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INTRODUCTION: Wild boar (i.e., Sus scrofa) are susceptible to a range of diseases that can be transmitted to domestic pigs. Assessing the potential risk of transmission-related events involves identifying where wild boar occur in Switzerland and where they still can colonize. It also involves identifying zones where piggeries are dense. In the work presented here, the distribution of wild boar in Switzerland was projected from grid data as probabilities of presence using an approach based on statistical modeling, separately for closed and open season for hunting. The predicted probabilities of wild boar presence were related to the density of piggeries in the six agricultural zones. The resulting maps show how the potential risk of transmission-related events, as a proxy for disease transmission, is distributed in Switzerland. Wild boar presence data consisted of hunting data and casual observations recorded from September 2011 to February 2018 at the coordinate level. They were obtained from all 16 Swiss cantons maintaining a license hunting system plus Solothurn (for 2017) and Zurich, as well as from info fauna. The probability of wild boar occurrence was high (> 0.7) in Jura, the valleys of the Southern Alps, the Rhone Valley down the river from Martigny, and the Rhine Valley down the river from Bündner Herrschaft; it was fair (0.5-0.7) in the Swiss Plateau. These regions broadly overlap agricultural zones with a high density of piggeries. Patches of perennially suitable, but currently not colonized habitat were found in the cantons of Berne, Obwalden, Uri, Schwyz, Glarus, and Grisons. The probability of wild boar occurrence across the entire study area, including the Alps, increased by 12% during closed season for hunting. The results were discussed with reference to similar studies.

INTRODUCTION: Le sanglier (Sus scrofa) est sensible à plusieurs maladies qui peuvent être transmises au cochon domestique. Afin d'estimer le risque potentiel de transmission, il est important d'identifier les zones occupées par le sanglier en Suisse ainsi que celles qu'il pourrait encore coloniser. De plus, cela implique également de pouvoir situer les secteurs où les élevages de cochons sont les plus abondant. Dans le présent travail, la distribution du sanglier a été projetée selon une grille à l'échelle de la Suisse à partir des présences confirmées en utilisant des méthodes statistiques, ceci en considérant la période d'ouverture de chasse d'une part et la période de fermeture d'autre part. Les probabilités de présence calculées ont été misent en relation avec la densité des porcheries dans les différentes zones agricoles. Les cartes résultant de cet exercice montrent comment le risque potentiel de transmission de maladies est distribué en Suisse. La base de données utilisée contenait des informations sur les sangliers tirés lors de la chasse, ainsi que des observations occasionnelles, rapportées à l'échelle de la coordonnée entre Septembre 2011 et Février 2018. Ces données ont étés obtenues de l'ensemble des 16 cantons maintenant un système de chasse à patente, plus Soleure (2017) et Zurich, et des données disponibles sur info fauna. La probabilité de trouver des sanglier est élevée (> 0.7) dans le Jura, les vallées du sud des Alpes, la vallée du Rhône en aval de Martigny et la vallée du Rhin en aval de Bündner Herrschaft. Elle est modérée (0.5­0.7) pour le Plateau Suisse. Ces régions correspondent à peu près aux zones agricoles possédant les plus grandes densités de porcheries. Des secteurs offrant des conditions favorables toute l'année, mais encore inoccupés par le sanglier ont été trouvés dans les cantons de Berne, Obwald, Uri, Schwyz, Glaris et les Grisons. Sur l'ensemble de la zone d'étude, la probabilité de présence des sangliers était supérieur de 12% en dehors de la période de chasse. Les résultats ont été discutés en les comparant à des études similaires.

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QUESTIONS UNDER STUDY: To investigate the utilisation of the Internet by primary care physicians for medical purposes during their daily practice, and to clarify the reasons for use or non-use of this technology. METHODS: Cross-sectional postal survey in German-speaking Switzerland employing a purpose-designed pre-validated 69-item questionnaire. A random sample of 2009 primary care physicians participated in the investigation. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Number of primary care physicians with access to the Internet; reasons for using the Internet during consultations; sources of information in solving medical problems arising from concurrent patient care. RESULTS: 55% of the physicians returned the completed questionnaire. 75% of respondents reported access to the Internet. Only 7% use the Internet during patient consultations. The main reasons for not using the Internet were time pressure and concerns about potential negative interaction with physician-patient communication. To solve patient-specific problems arising during daily practice, 59% of the practitioners consult text-books or colleagues. Only 14% of respondents report regularly finding useful information on the Internet. Internet users assess information quality by checking on authorship, institution, publishing company, or whether the information is sponsored by a third party with a potential conflict of interest. CONCLUSIONS: Access to the Internet is widespread amongst German-speaking Swiss primary care physicians. Only a small minority use the Internet for information retrieval during consultation hours. Electronic information systems need to be tailored to the needs of primary care physicians.

