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•Both patients with sickle cell disease and ED providers strongly endorse IPPs.•Collaboration among specialties, including informatics and patients, is needed to successfully implement IPPs.

The article focuses on demonstrations running in Haiti that focuses on holding government accountable for a massive corruption scandal and for its failure to provide basic social services that amounts to human rights violations. It mentions that leveling of inequality is brought about by state collapse, pandemics, warfare and transformative revolutions.

An excerpt of an memoir "Celebrating My Mysteries" by Monique Clesca is presented in which Monique discusses her childhood memories.

The article narrates an experience in Haiti, where the author faced the horrors of gang violence and kidnapping, which have become rampant in the country.

The threat of a capacity crunch in the worldwide fiber communications system, and the availability of inexpensive, high-power diodes as pump sources for Raman amplification, has attracted new interest in the virtues of a decades-old technology.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of seeing queues of over 50 people standing in front of office buildings in Zimbabwe on January 27, 2004.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of witnessing the Haiti earthquake on January 12, 2010.

The limited number of organs and tissues available for transplantation in Venezuela and the need to improve outcomes for patients with life-threatening end-stage organ failure or inadequate quality of life resulted in the development and implementation of an organ and tissue procurement system by the Venezuelan National Transplant Organization. This procurement system, a 24-hour, nationwide, free phone service for detection of potential organ donors, connects callers with transplant coordinators. The on-call coordinator supervises family approach as well as maintenance, transport, and allocation of the organs and tissues. During a period of 21 months, the phone service received 1191 calls (713 requesting information to become a voluntary donor, 207 requesting information about donation and transplantation, and 271 reporting potential donors). Of the potential donors, 74% were men and 67% were aged between 11 and 40 years, and most came from hospital intensive care units, emergency departments, and trauma shock units. The main causes of death were trauma and stroke. Reasons why donation was not accomplished included early cardiorespiratory arrest and denied consent. In conclusion, establishing the procurement system resulted in an increase in the detection, referral, and maintenance of potential donors; doubling of the number of donors per million population; and an increase in the number of cadaveric transplants.

This review emphasizes the role of vascular endothelial cells (EC) on physiology and physiopathology of allogenic response in solid organ transplantation. EC is the first interface between receptor circulant cells (macrophages and lymphocytes) and the graft. Compression of events of them at the moment of reperfusion and posterior events that imply EC and circulant cell activation contributes to developing strategies of therapy against acute rejection. Three different types of endothelial responses were described: stimulation, a rapid response of resting EC initiated by agonists such as histamine; activation, a slower protein synthesis-dependent response initiated by inflammatory cytokines and injury. The first two responses represent normal functions of EC. Injury can either produce endothelial necrosis or may lead to endothelial dysfunction; a response that results as a consequence of sub-lethal injury produced by complement or cytolytic T cells. As discussed, each type of endothelial response can individually contribute to graft injury. However, these responses often occur concurrently, producing novel consequences. The functional response to proinflammatory cytokines can also exacerbate the consequences of dysfunction, especially cytokine-induced procoagulant activities with dysfunctional loss of anticoagulant properties. In recent years, similar responses have been found to occur in vivo and, in particular, evidence has suggested that they occur in both clinical and experimental rejection reactions. Much of current anti-rejection therapy targeted all leukocytes. Novel strategies to preserve endothelium in its quiescent (i.e., non-stimulated and non-activated) and functional state offer promising new therapeutic targets for the improvement in transplant success.

