Immundefiziente Labortiere im System des Tierschutzrechts

Natur und Recht - Zucht und Haltung immundefizienter Labortiere wurden bislang nicht als Tierversuch gewertet, soweit die Tiere mit an Sicherheit grenzender Wahrscheinlichkeit nicht aufgrund des...     

Fatal intoxication with 1,4-butanediol: Case report and comprehensive review of the literature

A fatal case of 1,4-butanediol (1,4-BD) oral ingestion is reported here, in which a 51-year-old man was found dead in his bed. According to the police report, the deceased was a known drug user. A glass bottle labeled (and later confirmed to be) “Butandiol 1,4” (1,4-BD) was found in the kitchen. Furthermore, the deceased's friend stated that he consumed 1,4-BD on a regular basis. The autopsy and histological examination of postmortem parenchymatous organ specimens did not revealed a clear cause of death. Chemical-toxicological investigations revealed gammahydroxybutyrat (GHB) in body fluids and tissues in the following quantities: femoral blood 390 mg/L, heart blood 420 mg/L, cerebrospinal fluid 420 mg/L, vitreous humor 640 mg/L, urine 1600 mg/L, and head hair 26.7 ng/mg. In addition, 1,4-BD was qualitatively detected in the head hair, urine, stomach contents, and the bottle. No other substances, including alcohol, were detected at pharmacologically relevant concentrations. 1,4-BD is known as precursor substance that is converted in vivo into GHB. In the synoptic assessment of toxicological findings, the police investigations and having excluded other causes of death, a lethal GHB-intoxication following ingestion of 1,4-BD, can be assumed in this case. Fatal intoxications with 1,4-BD have seldom been reported due to a very rapid conversion to GHB and, among other things, non-specific symptoms after ingestion. This case report aims to give an overview to the published of fatal 1,4-BD-intoxications and to discuss the problems associated with detection of 1,4-BD in (postmortem) specimens.     

Economic Elites and Support for Housing Affordability Policy: How a Housing-Health Belief Matters

Political Behavior - To investigate economic elites’ housing policy preferences and test the attitudinal, contextual, political, and economic conditions that drive support for affordable...     

Non-compliance by design: Moribund hard law in international institutions

States often create international institutions that impose legally binding rules on member states, and then do not even attempt to enforce these rules. Why? In this article, we present a game-theoretic model of moribund hard law in international institutions. We show that if some states face domestic pressure to negotiate a hard law treaty, their incentive to insist on hard law in the negotiations is maximized when less enthusiastic states expect that the hard law will probably not be enforced. Domestic proponents of hard law reward states for negotiating a hard law treaty, while states that oppose hard law can accept it because they expect no enforcement. As a form of informal governance, moribund hard law allows non-compliance by design.     

Time-resolved hair analysis of MDMA enantiomers by GC/MS-NCI

The aim of the study was to determine the enantioselective disposition of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and other amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) in segmented hair specimens of self-declared ecstasy abusers, who took part in a double-blind placebo-controlled six-way crossover study during approximately 7 weeks, during which they received a 75 and a 100 mg dose of racemic MDMA twice. Hair specimens were washed and cut into pieces of 2 cm length. After digestion and solid phase extraction, the enantiomers were derivatized with a chiral agent (2S,4R)-N-heptafluorobutyryl-4-heptafluorobutoyloxy-prolyl chloride, developed at the authors laboratory and quantified by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry operating in the negative chemical ionization mode. Most of the hair specimens that were tested positive for MDMA showed a predominance of the (R)-enantiomer. The R/S ratios of MDMA varied between 1.02 and 2.75 and total concentrations ranged from 0.1 to 20.1 ng/mg. The enantiomers of its metabolite 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) were also quantified in most hair segments. The R/S ratios of MDA varied between 0.60 and 1.60, while the concentrations of the enantiomers ranged from 10 to 160 pg/mg hair. When segmental analysis was performed on single hair specimens, no inversion of the R versus S ratios of MDMA and MDA was observed. The predominance of (R)-MDMA in hair was in accordance with those already published for other matrices. Furthermore, both enantiomers of amphetamine (AM) were also detected in hair segments of four volunteers and the R/S ratios ranged from 1.00 to 1.47.     

Organised crime threat assessments: a critical review

Since the beginning of the 21st century, several national and international government agencies have initiated organised crime threat assessments. Additionally, a few scholars have published methods to assess the risks and threats of organised crime. These governmental bodies and scholars claim that their reports and methods can demonstrate that certain forms of organised crime are more threatening than others and thus help policy-makers set strategic priorities. In this article I discuss these claims by examining the reliability and validity of the operational definitions of the key concepts used, such as organised crime, threat and risk. This examination reveals that most reports and methods provide insufficient detail—and sometimes even no details at all—to guarantee the reliability and validity of their operational definitions. The search for validity is made particularly difficult by the ambiguity surrounding the concepts of organised crime, threat and risk, while the concept of cost is less problematic. Moreover, establishing what constitutes a threat is at its core a normative decision that cannot be left to intelligence analysts or scientists alone. The challenge ahead lies in acknowledging the normative framework of organised crime threat assessments and within that framework maximising the reliability and validity of the operational definitions of key concepts and related measuring instruments.     

The Silent Reform of Swiss Federalism: The New Constitutional Articles on Education

This article examines the decision‐making process leading to the new constitutional articles on education in Switzerland. It analyzes how actors from both state levels (Confederation and cantons) could reach consensus in a process that was prone to a “joint‐decision trap”. To that end, we hypothesize which factors may be conducive to a “problem‐solving” style of policy‐making in a compulsory negotiation system. Rich empirical material from various sources supports our theoretical arguments: We show that shared beliefs and a common frame of reference, the procedural separation between constitutional and distributional issues, neutral brokers, and informal structures were all beneficial to the success of the reform project.     

Wachsende Lohnungleichheit in Deutschland

Based on the thesis of growing overall inequality in the German society, this paper discusses changes in the inequality of wages for the period between 1998 and 2006. Our objective is to identify differences in real wage growth for various occupational classes. The theoretical foundation of the article is based on economic as well as sociological concepts. With regard to recent findings of labor economists, one could postulate that market forces driven by technological changes and the corresponding growth in the relative demand for highly-skilled labor have led to an increase in wage inequality (skill-biased technological change, SBTC). In contrast, a structural theory approach, based on the work of Aage B. Sørensen, would argue that increasing wage inequality is due to changes in the extent to which certain labor market groups are able to generate rents. For the empirical analysis, data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and data from the BIBB/IAB-Survey are used. Our results show that people in lower occupational classes belong to the losers of the general income dynamics in Germany between 1998 and 2006. Moreover, the inclusion of a broad variety of characteristics of the occupational position reveals that the growth of wage inequality in Germany can be explained by skill-biased technological changes, but also by changes in rent generating processes.