57 research outputs found
Spectrum and potency evaluation of a new oxazolidinone, linezolid: report from the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program, 1998-2000
No full textCopyright © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.Resistance (R) among Gram-positive cocci has escalated in the last two decades to levels necessitating the development and use in the newer drug classes, oxazolidinones (linezolid) and streptogramins (quinupristin/dalfopristin [Q/D]). The SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program has monitored these classes before, during and after their release by various regulatory agencies. Over 30,000 Gram-positive strains were tested against >30 drugs by reference broth microdilution methods between 1998-2000 in four geographic regions (Asia-Western Pacific [APAC], Europe [EU], Latin America [LA], North America [NA]). The tested strains were 23,188 staphylococci; 5,103 enterococci and 2,045 streptococci. Among staphylococci, linezolid was active against all isolates (MICs, EU (3.2%) > LA (1.6%) > APAC (1.3%). Among streptococci, linezolid was consistently active (MIC(90,) 1 microg/ml) as were the glycopeptides and Q/D. Variable penicillin-R (MIC, > or = 2 microg/ml) was observed among regions: EU (32.5%) > APAC (15.1%) > LA (13.8%) > NA (9.6%), and macrolide-R was higher in EU (40.3%). Ciprofloxacin-R at > or =4 microg/ml in streptococcal strains was noted world wide highest in viridans group streptococci (18.4-25.6%). Linezolid remained active (MIC, < or =4 microg/ml) against all Gram-positive species strains tested in the SENTRY Program (1998-2000). Q/D, glycopeptides and newer FQ compounds were generally less effective in vitro. It remains a prudent practice to continue surveillance programs to detect emerging resistance patterns and recognize significant regional variations in the oxazolidinone susceptibilities.Alan H. Mutnick, Douglas J. Biedenbach, John D. Turnidge and Ronald N. Joneshttp://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505759/description#descriptio
Stardust: Toward a Revolutionary Urban Ecology
No full textI wanted my square for the quilt to express what a sustainable urban ecology would look like with human beings and plants and animals coexisting in harmony in a city. Given the role that population density, public transportation, and greater access to education, jobs, and cultural engagement—museums, theater, galleries, and so on—can play in combating climate change, cities are crucial sites for mitigating the worst ecological crisis in human history. I considered various slogans: “Toward a Revolutionary Urban Ecology,” “The Right to the City,” and “Another World Is Possible.” But the actual design of the square dictated something less explicit, more metaphorical.
In designing the square, I placed blocks of fabric that drew my eye in a quilt-like pattern with two of the same pieces catacorner—blue fish in a sea and flowers on a turquoise background; in between are four wavy red rectangles, perhaps rays of light, in vertical and horizontal lines; and a yellow sun in the center. In the lower left hand corner, a woman is leaping, holding a flag; to her right is a blossoming tree; above the tree is a bird, wings spread; and in the center, enveloped by the sun, is the trace of a cityscape.
Instead of the slogans I had initially considered putting on the flag, I embroidered (a bit crudely) the word “stardust,” signifying the origins of life. The word started to mean more to me after reading the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s public diary as he was dying from leukemia. He wrote about his time left “in this marvelous form of stardust,” observing that “Atoms don’t have experiences. They’re just stuff. That’s all I really am is stuff. But stuff so complexly organized across several thresholds of stuff-complexity, that it’s able to reflect upon its stuff-ness and what an extraordinary thing it has been to be alive and aware that it’s alive and aware that it’s aware that it’s alive. And from that complexity comes the love and beauty and meaning that constitutes the life I’ve lived.”
This deep knowledge of the stardust from which we came and to which we return in nonhuman form connects us to everything around us on earth and across the universe. But to realize that harmony between nature and humans will mean enacting a revolutionary urban ecology; demanding the right to the city; sustaining the natural world of which we are part and which global capitalism, run amok, is destroying; and making our own history to prove that another world is possible.https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/community_usquilt_2023/1002/thumbnail.jp
Primary Brain Cancer in Adults and the Use of Common Household Appliances: A Case-Control Study
No full textThe Right Time: Building the Learning Community Movement
No full textThe author argues that the current conjuncture is a kairotic moment for their own learning community program as well as the national movement to support the development of learning communities in universities and colleges and the array of pedagogical approaches associated with them. With Barbara Leigh Smith (2013), they recognize a link between the social justice movements of the 1960s and the learning community movement both in their commitments to democracy and their organizing strategies. Through relating the story of their own experience as co-directors of the LIU Brooklyn Learning Community program, specifying different inventions, audiences, and purposes driving that initiative, they further suggest that learning communities have the potential not only to reinvigorate teaching and learning but also to contribute to struggles for a more democratic, compassionate society
The Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project
No full textThe digital content created by Pathways to Freedom students and faculty will feature a variety of media, artifacts, and documents with a primary focus on local civil rights oral histories mapped to archival documents and specific Brooklyn locations. It will be produced by undergraduate students and their professors in Pathways to Freedom as well as undergraduate and graduate Computer Science and/or Media Arts students, with the support of faculty and IT specialists, and will have enduring value to the academic and broader public, including middle and high school groups as well as other college students. Through an innovative use of existing digital tools and technologies, the prototype will combine oral history interviews with images of archival documents and interactive maps, enabling those artifacts to be seamlessly integrated on a variety of platforms including the Internet, a digital repository, and mobile devices
Application of Decision Analysis in Antibiotic Formulary Choices
No full textObjective: To introduce the reader to the fundamentals involved in using decision analysis as a tool in evaluating the associated costs and effectiveness of comparable therapeutic agents. Data Sources: Currently available literature citations were used to provide the reader with basic references whose purpose is to provide a step-by-step approach for using Decision Analysis in conducting a cost-effective comparison of three commonly used antibiotics. Data were gathered from a previously conducted retrospective chart review where the three antibiotics were used for either prophylactic, empiric, or documented infections. Although this study was limited by its retrospective nature, the reader can use the data to appreciate the fundamentals of decision analysis. Conclusions: The continually changing climate in healthcare and the added visibility of pharmacologic agents in the treatment and prevention of disease has increased pressure on pharmacy departments to provide therapeutic agents that are cost-effective. Decision analysis can be used to compare therapeutic agents, in terms of financial as well as clinical outcomes, in a structured fashion that all members of the health care team can understand. The application of Decision analysis is appropriate for many therapeutic agents, not just antibiotics. </jats:sec
The Nature of the City
No full textAs an academic, I believe it is my responsibility to incorporate political economic and ecological concepts and histories into my research, teaching, and community involvement. To avert a worstcase scenario already unfolding, we collectively need to understand and overcome the pressing, interrelated crises of our time of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and obscene levels of social and economic inequality worldwide.
I aim broadly in this quilt square to express “the nature of the city,” playing on the double entendre of “nature” as character or quality of urban spaces and “nature” as all the life and elements surrounding human beings and the built environment. However, I also want to represent the problem of centuries of humanity’s attempts to conquer, master, and control nature, which has catapulted us into a new epoch of the Anthropocene. The large hawk and small city skyline represent what Marx called an “irreparable rift” in the social metabolism between nature and society. The challenge for humanity in the 21st century is to mend the rift by ceasing to extract fossil fuels and other natural resources from the earth and building egalitarian societies based on human need for the many rather than exorbitant profits for a very few.https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cusp_usquilt_2022/1000/thumbnail.jp
Write. Persist. Struggle: Sponsors of Writing and Workers’ Education in the 1930s
No full textOrganizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role
- …