This paper deals with different issues related to the spectral behavior of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers within multichannel systems. The requirements fiber amplifiers will have to meet for implementation in future all-optical transport networks are discussed. The current status of various attempts to flatten the nonuniform gain bandwidth of conventional silica-based amplifiers and the limitations they induce in multichannel systems is reviewed as well. The improvements in gain flatness offered by fluoride-based fiber amplifiers are theoretically and experimentally investigated and highlighted in various multichannel system experiments. From this study, fluoride-based amplifiers appear to be an effective solution of high potential for significantly increasing the available bandwidth in transport networks of high capacity and flexibility. Copyright 1995, 1999 Academic Press

Donor shortage is the single most important limitation for allowing adequate growth of transplant programs. Transplant coordination programs have been shown to provide solutions to this situation worldwide. To evaluate the efficacy of transplant coordination programs in Venezuela, a pilot program was implemented at a 1200-bed teaching hospital. The implementation of this program included an assessment of the hospital's donation practices such as donor identification, maintenance, brain-death diagnosis, family consent for donation, and timely transport and allocation of organs and tissues. A follow-up 1 year after the implementation of the transplant coordination program demonstrated a 7-fold increase in the number of donors compared with the 2 previous years when the program did not exist. During the first year of application, the transplant coordination program resulted in solutions in how to address issues surrounding the procurement process in a hospital with a high potential donor rate; a linkage between the coordinator and the medical staff through educational activities; increased skills of hospital staff; and a methodology that should be applied extensively in hospitals with high donor potential to deal with the organ shortage.

A 565 Mbit/s DPSK heterodyne transmission experiment has been demonstrated using a fibre post-amplifier. Over + 12 dBm output powers were obtained in a both end pumping configuration for 35 mW total launched pump power, leading to a repeaterless link budget of 62.9 dB.

The wavelength emitted from a 2.5 Gbit/s integrated electroabsorption modulator/DFB laser module is tuned over 3.2 nm via the chip temperature control, while sensitivity penalties caused by the chromatic dispersion of 770 km standard fibre remain <1 dB. This significantly relaxes the manufacturers' constraints on the wavelength specifications in the scope of multichannel systems.

Using four cascaded fluoride-based fibre-amplifiers, the authors report equalisation-free, simultaneous amplification of a 16 wavelength-multiplexed signals ranging over 25 nm. 4.5 dB gain excursion was obtained for a power budget larger than 77 dB, with a signal-to-noise ratio excursion as low as 3.3 dB over the spectral range considered.

A new technique for flat gain control over a large range of input power with 1.55 µm fluoride-based erbium-doped fibre amplifiers is reported. It relies on the monitoring of backward-propagating amplified spontaneous emission. This technique is promising for future multiwavelength systems, where signal power or channel number variations may occur.

Using the new method of dispersion supported transmission, high power signals of + 19 dBm at 10 Gbit/s are transmitted on standard singlemode fibre via the record length of 182 km without inline amplification. The robustness of the transmission scheme against nonlinear effects is verified.

The authors have shown numerically, and confirmed experimentally, that reducing the bandwidth of the sequence spectrum (as opposed to the pulse spectrum), for instance using a duobinary coding, does not necessarily improve the propagation through dispersive fibres.

Results are reported for a repeaterless transmission experiment at 2.5 Gbit/s through 1391 km of non-dispersion-shifted fibre (26100 ps/nm total chromatic dispersion), using a module incorporating an integrated electroabsorption (EA) modulator/DFB laser chip. A system penalty of 0.2 dB was obtained producing a record bit–rate–distance product of 3.5 Tbitkm/s.

Depending on the launched state of polarisation, 10 Gbit/s system impairments are investigated experimentally in the presence of chromatic dispersion and variable differential group delay caused by polarisation mode dispersion. In addition, an actual fibre cable, not an optical simulator, was used to bring polarisation mode dispersion.

Using an 8 channel multiplex ranging over 28 nm and a circulating loop, the gain excursion and the signal-to-noise ratio discrepancies between channels were measured against the number of in-line fluoride-based fibre amplifiers. 27 nm 6 dB gain bandwidth was observed after six fluoride-based amplifiers.

The feasibility of 40 Gbit/s aggregate bit rate transmission through 440 km standard fibre is experimentally demonstrated using a 25 nm-wide 16 wavelength multiplex and fluoride-based fibre amplifiers. This result corresponds to a potential bit rate-distance product of 17.6 Tbit/s.km through standard fibre.