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Torts have names for a reason. A tort without a name would very nearly be a contradiction in terms because it would not describe itself. But torts do not always get names immediately upon birth. Typically, it takes some time to recognize what they are because they are in search of an identity or have vaguely defined content. The law of torts of the future may well experience this process, as it works through the rights and liabilities that govern harms characteristic of the information age: invasions and misuses of digitized personal data and sexualized attitudes and misconduct, for example. The dominant form that new liabilities took in the twentieth century was through the establishment of new, particularized torts. An alternative, but much less known form of liability, however, competed with the named-tort approach during this same period and to some extent, still competes with it. This is the application of what we call a “residual category” of liability. In our judgment, however, a residual category approach to the intangible harms of the twenty-first century should and would fail in the same way, and for the same reasons, that this approach largely failed in the twentieth century. The new torts of the twenty-first century will have to be particular, named torts. This Article explains why this will be the case, and then undertakes to demonstrate how these explanations apply to the most salient forms of intangible harm on the current scene—harms that inevitably will be candidates for tort liability in the years to come. We identify the aspects of each form of loss that we think may well become actionable through the adoption of new torts or the expansion of existing torts, as well as the aspects of loss that will continue not to be actionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I plan to spend most of my time today setting forth the details of an episode in the mid twentieth-century history of American tort law, from which I intend to draw some observations on the place of history in tort law, or, put more precisely, the relationship between tort law and its surrounding cultural contexts, which amount to, when one has some distance from those contexts, its history. But before getting to that episode, I want to state, in general terms, what I take the relationship of tort law to its history to be. I don’t think tort law is any different from any other field of law, private or public, in its relationship to history. I’ve completed two books in a series called Law in American History, and am in the process of writing a third. The coverage of those works ranges from the colonial years through the twentieth century, and I take up fields in both public and private law, including torts. Throughout the books my theory of the relationship of law to its “history”–its surrounding contexts–is that the relationship is reciprocal. Law, at any point in time, is both affected by developments in the larger culture and affects them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about judicial style of Benjamin N. Cardozo, former Associate Justice for Court of Appeals of New York in case "Wagner v. International Railway Co." Topics discussed include different aspect of his jurisprudence along with his opinions on the practice of law; and his opinions in which he had the opportunity to evaluate the conduct of lawyers within the practice of law; and his opinions in cases like Wagner.

Everyone agrees that American tort law expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century. But the story of that change, as usually told, is radically incomplete. One important precondition of tort law, as we now know it, was a major change in evidence law, one that only began to emerge after 1850. Before then, plaintiffs, defendants, and other "interested" parties were almost universally prohibited from testifying in civil trials. With this prohibition on party testimony, what the jury knew about the facts underlying a tort action was derivative and incomplete. Far fewer tort actions were brought because often the only evidence available to the plaintiff was his or her own account of what had happened, and that was inadmissible. But with the change, victims of personal injury were now able to describe before juries the circumstances in which they had been injured. They were able to talk about what they had done, what the entities they were suing had done or not done, and how they had suffered. They no longer needed the fortuitous presence of third-party witnesses to elicit testimony about how they had been injured. The abolition of the prohibition on party testimony, in short, made it much easier to succeed in personal injury lawsuits. At stake in this transformation was the very epistemology of the civil trial. With the admission of party testimony, civil trials went from being premodern efforts to resolve disputes whose outcomes were affected by the spiritual weight assigned to oaths taken by third-party witnesses, to the modern searches for factual truth that we now (incorrectly) assume they always have been. Without this transformation, other factors that later brought about modern tort liability could not have exercised the influence that they did. The transformation created the very conditions under which modern tort law could, and then did, emerge. Yet, the transformation and its significance for tort law have gone largely unrecognized. Modern tort scholars appear to be completely unaware of the prohibition on party testimony and have therefore failed for more than a century to take it into account in the way they have written and taught about the development of the law of torts. Because the rules and practices that preceded the transformation have now completely disappeared from modern torts cases, what the transformation accomplished may appear, incorrectly, to have always been the case. But it is lack of visibility, rather than lack of responsibility, that has actually been at work in hiding the significance of the transformation for the emergence of modern tort law. In order to appreciate the causal significance of the abolition of the prohibition on party testimony for the emergence of tort law in America, we need to recover a "lost" epistemology of civil trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a response to Professor Lawrence B. Solum's article "Intellectual History as Constitutional Theory" which appears in the same issue of the journal, and it mentions the originalism constitutional interpretation theory and the potential role that intellectual history should play in constitutional theory in America. The provisions of the U.S. Constitution are examined, as well as a distinction between communicative content and legal content.

