Search

Biotechnology companies face an elusive threat-how to handle what they know, says John Hodgson.

Several scientific, conceptual, and financial challenges face biotechnology if it is to overcome thus far intractable problems in human disease and agriculture.

The law on medical negligence is part of the law of negligence generally. It has played a significant part in developing two key aspects of the law. There are special rules to determine the standard of care expected of experts when advising and solving problems, and medical cases have largely shaped the law. Although cases on causation may arise in any area, several of the key cases happen to be medical ones. They are particularly likely to assist where there are alternative causes, as it is often difficult to distinguish the effects of disease from those of inappropriate treatment.

The previous articles on the European Union and health law have looked at the effect of EU law on the practitioner and on the patient. This article considers the impact on public health. This is a broad concept, and the impact of EU law is equally broadly felt. There is a general recognition of the importance of health issues, reflected in Article 152 (1) EC, ‘A high level of human health protection shall be ensured in the definition and implementation of all Community policies and activities.’ This article focuses particularly on the impact of Article 152 on public health within individual member states.

There exists among nurses the widespread and general, fear that they are unwittingly exposing themselves to litigation and professional misconduct in their daily practice. stems mainly from the facts that they perceive a general increase in legal claims against professionals, and that many of them are extending their roles. Queries like the following occur as a result.

Location-allocation (LA) models optimally locate service facilities and allocate demand to them. They have been used to locate many types of facility and service (Hodgson et al., 1993). Many different objectives have been optimized in the literature, the most popular being of distance-minimizing or demand-covering types. Whatever the objective, almost without exception, demand is conceived of as occurring in points from which patrons travel to facilities, or from which services are delivered to patrons. There is a growing recognition that not all demands are point-based (expressed by patrons at points), but that demands may be flow-based (expressed by flows, by patrons who are traveling on a pre-determined journey). In this paper, I consider several models which locate facilities to serve flow-based demands.

The p-median model in a network treats demand for service as weights expressed at nodes. The flow-capturing location-allocation model treats demands expressed by traffic (OD) flows. We consider a bicriterion model, a hybrid of these two, which trades off node- and flow-based demand, and apply it to realworld data. These are journey to work data in a system of 177 traffic zones in Edmonton, Canada. The system is relatively complex, comprising 703 nodes, 2198 links and 23,350 OD pairs.

We develop a new conceptual approach to locating inspection stations for hazardous vehicles, prevention, and compare it to the previous, punitive, philosophy of the flow-capturing location model. We implement this preventive protection philosophy with a new mixed integer program that maximizes hazard avoidance by locating a number of inspection stations to detect and remove hazardous vehicles as early in their trips as possible. We test the model's performance and analyze the spatial characteristics of solutions simulating several potential applications. Our computations demonstrate that a relaxed integer-linear program is overly demanding computationally and that a simple greedy heuristic lacks robustness. We suggest further approaches to developing more powerful and efficient solution methods.

The "fat-pill" prospects of leptin are just the latest in biotechnology's efforts to address obesity

Greater awareness of markets and exposure to public scrutiny has forced Wellcome to adopt a new strategic approach