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AO Documentation collected reports of nearly five thousand diaphyseal tibial fractures occurring in the 1980s. The following conclusions can be drawn: i. The number of fractures affecting men is twice that affecting women. ii. These fractures occurred mainly in younger people (under 40 years of age) and no increase occurred in elderly people. iii. Most bending fractures occurred in young men (20-30 yrs) and the torsion fractures affected men and women of about 40 equally. iv. The number of simple fractures (type A) is about the same as for fractures with one fragment (type B).

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How strong is a long bone in torsion? The principle of mechanical engineering of torsion on a beam is applied to the cylindrical tube model of a bone. The deformation and the strength of the tube are calculated. The calculated strength is about twice that of a real, not circular bone (human tibia) with the same cross-sectional area.

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Epidemiology revealed that diaphyseal fractures of the tibia affect young people, particularly young men; no increase was noticed for the elderly. This indicates that osteoporosis does not lead to increased bone fragility. Obviously, this is a biomechanical enigma. Torque measurements were carried out on human cadaveric tibiae and revealed a great correlation between the polar moment of inertia of the cortical bone at the tibial isthmus and the ultimate torque at failure (r = 0.83) and a lesser correlation between the cross-sectional density at the isthmus and the torque at failure (r = 0.57). Therefore, the size is more important than the degree of osteoporosis. We can speculate that endosteal resorption due to osteoporosis is compensated for by periosteal apposition and therefore does not lead to bone weakness.

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Extensible Markup Language (XML) is on its way to becoming a global standard for the representation, exchange, and presentation of information on the World Wide Web (WWW). More than that, XML is creating a standardization framework, in terms of an open network of meta-standards and mediators that allows for the definition of further conventions and agreements in specific business domains. Such an approach is particularly needed in the healthcare domain; XML promises to especially suit the particularities of patient records and their lifelong storage, retrieval, and exchange. At a time when change rather than steadiness is becoming the faithful feature of our society, standardization frameworks which support a diversified growth of specifications that are appropriate to the actual needs of the users are becoming more and more important; and efforts should be made to encourage this new attempt at standardization to grow in a fruitful direction. Thus, the introduction of XML reflects a standardization process which is neither exclusively based on an acknowledged standardization authority, nor a pure market standard. Instead, a consortium of companies, academic institutions, and public bodies has agreed on a common recommendation based on an existing standardization framework. The consortium's process of agreeing to a standardization framework will doubtlessly be successful in the case of XML, and it is suggested that it should be considered as a generic model for standardization processes in the future.

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This paper presents an introduction to a new approach in the field of clinical trial information technology. During the last years, more and more modern tools have found their ways to the different tasks during the design, the realization and data processing in the clinical trial. Choosing tools depends on a variety of conditions and aspects that have to be considered. Besides issues in the field of trial software, the focus of research also turns over to special hardware used in the trial. The Wireless Markup Language (WML) offers the possibility of using handheld devices like mobile phones (handy) or Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) for remote data entry. These widespread, easy to use hardware devices could use wireless access to the standard internet for use in their applications. This combination seems to become a success because of the existing infrastructure, the ongoing efforts in improving and enlarging the internet platform and not at last because the approach is so similar to the well accepted World Wide Web (WWW). As today this technology has not yet matured, different criteria have to be mentioned when choosing hard- and software for this application. We will show some aspects related especially to modern handheld devices and the belonging software.

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In order to be useful for practice, medical information on the World Wide Web must be relevant, reliable, well designed, and easy accessible. Approaches towards improving these requirements include evidence-based medical information services such as EVIMED. This research paper considers the question of how a user can be supported in accessing requested information from EVIMED and how further, semantically related information can easily be retrieved. The presented method of resolution is based on Schmid's concept of media and on Gruber's concept of the ontology. The use of the emerging Web standard eXtensible Markup Language (XML) in order to implement it, allows for the design of a component-based solution supporting an easy adaptation of the representational vocabulary in accordance with the conceptualization of the user, i.e., the practitioner.

