Therapeutic approaches to disease modifying therapy for multiple sclerosis in adults: an Australian and New Zealand perspective: part 1 historical and established therapies

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a potentially life-changing immune mediated disease of the central nervous system. Until recently, treatment has been largely confined to acute treatment of relapses, symptomatic therapies and rehabilitation. Through persistent efforts of dedicated physicians and scientists around the globe for 160 years, a number of therapies that have an impact on the long term outcome of the disease have emerged over the past 20 years. In this three part series we review the practicalities, benefits and potential hazards of each of the currently available and emerging treatment options for MS. We pay particular attention to ways of abrogating the risks of these therapies and provide advice on the most appropriate indications for using individual therapies. In Part 1 we review the history of the development of MS therapies and its connection with the underlying immunobiology of the disease. The established therapies for MS are reviewed in detail and their current availability and indications in Australia and New Zealand are summarised. We examine the evidence to support their use in the treatment of MS.

Petal diagrams: a new technique for mapping historical change in the film industry

As the study of cinema has increasingly turned to the examination of economic ebbs and industrial flows, rather than focussing its attention solely on the critical evaluation of the films themselves, new analytic techniques and tools have been adopted (and adapted) by film scholars. Key amongst these is the use of innovative visualization techniques that can assist in the understanding of the spatial and temporal features of film industry practices. However, like the cinema itself, visualization carries its own spatial and temporal dimension. This article explores some of the benefits and limitations that derive from the use of spatial visualization technologies in the field of cinema studies. In particular, this research presents a new holistic multivariate approach to spatio-temporal visualization for point based historical data. This method has been developed through extending the spatial presence in timeline graphics and through meaningful spatial classification and representation.

Pluralist risk cultures: the sociology of childbirth

Western medical approaches to childbirth typically locate risk in women’s bodies,making it axiomatic that ‘good’ maternity care is associated with medically trainedattendants. This logic has been extrapolated to developing societies, like Vanuatu, anIsland state in the Pacific, struggling to provide good maternity care in line with theWorld Health Organization’s Millennium Development Goals. These goals include thereduction of maternal mortality by two-thirds by 2015, but Vanuatu must overcomechallenging hurdles – medical, social and environmental – to achieve this goal.Vanuatu is a hybridised society: one where the pre-modern and modern coincide inparallel institutions, processes and practices. In 2010, I undertook an inductive study of30 respondents from four main subcultures – women living in outer rural communitieswith limited access to Western-trained health workers; women from inner urbancommunities with ease of access to medical clinics; traditional birth attendants whoare formally untrained but highly specialised and practised mainly in remote communities;and Western-trained medical clinicians (obstetricians and midwives). I invitedall the participants to comment on what constituted a ‘good birth’. In this article, Ishow that participants interpreted this variously according to how they believed theuncertainties of childbirth could be managed. Objectivist approaches that define risk asan objective reality amenable to quantifiable measurement are thus rendered inadequate.Interpretivist approaches better explain the reality that social actors not only findrisk in different sites but gravitate towards different practices, discourses and individualsthey can trust especially those with whom they feel a strong sense of community.Strategies are, therefore, formed less through scientific rationality but according tofeelings and emotions and the lived experience. The concept of risk cultures conveysthis complexity; they are formed around values rather than calculable rationalities. Riskcultures form self-reflexively to manage contingent circumstances.

Beating space and time: historical gay sex and queer cultural geographies of masculinities

This article focuses on historical queer cultural geographies of masculinities and to do so it focuses on two cases/places. The first is an archival case/place: a partial assembly of documents of beats and their uses during and in the wake of Gay Liberation in Australia. The second is a literary case/place: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a canonical twentieth-century imbrication of male homosexuality and geography. This article will seek to rationalize the mobilization of these two asynchronous cases/places through the insights that both afford, when brought together, for elaborating contributions that queer readings of Nietzsche can make to contemporary queer theories of space, time and masculinities.

An overview of some historical brazilian macroeconomic series and some open questions

This paper presents an overview of the Brazilian macroeconomy by analyzing the evolution of some specific time series. The presentation is made through a sequence of graphs. Several remarkable historical points and open questions come up in the data. These include, among others, the drop in output growth as of 1980, the clear shift from investments to government current expenditures which started in the beginning of the 80s, the notable way how money, prices and exchange rate correlate in an environment of permanently high inflation, the historical coexistence of high rates of growth and high rates of inflation, as well as the drastic increase of the velocity of circulation of money between the 70s and the mid-90s. It is also shown that, although net external liabilities have increased substantially in current dollars after the Real Plan, its ratio with respect to exports in 2004 is practically the same as the one existing in 1986; and that residents in Brazil, in average, owed two more months of their final income (GNP) to abroad between 1995-2004 than they did between 1990 and 1994. Variance decompositions show that money has been important to explain prices, but not output (GDP).