This Article makes three contributions. First, it represents the first sustained effort to identify and trace the origins of the legal category of civil rights in American constitutional jurisprudence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the category of civil rights did not extend back to the Declaration of Independence or to the framing of the Constitution. There was no established category of "civil rights" in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American law, although one can find discussion of the "privileges and immunities" of citizens of the United States and occasional mention of the term "civil rights." The category only came into being with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 18661 and received its first judicial interpretations in the context of the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. In the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, the category was refined, but there was never a clear consensus about the content or scope of civil rights, or the extent to which they could be enforced by the federal government. Second, the Article follows the work of recent scholars, such as William Nelson, Michael Collins, and most prominently Pamela Brandwein, in seeking to revise a conventional narrative about the constitutional history of the Reconstruction era. That narrative asserts that Reconstruction began as a distinctly libertarian and egalitarian vision, premised on the creation of new universal rights of citizenship and enforcement of those rights by the federal government. It then claims that in the years between 1866 and the mid-1880s, that vision was derailed and the prospective rights of former African American slaves in former Confederate states largely abandoned. It assigns some responsibility for the abandonment of the original goals of Reconstruction to the Supreme Court of the United States in the tenures of Chief Justices Salmon Chase and Morrison Waite, emphasizing Court majorities' narrow readings of the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges and Immunities and Equal Protection Clauses in the Slaughter-House Cases2 and invalidation of the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 18753 in the Civil Rights Cases Finally, the Article has implications for a longstanding debate about the "original understandings" of framers of the Reconstruction Amendments, in particular whether the Fourteenth Amendment was originally understood as "incorporating" some of the provisions of the Bill of Rights against the states. The Article finds that the Court's Reconstruction-era civil rights jurisprudence was primarily driven by a concern that too-broad readings of the power of the federal government to enforce new civil rights would radically disturb the existing balance of state and federal powers. That concern, the Article suggests, emanated from an assumption on the part of the justices that the Privileges and Immunities and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment were capable of being read as robust definitions of the privileges and immunities of national citizenship and of a right to equal treatment under the law, both of which could be enforced by the federal courts. Precisely because of this assumption, Chase and Waite Court majorities sought to define the meaning of "privileges or immunities"5 and "equal protection of the laws"6 narrowly. The Article concludes by maintaining that a proper understanding of the category of "civil rights" at its origin needs to take into account the fact that both the conceptualization and interpretation of the category were driven by established antebellum understandings about "rights" and federalism. The result was that instead of initially expansive definitions of new national civil rights being narrowed in the 1870s and 1880s, the category remained fluid and uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reported evolution of a legal protection for compelled commercial speech (CCS) under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, focusing on the U.S. Congress and various legislative efforts which are apparently designed to regulate competition in America as of 2014. America's Agricultural Marketing Act and the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings in the CCS- and freedom of speech-related cases Glickman v. Wileman Brothers & Elliott and Valentine v. Chrestensen are examined.

The article focuses on what makes a U.S. Supreme Court decision notorious. Topics include discrimination in judicial opinions, issues that polarize the general public, and the controversy surrounding Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and Korematsu v. United States.

Although the government of the Confederate States of America has been formally treated as a legal nullity since 1878, from February, 1861 to April, 1865 the Confederacy was a real government, with a Constitution, a Congress, district courts, and administrative offices. This Article seeks to recover the legal order of the Confederacy in its robust state, before the prospect of its obliteration came to pass. The Article explores the question why certain southern states would have considered seceding from the United States, and forming a separate nation, in late 1860 and early 1861. It then turns to the legal order of the Confederacy that was erected after secession. It focuses on two characteristics of that legal order: its architecture, including the drafting of the Confederate Constitution, the establishment of Confederate district courts, and the failure of the Confederate Congress to organize a Supreme Court for the Confederacy; and the central legal issues with which the Confederate government was preoccupied. The Article concludes that in the minds of contemporaries, the outcome of the Civil War and the dissolution of the Confederacy that accompanied it represented a transformative phase in American history, in which the way of life that the Confederacy symbolized was confined to oblivion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay which offers a commentary on Philip Hamburger's book "Law and Judicial Duty" is presented. The relationship of Hamburger's approach to the history of judicial review in the U.S. to other works is described. Accounts of the history of judicial review that Hamburger considers inadequate are discussed. The essay asserts that the book is timely, conscious of the implications of its findings and within a counter-Progressive perspective in the U.S. legal and constitutional history.

