Death caused by myocarditis in Wayne County, Michigan: a 9-year retrospective study

This paper reviews 72 cases of death caused by myocarditis between the years 1996 and 2004, autopsied at the Office of the Wayne County Medical Examiner in Michigan. Myocarditis as a cause of sudden and unexpected death represented 1.3% of all natural deaths in Wayne County during said period. The year 1999 contained the highest number of deaths of this cause (18), where the average number of myocarditis deaths was 8 per year for this 9-year span. In this study, each case was reviewed based on information gathered from investigative, autopsy, and toxicology reports. Significantly, 58% of these cases were male, and 63.4% were African American. Myocarditis caused death in every age group between 7 months and 67 years, but adults between the ages of 19 and 67 were most significantly affected (75%). Flu and/or cold were the most common symptoms experienced in the days directly proceeding death (28%), followed by shortness of breath (17%) and sudden collapse (15%). Sixty-nine percent of these 72 cases were pronounced dead after ACLS (advanced cardiac life support) protocol by emergency medical services or hospital attendants. Cardiomegaly was observed in 24 cases of adults aged 19 or older (54%), and flabby/soft myocardial tissue was observed grossly in 16% of all 72 cases.     

Global rights and regional jurisprudence

This article asks whether a “law-as-integrity” approach to human rights adjudication provides a theoretical framework within which to make sense of authoritative regional interpretations of basic human rights for the global community. To focus analysis, I consider U.S. court interpretations of international human rights as an interpretive context. I argue that, with appropriate modification so as to include the world community as a “community of principle” for purposes of human rights adjudication, the law-as-integrity perspective permits disputes surrounding the legality of human rights to revolve around competing interpretive claims backed up by justifying legal theories, rather than as ideological battles external to a juridical philosophy of rights.     

Violence and trauma: the past 20 and next 10 years

The issues of violence and trauma over the past 20 years have generated a significant amount of research. However, the development of each field has remained, for the most part, exclusive from the other. Therefore, the goal of this article is to address this shortcoming within the literature by responding to three important questions: (a) What is the most important thing we have learned about violence and trauma in the past 20 years? (b) What is the most important thing we need to learn in the next 10 years? and (c) What is the most promising methodological innovation in the past 20 years for the study or treatment of trauma or interpersonal violence? This article concludes that by increasing the discourse between the two fields, both research fields may be better able to develop conceptually, methodologically, and empirically.     

Interrogating genomic diversity of E. coli O157:H7 using DNA tiling arrays

Here, we describe a novel microarray-based approach for investigating the genomic diversity of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in a semi-high throughput manner using a high density, oligonucleotide-based microarray. This microarray, designed to detect polymorphisms at each of 60,000 base-pair (bp) positions within an E. coli genome, is composed of overlapping 29-mer oligonucleotides specific for 60 equally spaced, 1000-bp loci of the E. coli O157:H7 strain EDL933 chromosome. By use of a novel 12-well microarray that permitted the simultaneous investigation of 12 strains, the genomes of 44 individual isolates of E. coli O157:H7 were interrogated. These analyses revealed more than 150 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and several deletions and amplifications in the test strains. Pyrosequencing was used to confirm the usefulness of the novel SNPs by determining their allelic frequency among a collection of diverse isolates of E. coli O157:H7. The tiling DNA microarray system would be useful for the tracking and identification of individual strains of E. coli O157:H7 needed for forensic investigations.     

Forensic Analysis of mtDNA Haplotypes from Two Rural Communities in Haiti Reflects Their Population History

Abstract: Very little genetic data exist on Haitians, an estimated 1.2 million of whom, not including illegal immigrants, reside in the United States. The absence of genetic data on a population of this size reduces the discriminatory power of criminal and missing‐person DNA databases in the United States and Caribbean. We present a forensic population study that provides the first genetic data set for Haiti. This study uses hypervariable segment one (HVS‐1) mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) nucleotide sequences from 291 subjects primarily from rural areas of northern and southern Haiti, where admixture would be minimal. Our results showed that the African maternal genetic component of Haitians had slightly higher West‐Central African admixture than African‐Americans and Dominicans, but considerably less than Afro‐Brazilians. These results lay the foundation for further forensic genetics studies in the Haitian population and serve as a model for forensic mtDNA identification of individuals in other isolated or rural communities.     

Focusing on How Rather Than on Whom: Constructing a Process-Based Framework for Interpreting the Press Clause in the Network-Society Era

The Internet has made it possible for anyone to become a publisher, thus raising questions regarding how the press clause of the First Amendment will be defined in the twenty-first century. This study proposes a process-based framework for understanding the press clause that moves away from the historically problematic questions that arise with approaches that seek to determine who is a journalist. This approach aligns with historical conceptualizations of the press clause and the characteristics of the network society. The proposed framework is drawn from an analysis of recent lower-court cases in which citizen publishers claimed protections that have traditionally been associated with journalism, as well as an examination of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States and of legal scholars’ historical understandings of the clause.