The safety of vaccinations in patients with multiple sclerosis has been debated for decades.¹ Clinical onset and relapses of multiple sclerosis after vaccination have been reported.²–²⁰ The results of post-marketing surveillance studies²¹–²⁸ and small ...

According to the World Health Organization, more than 2 billion people in the world have serologic markers of hepatitis B infection, including 350 million chronic carriers of the virus,¹ of whom about 65 million will die from liver disease caused by the ...

Hip fractures cause substantial disability and are associated with a high rate of death among elderly women,¹ but there have been few studies of the effects of drug treatment on the risk of hip fracture. Observational studies suggest that estrogen may ...

Many people who live at high altitudes are shorter than their lowland counterparts.¹–⁶ However, well-nourished children from diverse ethnic groups will attain a height within international reference ranges.⁷,⁸ Therefore, the short stature of children ...

Figure 1. A 54-year-old man presented with severe pain in the right side of the groin that radiated to the calf and anteromedial thigh of the right leg, causing him to lie with his hips flexed. Hip extension exacerbated the pain. Because of venous ...

Figure 1. An 83-year-old woman who was taking acenocoumarol because of a previous pulmonary embolism presented with tiredness, a limp, and extensive bruising of both legs. Two weeks earlier, she had had multiple hematomas of the legs, which had been ...

Asthma is a complex syndrome with many clinical phenotypes in both adults and children. Its major characteristics include a variable degree of airflow obstruction, bronchial hyperresponsiveness, and airway inflammation. For many patients, the disease has ...

About two thirds of adults suffer from low back pain at some time. Low back pain is second to upper respiratory problems as a symptom-related reason for visits to a physician.¹,² There are wide variations in care, a fact that suggests there is ...

Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after; so that when men come to be undeceived it is too late: the jest is over and the tale has had its effect.

— Jonathan Swift¹

Despite their success in the control and elimination of serious infectious ...

Many people view Tibet as an exotic region where people live in rugged circumstances yet perpetuate values that are noble and mysterious. The study reported by Harris et al. in this issue of the Journal ¹ reveals a harsher reality. In this study, the ...

One hundred years ago, Boston had its last epidemic of smallpox. We describe this final epidemic, the controversy over compulsory vaccination, and ethical issues that remain relevant today.

Epidemiology and Protection through Vaccination

In May 1901, an ...

To the Editor: We are troubled by the suggestion in the review article on multiple sclerosis by Noseworthy and colleagues (Sept. 28 issue)¹ that hepatitis B vaccine should be administered only to persons at substantial risk for exposure to the virus. The ...

To the Editor: There are several reasons for advocating caution in generalizing the beneficial findings reported by Chan et al. (Oct. 19 issue)¹ to other patients with proliferative lupus glomerulonephritis. First, mycophenolate mofetil was compared with ...

To the Editor: Jouven et al. report on the long-term outcome in asymptomatic men with exercise-induced premature ventricular depolarizations (Sept. 21 issue).¹ In 1977, a colleague and I reported the results of a similar study involving 6500 patients, ...

To the Editor: Lipscomb et al. (Nov. 2 issue)¹ describe medical treatment for ectopic pregnancy almost as a stand-alone approach, which may leave nongynecologists with the wrong impression. For balanced decision making, several factors should be ...

To the Editor: The reconstruction of large bone segments is an important clinical problem, and none of the approaches proposed thus far have proved very effective. In animals, repair and functional recovery of segmental bone defects have been reported ...

To the Editor: In the idiopathic nephrotic syndrome, including focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a glomerular permeability factor may be responsible for the development of proteinuria and the recurrence of disease after renal transplantation.¹,² Plasma ...

Multiple-organ failure is one of the most challenging clinical problems in intensive care. This and related conditions, such as the systemic inflammatory response syndrome and the multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, represent the end result of a wide ...

Immunology and Drug Therapy of Allergic Skin Diseases and Handbook of Contact Dermatitis are concise, up-to-date reviews of the basic and clinical science of inflammatory skin diseases. Whereas Immunology and Drug Therapy of Allergic Skin Diseases focuses ...

Recent widespread efforts to change how we identify and prevent errors in health care have generated only a limited literature on medical errors. Even more limited are discussions of error in the field of clinical bioethics consultation. This book ...

Patient-to-Patient Transmission of Hepatitis C Virus during Colonoscopy Original Article, N Engl J Med 1997:337;237-240.. On page 237, one of the authors' names is misspelled. “Bertrand Rhin, M.D.,” should have been “Bertrand Rihn, M.D.”

Clinical and Genetic Features of Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome Type IV, the Vascular Type Original Article, N Engl J Med 2000:342;673-680.. On page 678, in Figure 3, the mutation described as G352V in the figure should have been given as G352E.