Families 'at risk' and the family nurse partnership:the intrusion of risk into social exclusion policy

This article considers why the family nurse partnership (FNP) has been promoted as a means of tackling social exclusion in the UK. The FNP consists in a programme of visits by nurses to low-income first-time mothers, both while the mothers are pregnant and for the first two years following birth. The FNP is focused on both teaching parenthood and encouraging mothers back into education and/or into employment. Although the FNP marks a considerable discontinuity with previous approaches to family health, it is congruent with an emerging new approach to social exclusion. This new approach maintains that the most important task of social policy is to identify quickly the most 'at-risk' households, individuals and children so that interventions can be targeted more effectively at those 'at risk', either to themselves or to others. The article illustrates this new approach by analysing a succession of reports by the Social Exclusion Unit. It indicates that there is a considerable amount of ambiguity about the relationship between specific risk-factors and being 'at risk of social exclusion'. Nonetheless, this new approach helps to explain why British policy-makers may have chosen to promote the new FNP now. © 2009 Cambridge University Press.

Effect of microstructure upon elastic behaviour of human tooth enamel

Tooth enamel is the stiffest tissue in the human body with a well-organized microstructure. Developmental diseases, such as enamel hypomineralisation, have been reported to cause marked reduction in the elastic modulus of enamel and consequently impair dental function. We produce evidence, using site-specific transmission electron microscopy (TEM), of difference in microstructure between sound and hypomineralised enamel. Built upon that, we develop a mechanical model to explore the relationship of the elastic modulus of the mineral-protein composite structure of enamel with the thickness of protein layers and the direction of mechanical loading. We conclude that when subject to complex mechanical loading conditions, sound enamel exhibits consistently high stiffness, which is essential for dental function. A marked decrease in stiffness of hypomineralised enamel is caused primarily by an increase in the thickness of protein layers between apatite crystals and to a lesser extent by an increase in the effective crystal orientation angle. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.