The article indicates that when the past is ignored in the procedure of the evaluation of reputations in the judiciary, the consequences of the past have great influence to question the unity of the standard evaluation of the justices, particularly when making a comparison on the performance of previous justices. It states a few associated conclusions for the article which includes the neglected justices in the U.S. It mentions several contributions by remarkable justices from the 1920's to the present which includes the review of the judiciary, governmental ability separation and the connection of the federal and the power of the state in the constitution.

Since at least 2001, the Supreme Court of the United States has signaled that the jurisprudence of the writ of habeas corpus, and its possible suspension, should be informed by an understanding of the writ and of the Habeas Suspension Clause in the U.S. Constitution "as it existed in 1789." This Article recovers the historical basis of the Suspension Clause. It begins by exploring, in the English context, previously unexamined court archives and other manuscript sources. It then traces the path of the writ across the British Empire in the years before 1789. Finally, it analyzes early American uses of the writ, including its treatment in the Judiciary Act of 1789 and Chief Justice John Marshall's decision in Ex parte Bollman. The Article concludes that the writ's peculiar force was the product of judicial rather than statutory innovation; that judicial authority was premised on the idea that judges enacted powers peculiar to the king-his prerogative-when they used the writ; that this meant that judges focused more on the behavior of jailers rather than the rights of prisoners; that this focus gave the writ its surprisingly wide coverage as to persons and places; and that the implications of this history for current cases involving the claims of Guantanamo Bay detainees are significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to maintain the rapid advance of biophotonics in the U.S. and enhance our competitiveness worldwide, key measurement tools must be in place. As part of a wide-reaching effort to improve the U.S. technology base, the National Institute of Standards and Technology sponsored a workshop titled "Biophotonic tools for cell and tissue diagnostics." The workshop focused on diagnostic techniques involving the interaction between biological systems and photons. Through invited presentations by industry representatives and panel discussion, near- and far-term measurement needs were evaluated. As a result of this workshop, this document has been prepared on the measurement tools needed for biophotonic cell and tissue diagnostics. This will become a part of the larger measurement road-mapping effort to be presented to the Nation as an assessment of the U.S. Measurement System. The information will be used to highlight measurement needs to the community and to facilitate solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Climate Forecast System (CFS), the fully coupled ocean–land–atmosphere dynamical seasonal prediction system, which became operational at NCEP in August 2004, is described and evaluated in this paper. The CFS provides important advances in operational seasonal prediction on a number of fronts. For the first time in the history of U.S. operational seasonal prediction, a dynamical modeling system has demonstrated a level of skill in forecasting U.S. surface temperature and precipitation that is comparable to the skill of the statistical methods used by the NCEP Climate Prediction Center (CPC). This represents a significant improvement over the previous dynamical modeling system used at NCEP. Furthermore, the skill provided by the CFS spatially and temporally complements the skill provided by the statistical tools. The availability of a dynamical modeling tool with demonstrated skill should result in overall improvement in the operational seasonal forecasts produced by CPC. The atmospheric component of the CFS is a lower-resolution version of the Global Forecast System (GFS) that was the operational global weather prediction model at NCEP during 2003. The ocean component is the GFDL Modular Ocean Model version 3 (MOM3). There are several important improvements inherent in the new CFS relative to the previous dynamical forecast system. These include (i) the atmosphere–ocean coupling spans almost all of the globe (as opposed to the tropical Pacific only); (ii) the CFS is a fully coupled modeling system with no flux correction (as opposed to the previous uncoupled “tier-2” system, which employed multiple bias and flux corrections); and (iii) a set of fully coupled retrospective forecasts covering a 24-yr period (1981–2004), with 15 forecasts per calendar month out to nine months into the future, have been produced with the CFS. These 24 years of fully coupled retrospective forecasts are of paramount importance to the proper calibration (bias correction) of subsequent operational seasonal forecasts. They provide a meaningful a priori estimate of model skill that is critical in determining the utility of the real-time dynamical forecast in the operational framework. The retrospective dataset also provides a wealth of information for researchers to study interactive atmosphere–land–ocean processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of the internal powers of the Chief Justices in the United States. It explores the origin of the Chief Justice's powers and states that the standards of opinion circulation and review was established during the nineteenth century and changes over the court's history.

