Testing problems regarding narcotic substances in hair analysis]

The authors discuss legal, ethic, and technological problems associated with introduction of drug testing by analysis of hair in Russia. There are sufficiently reliable methods of hair analysis, but lack of legal basis and poor equipment of forensic chemical departments impede the introduction and wide use of these methods in Russia. The authors propose certification of the best equipped departments and render them the legal status of regional centers for tests for narcotics and psychotropic agents.     

原苏联部长会议主席雷日科夫谈苏联解体、苏共失败的原因

编者按:2008年6月11日,原苏共中央政治局委员、书记处书记,原苏联部长会议主席(总理)尼·伊·雷日科夫一行四人来华访问.全国政协副主席、中国社科院院长陈奎元会见并宴请客人.中国社科院副院长兼当代中国研究所所长朱佳木主持了报告会.报告会上,雷日科夫就苏联解体的原因以及刚刚翻译出版的他的新著<大国的悲剧>一书的相关内容做了演讲,并回答了听众的提问.     

Remembering the bad old days: Human rights, economic conditions, and democratic performance in transitional regimes

Using the natural laboratory of 18 post–communist Central and Eastern European countries, this article presents a basic model for democratic transition, specifically testing two alternative explanations for the degree of citizen satisfaction with the performance of their fledgling democracies: (1) virtues of omission, which include bad actions from which the state refrains, namely violations of individual human rights, and (2) virtues of commission, which include positive state actions, in particular actions enhancing economic well–being. The findings clearly indicate that, during the transition period citizens' sense of the condition of human rights is consistently more important than are perceived economic prospects as predictors of democratic performance.     

Off the Grid: Vaccinations Among Homeschooled Children

To protect public health, states require that parents have their children immunized before they are permitted to attend public or private school. But for homeschooled children, the rules vary. With the spectacular growth in the number of homeschooled students, it is becoming more difficult to reach these youth to ensure that they are immunized at all. These children are frequently unvaccinated, leaving them open to infection with diseases that are all but stamped out in the United States with immunization requirements. States should encourage parents to get their homeschooled students vaccinated through enacting the same laws as those used for public school students. This could be done by enforcing current laws through neglect petitions or by requiring that children be immunized before participating in school sponsored programs. As most states require some filing to allow parents to homeschool their children, it would be easy to enact laws requiring that homeschooled children be immunized or exempted before completing registration.     

A retrospective analysis of alcohol in medicolegal postmortems over a period of five years.

Violence and violent death are everyday events in present-day South Africa. Although this phenomenon may be attributed in great part to the sociopolitical environment, the single most important underlying common factor is the presence of alcohol in both the perpetrators of violence and their victims. We retrospectively studied 948 cases of 2,980 medicolegal autopsies done over a 5-year period. We found that 52.5% of cases tested positively for alcohol, with blood alcohol concentration varying from 0.008 to 0.048 g% (mean = 0.18). Male patients were more common and more likely to be positive than female patients. Breakdown of the cases into various modes of death showed that homicides, vehicular accidents, and suicides predominated. The results are in agreement with earlier studies done locally and elsewhere.     

The determination of benzodiazepines in biological objects on the Milichrome microcolumn liquid chromatograph]

1,4-benzodiazepines and benzophenols, the products of their hydrolytic cleavage, were measured by high-pressure liquid chromatography in expert material (stomach, liver, intestine, kidney samples). Milichrome microcolumn liquid chromatograph, designs 1 and 2, was employed, with a chromatography column packed with Separon C18 (5 microns) sorbent. A mixture of (NH4)2HPO4 (0.05 M) and acetonitryl in volume ratio 65:35 was used as the mobile phase in native compound analysis and that in volume ratio 45:55 for benzophenols and medazepam separation. The external standard method was used for quantitative estimation.     

The use of immunoenzyme analysis for determining ABH antigens in traces of saliva and sperm]

The authors suggest a simple sensitive technique for enzyme immunoassay (EIA) of ABH antigens in saliva and semen. A two-staged dot blot solid-phase EIA on nitrocellulose membranes was employed with anti-ABH monoclonal antibodies obtained in immunization of mice with human red cells. 4-chloro-1-naphthol substrate solution was used to visualize the peroxidase label. The results of analysis of salivary and spermatic samples obtained from donors of various groups evidence that this EIA variant may be useful in forensic medicine.