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When dealing with biological organisms, one has to take into account some peculiarities which significantly affect the representation of knowledge about them. These are complemented by the limitations in the representation of propositional knowledge, i.e. the majority of clinical knowledge, by artificial agents. Thus, the opportunities to automate the management of clinical knowledge are widely restricted to closed contexts and to procedural knowledge. Therefore, in dynamic and complex real-world settings such as health care provision to HIV-infected patients human and artificial agents must collaborate in order to optimize the time/quality antinomy of services provided. If applied to the implementation level, the overall requirement ensues that the language used to model clinical contexts should be both human- and machine-interpretable. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is used to develop an electronic study form, is evaluated against this requirement, and its contribution to collaboration of human and artificial agents in the management of clinical knowledge is analyzed.

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Effects of peroral insulin on plasma concentrations of immunoreactive insulin (IRI) and glucose in newborn calves were studied. Bovine insulin was administered in amounts of 0.5 mg/kg body weight immediately preceding first colostrum. Thereafter, neither an increased IRI response nor a lowering of blood glucose level were observed, indicating that insulin was either not absorbed from the intestine or possibly retained in the liver. Feeding of whole milk was followed by a higher rise in IRI and glucose concentrations than feeding of colostrum after po insulin. However, when compared with 1-3-month old calves, IRI responses to feeding and to iv infused glucose were markedly smaller on the first and second day of life respectively, while glucose responses were similar. This indicates that insulin secretory mechanisms are not fully developed in the newborn calf.

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Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a noninvasive investigation technique that uses non ionizing radio waves of low quantum energy, rendering it suitable for application in children. Monitoring and anesthesia techniques allow MRL including immobilisation in a special incubator to be carried out in small infants. In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) provides biochemical information on living organisms in a non-invasive manner. Such a technique has recently been used to study neonatal brain energy metabolism. High energy phosphate metabolism and phospholipid metabolism can be evaluated in this manner and available clinical correlations can be made regarding eg seizures or long term neurologic sequelae associated with a decreased phosphocreatine: orthophosphate ratio. Future trends in neonatal MRS will provide further information on morphologic and metabolic brain development.

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We are investigating metabolism and morphological differentiation of the developing brain in neonates and children under non-invasive conditions combining MR imaging (MRI) with spectroscopy (MRS) on a high-field/small-bore (2.35 Tesla/40 cm) system. By the end of 1987, 116 neonates, infants and young children with various perinatal problems, congenital abnormalities and different neurological diseases have been examined with MRI. In addition, MRS studies were subsequently performed on 46 of these children using the same instrument and within the same session. The small, sometimes very sick and instable patients require careful monitoring and elaborate technical devices in the high magnetic field. We are presenting solutions for methodological and technical developments and adaptations, concepts for sedation and measurement protocols in various age groups and first results of the combined use of MRI and MRS to investigate the brain in neonates and infants.

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Sequence-specific 1H NMR assignments are presented for a non-selfcomplementary 23-base-pair DNA duplex of molecular weight 15,000 daltons, containing the OR3 repressor binding site of bacteriophage lambda as the central core. The NMR techniques used were mainly phase-sensitive two-dimensional NOE and 2Q spectroscopy, the latter to overcome overlap problems within the spectral region of the deoxyribose spin-systems. Direct sequential NOE connectivities are observed between adenine 2 H and deoxyribose 1' protons. We propose the use of these connectivities as a check of the assignments of C1' and A2 protons, which have independently been derived via other assignment pathways.

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Two-dimensional nuclear Overhauser enhancement (NOESY) spectra of labile protons were recorded in H2O solutions of a protein and of a DNA duplex, using a modification of the standard NOESY experiment with all three 90 degree pulses replaced by jump-and-return sequences. For the protein as well as the DNA fragment the strategically important spectral regions could be recorded with good sensitivity and free of artifacts. Using this procedure, sequence-specific assignments were obtained for the imino protons, C2H of adenine, and C4NH2 of cytosine in a 23-base-pair DNA duplex which includes the 17-base-pair OR3 repressor binding site of bacteriophage lambda. Based on comparison with previously published results on the isolated OR3 binding site, these data were used for a study of chain termination effects on the chemical shifts of imino proton resonances of DNA duplexes.

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