The article discusses the internalist/externalist debate about the relationship of the New Deal to early- and mid-twentieth-century changes in constitutional jurisprudence. The areas of agreement between the two sides in the debate are larger than one might think. Both sides acknowledge the authoritative status of the Constitution in U.S. government, the power of justices of the Supreme Court to make final interpretations of the meaning of the Constitution, and the fact that Supreme Court justices have life tenure and few direct political checks on their conduct.

Discusses about the U.S. Supreme Court's attitude towards the judicial case Marbury versus Madison. Views of chief justice John Marshall on the case; Interpretation of the case within constitutional framework; Necessity of judicial review to look into the case.

Describes the search for vindication by Alger Hiss, a U.S. public servant committed to five-year prison sentence for perjury and espionage. Hiss' 1950 perjury conviction; Hiss as a Soviet agent; Hiss' campaign for vindication; Unexpected intervention of Allen Weinstein.

Provides information on the history and development of the constitution in the U.S. Discussion on the study of constitutional jurisprudence and policy making; Topics and issues related to the U.S. legal education; Details of behavioralist approach in policy making.

Sixty-seven English language articles were obtained for the review, the majority of which (44, 65.7%) had US origins. Broadly, the main issues covered in the literature were the under-utilization of services by minority ethnic groups; the prevalence of dementia in different ethnic groups; the experience of care giving in different racial groups and language as a factor in cognitive assessment. Although it has been argued that the instruments used to assess cognitive function are culturally biased, the available published evidence would seem to suggest that the fundamental issue is language ability, rather than minority group membership per se. Studies into the care giving experience amongst different ethnic or racial groups suffer from theoretical and methodological weaknesses. Studies of help-seeking among various ethnic groups in the US have found that many do not prioritize dementia as a health problem in the face of more pressing concerns. There was little consensus amongst the articles about whether services should be provided specifically for different ethnic groups, reflecting a lack of evidence concerning the efficacy of different models of service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on legal developments in negligence which influenced the developments in tort law in the United States between 1980 and 2000. Treatment of trends in academic theory and doctrinal trends as parallel developments; Examination of particular parallels between scholarship and doctrine; Explanation of why the tendency towards negligence is unexpected.

In this essay, the author focuses on one set of conventional wisdom in the area of constitutional foreign relations law. The author discusses a separation of the constitutional law of foreign relations from domestic constitutional law. He explores the presence of this separation on American constitutional jurisprudence.

Discusses the emergence of the First Amendment (free-speech) in America during the twentieth-century. Views of John Wigmore regarding free-speech during Justice Holmes' ruling in `Abrams versus United States,' in 1920; Indepth look at the libertarian free speech theory; Treatment of the First Amendment as cultural and constitutional in America.

