Equal IgG antibody response to pneumococcal vaccination in all stages of human immunodeficiency virus disease.

To evaluate the immunogenicity and safety of a 23-valent pneumococcal vaccine in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-seropositive patients, 80 men and 18 women received 1 dose of the vaccine (Pneumo 23; Pasteur Mérieux MSD, Brussels). The total IgG antibody response against all 23 Streptococcus pneumoniae capsular antigens was measured. Antibody levels were expressed in arbitrary units per microliter, referring to a standard curve. Geometric mean titers of the total IgG capsular antibodies on the day of vaccination and 30-45 days later were compared. The ratios of titers after and before vaccination in patients with > 500, 200-500, and < 200 CD4 lymphocytes/microL were 10, 10, and 12.6, respectively. Nonresponse (ratio < 4) occurred in 17% of patients and was unrelated to CD4 cell count. The vaccine was well tolerated; no serious side effects occurred. In 83% of the patients with HIV infection, the total antipneumococcal IgG level was higher after vaccination.

The Emergence of Access Controls in Small-Scale Fishing Commons: A Comparative Analysis of Individual Licenses and Common Property-Rights in Two Mexican Communities

Addressing global fisheries overexploitation requires better understanding of how small-scale fishing communities in developing countries limit access to fishing grounds. We analyze the performance of a system based on individual licenses and a common property-rights regime in their ability to generate incentives for self-governance and conservation of fishery resources. Using a qualitative before-after-control-impact approach, we compare two neighbouring fishing communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Both were initially governed by the same permit system, are situated in the same ecosystem, use similar harvesting technology, and have overharvested similar species. One community changed to a common property-right regime, enabling the emergence of access controls and avoiding overexploitation of benthic resources, while the other community, still relies on the permit system. We discuss the roles played by power, institutions, socio-historic, and biophysical factors to develop access controls. © 2012 The Author(s).

Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990

This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.

The Transnational Geography of Sexual Rights

Among the signal developments of the last third of the twentieth century has been the emergence of a new politics of human rights. The transnational circulation of norms, networks, and representations has advanced human rights claims in ways that have reshaped global practices. Just as much as the transnational flow of capital, the new human rights politics are part of the phenomenon that has come to be termed globalization. Shifting the focus from the sovereignty of the nation to the rights of individuals, regardless of nationality, the interplay between the local and the global in these new human rights claims are fundamentally redrawing the boundaries between the rights of individuals, states, and the international community. Truth Claims brings together for the first time some of the best new work from a variety of disciplinary and geographic perspectives exploring the making of human rights claims and the cultural politics of their representations. All of the essays, whether dealing with the state and its victims, receptions of human rights claims, or the status of transnational rights claims in the era of globalization, explore the potentialities of an expansive humanistic framework. Here, the authors move beyond the terms -- and the limitations -- of the universalism/relativism debate that has so defined existing human rights literature.

Postoperative statin use and risk of biochemical recurrence following radical prostatectomy: results from the Shared Equal Access Regional Cancer Hospital (SEARCH) database.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of statin use after radical prostatectomy (RP) on biochemical recurrence (BCR) in patients with prostate cancer who never received statins before RP. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We conducted a retrospective analysis of 1146 RP patients within the Shared Equal Access Regional Cancer Hospital (SEARCH) database. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards analyses were used to examine differences in risk of BCR between post-RP statin users vs nonusers. To account for varying start dates and duration of statin use during follow-up, post-RP statin use was treated as a time-dependent variable. In a secondary analysis, models were stratified by race to examine the association of post-RP statin use with BCR among black and non-black men. RESULTS: After adjusting for clinical and pathological characteristics, post-RP statin use was significantly associated with 36% reduced risk of BCR (hazard ratio [HR] 0.64, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.47-0.87; P = 0.004). Post-RP statin use remained associated with reduced risk of BCR after adjusting for preoperative serum cholesterol levels. In secondary analysis, after stratification by race, this protective association was significant in non-black (HR 0.49, 95% CI 0.32-0.75; P = 0.001) but not black men (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.53-1.28; P = 0.384). CONCLUSION: In this retrospective cohort of men undergoing RP, post-RP statin use was significantly associated with reduced risk of BCR. Whether the association between post-RP statin use and BCR differs by race requires further study. Given these findings, coupled with other studies suggesting that statins may reduce risk of advanced prostate cancer, randomised controlled trials are warranted to formally test the hypothesis that statins slow prostate cancer progression.