Freehold Regional High School District

In March 2003, there was an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in Hong Kong. The World Health Organization (WHO) has termed the illness severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The disease is highly contagious and has spread rapidly throughout the world. Globally, there were more than 3000 reported cases and 154 related deaths as of April 14, 2003 1. We report a case of an eighty-one-year-old woman who sustained an intertrochanteric fracture. Her postoperative course was complicated by a suspected aspiration pneumonia. She did not have the typically reported clinical features of SARS or a definite history of contact with a patient with SARS. She died of severe respiratory failure. An autopsy showed typical findings of SARS. An eighty-one-year-old woman who resided in a home for the elderly had a history of chronic obstructive airway disease. She had no history of contact with a SARS patient. She was admitted to the orthopaedic ward after a fall on March 16, 2003. Radiographs of the left hip showed a comminuted intertrochanteric fracture. A closed reduction and Asiatic Gamma nail fixation was performed with the patient under spinal anesthesia one day after admission. The operation was uneventful and was completed in forty-five minutes. Postoperatively, the patient's dentures were missing, and a radiograph of the chest was made to rule out aspiration. The radiograph showed only a hyperinflated lung. On the first postoperative day, oxygen desaturation and mild shortness of breath developed. A chest radiograph revealed bilateral pulmonary infiltrates in the middle and lower lobes ( Fig. 1 ). A pulmonary medicine consultation was obtained on the second postoperative day, and a provisional diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia was made on the basis of the episode of suspected aspiration. The clinical picture did not suggest SARS in view of leukocytosis (a leukocyte count of 14 × …

Tropospheric ozone (O 3 ) is an important air pollutant that can injure plants, and it may have direct or indirect effects on associated insects. Thus, tobacco plants, Nicotiana tabacum L., were exposed to 4 concentrations of O 3 in open-top chambers at the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Air Quality Research Unit at Raleigh, NC. The O 3 treatments were charcoal-filtered air (CF), nonfiltered air (NF), and NF with O 3 added for 12 h/d (0900-2100 hours EST) to obtain proportions of O 3 1.4 times ambient (NF1) and 1.7 times ambient (NF2). After plants had been exposed to ozone for at least 5 d, eggs from tobacco hornworm moths, Manduca sexta (L.), were counted and removed daily from the plants. Hornworm moths oviposited significantly more eggs on plants grown in the highest O 3 treatment (NF2), However, when plants were removed from the chambers, or when the O 3 was turned off in the chambers, there were no differences in ovipositional preferences of M. sexta females. Tobacco plants in treatments with enhanced O 3 had lower levels of total cuticular cembranoid diterpenes, which are important ovipositional stimulants for M. sexta. Therefore, observed changes in leaf-surface chemistry (i.e., lowered cembranoid diterpenes) do not explain the higher oviposition rates by M. sexta moths on plants grown in chambers with enhanced O 3 .

Visual acuity and displacement threshold hyperacuity were measured in a group of patients awaiting cataract extraction, and this was repeated several weeks subsequent to surgery. In addition, measurements were made on a group of patients with various ocular pathologies but without the presence of cataract. Displacement thresholds in the cataract group increased only slightly with the severity of the opacity. On the other hand, displacement thresholds for the pathology group showed a marked dependence upon visual acuity--the worse the acuity, the higher the threshold. This results in a clear distinction between vision loss due to optical factors (cataract) and retinal/neural factors. There was a good correlation between pre- and post-operative displacement thresholds in the cataract group, with post-operative thresholds being slightly better than pre-operative thresholds. The results suggest that this technique may offer patients a good indication of the likely quality of vision achieved following cataract extraction.