Foliar chemistry was examined in mature sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh), red maple (Acer rubrum L.) American beach (Fagus grandifolia Ehrh.) and red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.) in response to chronic, watershed-level additions of ammonium sulfate (NH 4)2SO 4. Following four years of treatment, N concentrations were significantly higher in foliage from the treated watershed for all four species, with increases ranging from 6% in American beechto 33% in sugar maple. Sugar maple foliage from the treated watershed had significantly lower Ca concentrations (18%). Concentrations of K were significantly lower in beech (13%) and red spruce (90%) from the treated watershed. Foliar Mg was not different between watersheds.Aluminum concentrations were significantly higher in the foliage from the treated watershed for beech (18%) red maple (33%) and sugar maple (65%) but no differences in Al concentration occurred in current year red spruce foliage. Red spruce foliage resampled following a fifth year of treatment contained higher concentrations of N and Al and lower concentrations of Ca and Mg in the treated watershed. Despite these differences in red spruce foliar chemistry, wood production and density did not appear to be affected by the treatment. Differences inthe foliar chemistry between the treated and untreated watershed mayreflect the temporal and spatial integration of changes taking placein the soil of the treated watershed. Increased N is likely directlydue to the N contained in the (NH 4)2SO4 treatment. Labile Ca and other cations in the treated watershedwould be expected to initially increase and then decrease in response to the treatment, with these changes beginning at the top of the forest floor. Thus. lower cation concentrations in foliage from the treated watershed may reflect the fact that cations in the uppermost portions of the soil were rapidly depleted, even though deeper soil layers were [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1998 marked the acceptance of Physician Assistants (PAs) as members in the Southern Medical Association. We review the history of the PA profession and, more importantly, the physician/PA relationship. We also provide an overview of PA education and certification requirements. Variations in state law regarding PA utilization, including the delegation of prescribing privileges, are discussed. Current American Medical Association guidelines regarding physician/PA practice are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As managed care organizations (MCOs) continue to expand into the care of the chronically ill, the concept of providing cost-effective care with a preventive approach is vital for primary care providers (PCPs) to embrace. Diabetes is an ideal disease to incorporate this concept.Methods: We reviewed the literature using MEDLINE. We used the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Provider Recognition Program guidelines as the foundation for MCOs to establish a diabetes disease management program.Results: The implementation of disease management protocols, the use of computerized management systems, and the team approach can provide cost-effective diabetic care.Conclusions: To compete in the managed care market, it is vital for providers to link with their Independent Practice Associations (IPA), the ADA, and MCOs to implement standard protocols and negotiate for adequate reimbursement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) aims to establish a national cloud-based data science infrastructure. Imaging Data Commons (IDC) is a new component of CRDC supported by the Cancer Moonshot. The goal of IDC is to enable a broad spectrum of cancer researchers, with and without imaging expertise, to easily access and explore the value of deidentified imaging data and to support integrated analyses with nonimaging data. We achieve this goal by colocating versatile imaging collections with cloud-based computing resources and data exploration, visualization, and analysis tools. The IDC pilot was released in October 2020 and is being continuously populated with radiology and histopathology collections. IDC provides access to curated imaging collections, accompanied by documentation, a user forum, and a growing number of analysis use cases that aim to demonstrate the value of a data commons framework applied to cancer imaging research. SIGNIFICANCE: This study introduces NCI Imaging Data Commons, a new repository of the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons, which will support cancer imaging research on the cloud., (©2021 The Authors; Published by the American Association for Cancer Research.)

With licensure of extended half-life (EHL) factor products and the changing landscape of available hemophilia products, patients and providers have options for less treatment-intense prophylaxis. The impact of these products in clinical practice to date remains understudied. We aimed to quantify the use of EHL products in prophylaxis in the US using the ATHN-dataset, a database of 145 ATHN-affiliated hemophilia treatment centers (HTCs). Further, we aimed to quantify the impact of EHL on key hemophilia indicators including annualized bleed rates (ABRs), hemophilia joint health scores (HJHS) and quality of life (QOL) metrics. The use of EHL vs standard half-life (SHL) products in severe hemophilia was compared between June 2018 and March 2019 using the ATHN-dataset. A cohort of patients was also recruited from seven participating HTCs in order to compare ABR, HJHS and QOL between product classes. By March 2019 the number of individuals with severe Hemophilia A (SHA) receiving EHLs remained relatively stable (28.4%), whereas the number of prescribed non-factor products increased to 7.1%, with a diminishing majority of patients (64.0%) continuing to receive SHLs. The majority of patients with severe hemophilia B (SHB) received treatment with EHLs including 57.5% by March 2019. There was a trend toward lower ABR with use of EHLs in SHA and SHB, although this did not result in improved HJHS nor QOL. EHL use in the United States in severe hemophilia continues to increase, although at a slower rate in SHA with the availability of non-factor therapy. The impact of the EHL therapies in clinical practice should continue to be examined prospectively., (© 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.© 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Approximately 56.7 million persons in the United States have functional impairments that can lead to disability. As a group, persons with disabilities show disparities in measures of overall health when compared with the general population. Much of this can be attributed to secondary conditions rather than to the impairment itself. Persons with disabilities can prevent and manage many of the conditions that contribute to these disparities. The Living Well with a Disability program was developed to support persons with disabilities to manage their health. The curriculum helps participants achieve early success in self-management of quality-of-life goals to build confidence for making health behavior changes; it includes 11 chapters that facilitators use to conduct an orientation session and 10 weekly, 2-hour sessions. The program has been implemented by 279 community-based agencies in 46 states. On the basis of the data from the field trial, these community applications have served approximately 8,900 persons since 1995, resulting in an estimated savings of $6.4-$28.8 million for health care payers. Persons with disabilities have unique needs that can be addressed through multiple levels of intervention to reduce health disparities. The Living Well with a Disability program is a promising intervention that has demonstrated improvements in health-related quality of life and health care use.

