Occupational medicine programs for animal research facilities

Occupational medicine is a key component of a comprehensive occupational health and safety program in support of laboratory animal research and production facilities. The mission of the department is to maximize employee health and productivity utilizing a population health management approach, which includes measurement and analysis of health benefits utilization. The department works in close cooperation with other institutional health and safety professionals to identify potential risks from exposure to physical, chemical, and biological hazards in the workplace. As soon as exposures are identified, the department is responsible for formulating and providing appropriate medical surveillance programs. Occupational medicine is also responsible for targeted delivery of preventive and wellness services; management of injury, disease, and disability; maintenance of medical information; and other clinic services required by the institution. Recommendations are provided for the organization and content of occupational medicine programs for animal research facilities.     

The Kansas City palliative care curriculum--medical schools improve end-of-life training

Midwest Bioethics Center believes that encouraging palliative care training in the school milieu is one of the keys to achieving lasting improvement in end-of-life care. Therefore, a cooperative venture to increase palliative care education in medical schools was among the first strategies envisioned in the Center's PATHWAYS initiative. Its implementation, no less than its goal, requires both time and effort.     

Living scaffolds (specialized and unspecialized) for regenerative and therapeutic medicine

The physical sciences have increasingly demonstrated a significant influence on the life sciences. Engineering in particular has shown its input through the development of novel medical devices and processes having significance to the biomedical field. This review introduces and discusses several fiber generation protocols, which have recently undergone development and exploration for directly handling living cells from which continuous cell-bearing or living threads to scaffolds and membranes have been fabricated. In doing so these protocols have not only demonstrated their versatility but also opened several unique possibilities for the use of these scaffolds in a plethora of biological and medical applications. In particular, these living fibrous structural units could be explored for regeneration purposes, e.g., from accelerated wound healing to combating a wide range of pathologies when coupled with gene therapy. Thus, "living entities" such as these scaffolds could be most useful in surgery/medicine, including its exploration with stem cells for the preparation of unspecialized living scaffolds and membranes.