Immunohistochemical quantification of pulmonary mast-cells and post-mortem blood dosages of tryptase and eosinophil cationic protein in 48 heroin-related deaths

Recent studies suggest that many fatal heroin overdoses are caused by anaphylactoid reaction. In the present study we measured tryptase and eosinophil cationic protein in post-mortem blood of 48 deaths after heroin injection. We also investigated the presence and pulmonary distribution of mast-cells using specific immunohistochemical antibody for tryptase and morphometric evaluation in those cases of heroin-related deaths. The data were compared with 44 subjects who died following head trauma and to 32 cases of fatal anaphylactic shock. In the heroin-related death cases, the measurements of serum tryptase levels and eosinophil cationic protein dosages resulted in particularly elevated concentrations compared with the trauma cases. Nevertheless, the data that our study supplies by immunohistochemical techniques indicate that when mast-cells count in the lung was determined, no definite pattern was obtained between fatal heroin overdose cases and the control groups. Furthermore, the wide range of morphine concentrations found in post-mortem blood samples suggest that the term ‘overdose’ is relative and does not sufficiently characterize death associated with heroin addiction. Our study confirms that elevated concentrations of serum tryptase are associated with many heroin-related deaths. At this moment to attribute the cause of these deaths to ‘heroin overdose’ ignores the likely causal contribution of other possible systemic reactions to the mechanism of death.     

Political competition and economic performance: evidence from the Italian regions

We verify the predictions of the theoretical literature on the relationship between political competition and economic performance, holding that, when the predominance of an ideological dimension creates a political rent, the party exploiting it selects lower quality politicians whose policy choices worsen economic performance. We examine the sample of 15 Italian Regions from 1980 to 2002 that exploits the institutional reforms of 1995 as an exogenous shock to pre-existing rents. We find evidence that higher political competition improves economic performance, through the choice of more efficiency-oriented policies.     

Towards agonistic peacebuilding? Exploring the antagonism–agonism nexus in the Middle East Peace process

Many contemporary conflicts are framed as antagonistic and difficult to resolve because of their zero-sum framing among the disputants. This article addresses the antagonism–agonism nexus and the political and contested nature of building peace. It has a three-fold aim: (1) to critically assess the interplay between constructive and destructive dynamics; (2) to analyse the circumstances under which conflict may move from antagonism to agonism; and (3) to advance the novel notion of agonistic peacebuilding. The Middle East Peace process is used as a critical case of intractable conflict to elucidate the enabling and restraining conditions for agonistic peacebuilding.     

Decentralization and access to social services in Colombia

Decentralization is meant to improve access to public services, but relatively few studies examine this question empirically. We explore the effects of decentralization on access to health and education in Colombia using an original database covering over 95 % of Colombian municipalities. We show that decentralization improved enrollment rates in public schools and access of the poor to public health services. In both sectors, improving access was driven by the financial contributions of local governments. Small increases in own-shares of spending led to surprisingly large increases in the access of the poor in both sectors. Our theoretical model implies that where local information dominates productive efficiency, elected local governments will provide services better tailored to local needs. Decentralizing such services should increase their use by the public. Together, theory and empirics imply that decentralization made the Colombian state more accountable. It provided local officials with the information and incentives they need to allocate resources in a manner responsive to voters’ needs and improve the impact of public expenditures.     

Decentralization as a constraint to Leviathan: a panel cointegration analysis

This paper extends the empirical literature about the effects of fiscal decentralization on the growth of government along three dimensions. It distinguishes between the effects of the level of decentralization from the way local governments finance their expenditures (common pool versus own resources); it uses a panel cointegration approach to separate the long run effects of decentralization from the short run dynamics; and it extends and revises the datasets generally used in these empirical analyses. The results show that the amount of revenue raised by sub-national governments leads to a long-term fall in the size of government but grants have the opposite effect. In addition, a greater decentralization of expenditure leads to greater overall spending. When the short-term is considered these influences work slowly, as the speed of adjustment towards the desired government size is relatively sluggish. In addition, in the short run, there is also a clear effect from the role of local revenue raising powers that stimulates the growth of government. These results appear robust to changes in the composition of the variables, countries and periods included the sample.     

Swiss worlds of welfare

Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of ‘varieties of capitalism’? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the development of national welfare states? These are the guiding questions of this article. We find strong empirical evidence for large inter-cantonal variation in welfare state policies. The sub-regimes are not functionally connected, however. Their variation is related to different sets of variables, indicating a weak functional link between them. Developments and causal structures are specific to the various subregimes. In addition, it is socio-economic and not politicoinstitutional variables that have had the strongest imprint on the overall structure of cantonal welfare regimes.     

New forms of industrial policy in the age of regulation: A comparison of electricity and telecommunications in Italy and Spain

Relying on insights from the comparative capitalism debate, this article compares the industrial policy strategies implemented by the Italian and Spanish governments to favor the internationalization of domestic electricity and telecommunications incumbents. It is shown how the cross‐sectoral and cross‐country variation in the outcome of their industrial policy efforts—that is, successful or unsuccessful internationalization—is explained by the reciprocal power relationship between governments and domestic large shareholders (“blockholders”). Successful internationalization is conditional on the availability of two power resources the government can use to influence blockholders' behavior: ownership power and regulatory power. When these resources were available, governments were able to impose a stable ownership structure on national champions, leading to successful internationalization. When they were not available, ownership instability led to failure. The findings presented here contribute to the debate on new forms of state involvement in the economy in the neoliberal era.     

Implantation of radio frequency identification device (RFID) microchip in disaster victim identification (DVI)

The tsunami catastrophe of December 2004 left more than 200,000 dead. Disaster victim identification (DVI) teams were presented with the unprecedented challenge of identifying thousands of mostly markedly putrefied and partially skeletised bodies. To this end, an adequate body tagging method is essential. Conventional body bag tagging in terms of writing on body bags and placing of tags inside body bags proved unsatisfactory and problem prone due to consequences of cold storage, formalin (formaldehyde) embalming and body numbers inside storage facilities. The placement of radio frequency identification device (RFID) microchips inside victim bodies provided a practical solution to problems of body tagging and attribution in the DVI setting encountered by the Austrian DVI team in Thailand in early 2005.     

Suicide by pencil

We report an unusual suicide, committed with a common pencil. A 72-year-old male inflicted himself a penetrating thoracic wound while being hospitalized for a hip prosthesis operation. Although the patient was immediately operated, the cardiac injury appeared to be fatal. Cases of suicidal penetrating wounds of the anterior chest wall are rare and they are mostly inflicted by knives, glass fragments, or other sharp instruments. The potential danger of a pencil should be taken into consideration, especially in psychiatric hospitals and imprisonment facilities. We examined the legislation in Italy and Finland concerning the regulation of privacy in special care institutions.