Background: The U.S. Supreme Court's Olmstead decision affirmed the right of individual with disabilities to live in the community. Centers for independent living (CILs) and other disability advocacy organizations have initiated a wide range of efforts to emancipate (i.e., transition) adults with disabilities from undesired nursing home placements to community living. There is, however, a paucity of published information about the nursing home transition process for adults with disabilities., Objective/hypothesis: The objectives of this research were to: (1) assess the levels of nursing home emancipation services and barriers to nursing home transitions, including the role of secondary health conditions, and (2) to assess nursing home transition policies and procedures., Methods: We conducted 2 studies. First, we surveyed 165 CILs operating nursing home emancipation programs. Second, we reviewed the written transition policy and procedures documents of 28 CILs from 14 states., Results: Respondents reported transitioning a total of 2,389 residents from nursing homes back to community living arrangements during the previous year, with only 4% of those returning to a nursing home for any reason. While most of the policies reflected many components of a standard model, several components appeared underrepresented., Conclusions: Findings suggest the need to expand on established programs to build evidence-based practices., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The current Department of Defense pest management system does not provide adequate protection from arthropod disease vectors to personnel deployed in support of US military operations. We hypothesized that military camouflage netting, ubiquitous around living and working areas in current US military operations in Africa and the Middle East, treated with a residual pesticide such as bifenthrin may reduce the presence of biting insects and improve the military pest management system. In this study, we examined the longevity and efficacy of bifenthrin applied to camouflage netting material at the maximum label rate of 0.03 liter formulation (7.9% AI) per 92.9 m2 against field populations of mosquitoes in southern California in a hot-arid environment similar to regions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa. We showed that bifenthrin treatment of camouflage netting was effective at reducing mosquito populations, predominantly Psorophora columbiae and Aedes vexans, by an average of up to 46% for 56 days, and could cause as much as 40% mortality in Culex quinquefasciatus in laboratory bioassays for nearly 2 months postapplication. These population reductions could translate to commensurate reductions in risk of exposure to mosquito-borne pathogens, and could potentially be effective against sand flies and filth flies.

Author argues that the adequacy of "reasonably inferred consent" as a justification for the retrieval of sperm posthumously or after persistent vegetative state suffers from definitional ambiguity, faulty comparisons, and ultimately may justify practices that are not in the interest of survivors or children yet to be conceived.

A multicentre, blinded, randomised complete-block, field trial was conducted with 140 horses and foals age 4 weeks-28 years to determine if omeprazole paste is effective and safe in promoting healing of spontaneous gastric ulcers under a variety of field conditions and in different breeds and ages of horses. Horses in the study had gastric ulceration as determined by gastroscopy and were divided into replicates of 4 or 5 animals. One horse in each replicate was assigned randomly to receive an empty omeprazole syringe (sham-dosed control) and the remaining horses received omeprazole paste once daily for 28 days. Gastroscopy was repeated at the end of the study. Horses treated with omeprazole had significantly (P < 0.01) more improvement in ulcer scores at the end of the study compared with controls. Ulcers were improved in 32.4 and 99.0% of the control and omeprazole groups, respectively. Ulcers were completely healed in 8.9 and 86.7% of the control and omeprazole groups, respectively. Under typical field conditions, omeprazole was effective at enhancing healing of spontaneous gastric ulcers in horses of a variety of ages and breeds.

Healthcare practitioners are the primary users of medical devices for direct patient care. As such, they are in the best position to recognize problems that result from the use of medical devices. The outcome of a device-related adverse event or product problem, as with any other medical product, can be serious and result in illness injury, or even death. The sooner that FDA learns about a problem, the sooner the agency can take action to protect patient and user safety. Healthcare practitioners are major contributors to the knowledge base related to device use and safety through astute monitoring, rapid identification of device-related problems, and reporting these problems. An understanding of the voluntary and mandatory mechanism of reporting will ensure that device problems are reported appropriately and in a timely manner. As the primary users of medical equipment for direct patient care, health care professionals have the training and expertise to improve patient care by reporting actual and suspected problems with medical devices.

Acne affects between 40 to 50 million individuals in the United States. Recent findings regarding the multifactorial pathogenesis of acne have facilitated a reexamination of the classification of acne and acne-related disorders. Disorders without a microcomedo as the initial pathologic condition are no longer classified as "acne." Research has also identified that the clinical characteristics of acne vary with age, pubertal status, gender, and race. These findings may have implications for the clinical management of acne and acne-related disorders.