughly 1564 to 1642 (dates given by Richard Baxter and Thomas Fuller; see Cumming 1965: 288), the Puritans pursued a goal of “completing” the English Reformation by reshaping Anglican worship, introducing church discipline in local parishes, establishing a new level of righteousness in political, domestic, and economic fields, and converting everyone to a “vigorous evangelical faith” (Packer 1990: 28). Among the Puritans, John Owen, known as “the Calvin of England” (this designation was first coined by Ambrose Barns; see Toon 1971: 173), was arguably the greatest (Toon 1971). Keywords: Owen, John (1616–1683); prolific and influential english puritan; puritans, spiritual renewal and reformation

It's critical that your athletics department and institution empower your sports medicine staff and physicians to make all medical decisions based on their professional judgment about what's best for the long-term well-being of each student-athlete. In fact, case law establishes the team physician as having the final say in student-athlete medical clearance.

A popular current theory proposes that the timing of puberty is related to attainment of a critical level of body weight or body fatness. These critical body weight and critical body fat theories have been studied almost exclusively in females. To explore these theories in males, we tested a corollary of these hypotheses: are male rats of the same weight all at the same level of sexual maturation irrespective of prior growth rate? Male rats growing in body weight at five different rates due to various degrees of underfeeding (beginning at weaning) were sacrificed at body weight milestones of 123 and 279 grams. At the first weight milestone, significant (P < 0.01) inverse correlations were observed among these weight-matched rats between the preceding rate of body weight growth and prostate weight, seminal vesicle weight, testis weight, serum testosterone, and daily sperm production rate, indicating that the underfed animals were more sexually mature. Testis histology also showed that spermatogenic development increased progressively as the prior rate of body weight growth was reduced. These parameters of sexual maturation tended to correlate inversely with body fatness (i.e., leaner animals were more sexually mature) and directly with body length (i.e., longer animals were more sexually mature). By the second body weight milestone, however, the degree of prior underfeeding exerted little effect on those indices of sexual development. We conclude that the degree of sexual maturation in weight-matched animals with varying previous patterns of body weight growth correlates inversely with body fatness and the rate of body weight growth but correlates directly with body length. These findings would not support either the critical body weight or critical body fatness theories of pubertal timing in underfed male rats and suggest that body length or chronologic age may be related more closely to sexual development than either body weight or fatness.