No abstract available.
Adenoma* ; Animals ; Benzo(a)pyrene* ; Ganoderma* ; Mice*

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of pesticide poisoning in South Korea and the relevant epidemiologic characteristics. During the period of 1996-2005, an approximate average of twenty-five hundred fatalities occurred per year due to pesticide poisoning, while age-standardized mortality rates by pesticide poisoning significantly increased from 4.42 to 6.42 per 100,000 population. Intentional self-poisoning was the primary cause of death due to pesticides (84.8% of total pesticide poisoning deaths). The prevalence of non-fatal pesticide poisoning among farmers varied from 5.7% to 86.7%. Paraquat was the leading causative agent for pesticide poisoning, followed by organophosphate insecticides. A variety of work-related factors such as pesticide usage, pesticide application days, hazardous practices and poor personal hygiene were significantly related with pesticide poisoning. The majority of the poisoned were male, elderly individuals possessing low levels of education and residing in rural areas. The number of pesticide poisoning cases was the highest during the growing season of May to August. Further evaluation of the incidence and risk factors of pesticide poisoning at the national level in South Korea is warranted to reduce the number of victims of pesticide poisoning.
Pesticides ; Poisoning aspects ; South Korea ; seconds ; Poisoning

No abstract available.

No abstract available.
Amino Acid Sequence* ; HIV* ; Phenotype*

To analyze the correlation between biological phenotypes of HIV-1 isolates and disease progression, we selected 9 long-term non-progressors (LTNP) and 12 rapid progressors (RP) from HIV-1 infected Korean. We isolated HIV-1 isolates by culture of PBMC of LTNP and RP with normal PBMC and measured HIV-1 p24 antigen production. The HIV-1 isolation rate from LTNP was 55.6% (5/9). And 4 HIV-1 LTNP isolates were non-syncytium inducing (NSI) phenotype and showed slow/low replication. The HIV-1 isolation rate from RP was 91.7% (l1/12) which was higher than that from LTNP. Besides 3 RP HIV-1 isolates which showed syncytium inducing (SI) phenotype, 8 RP HIV-1 isolates showed NSI phenotype in normal PBMC and MT-2 cell line. All RP HIV-1 isolates replicated more rapidly than LTNP HIV-1 isolates. Comparing the replication kinetics and syncytium forming capacity of HIV-1 isolates from LTNP and RP, we suggest that the difference of biological phenotype of HIV-1 isolates could be related with disease progression of HIV-1 infected persons.
Cell Line ; Disease Progression ; Giant Cells ; HIV-1* ; Humans ; Kinetics ; Korea* ; Phenotype

It is essential to search medical information precisely and efficiently in every aspect of medical practices and research activities. The growth of the medical literature has been tremendous in recent years, as exemplified by the annual growth of 710,000 records in MEDLINE in 2009, thus increasing the complexities of literature searching. Yet database search environments are changing toward very user-friendly ways facilitated by various hypertext linking capabilities such as "LinkOuts" to full texts and "reference linkings" among articles using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Once a direct search of a keyword is initiated, a searcher can continue searching endlessly and seamlessly by simply clicking various links provided in the records retrieved. Search behaviors of researchers are changing accordingly, avoiding any complex or advanced searches. The basics of database search methods are described in this paper. A brief overview of major medical databases is given by database type to illustrate the differences in the information retrievable from such databases: MEDLINE/PubMed and KoreaMed are abstract databases; SCI/Web of Science, SCOPUS and KoMCI are citation indexes; and PubMed Central and Synapse are full text databases. Some of the advanced search features of each database are also noted: searches using MeSH terms in PubMed and KoreaMed; differences in the "related documents" algorithms of PubMed and SCI; citation analysis using "analyze results" in Web of Science and SCOPUS; and citation tracking in Synapse and PubMed. The Journal of the Korean Medical Association (JKMA) records are used for the illustration of such features.
Hypermedia ; Synapses ; Track and Field

To identify where the quality research activity has been and is carried out in Korea, and to examine to what extents Korean medical colleges play leading roles in the production of international research papers, we investigated the publication productivity of Korean medical colleges and their medical departments as measured by the number of papers published in foreign journals indexed in MEDLINE. The 12-year period from 1988 to 1999 is covered. A total of 4,881 papers is published in MEDLINE foreign journals by the researchers in Korean medical colleges during the period. The production of MEDLINE papers are concentrated in a few universities. More than 60% of MEDLINE foreign journal papers is published by top five universities 25% by Seoul National University, and 15% by Yonsei University. The newly established medical colleges at the University of Ulsan and Sungkyunkwan University produced outstanding numbers of papers in less than ten years. Radiology has led the internationalization of Korean medical papers. It was the most productive specialty identified in this study. The productivity of Internal medicine is on the rise from the mid-1990s, and the field began to produce the most number of papers since then.
Bibliometrics* ; Korea ; MEDLINE* ; Periodicals/statistics & numerical data* ; Research/standards ; Schools, Medical/statistics & numerical data* ; Schools, Medical/standards ; Specialties, Medical/statistics & numerical data

The CD8(+)CD28(+) T cells have known to mediate major histocompatibility complex class I-restricted cytolysis and to secret an HIV-1 inhibitory factor. As HIV infection lead to dramatic changes within the cellular immune system, the cellular cytotoxicities decrease in the duration of the HIV infection. To determine the importance of the cellular cytotoxicities in long-term nonprogression, we tried to compare CD28 expression on total T, CD4(+) T, and CD8(+) T cells as one of methods for cellular cytotoxicity measurements between long-term nonprogressor and normal person or between long-term nonprogressor and rapid progressor. The median percentages and counts of CD4(+) T cells of the norrnal, the long-term nonprogressor, and the rapid progressor groups were 39.9 and 0.96 * 10(9) cells/L, 24.6 and 0.58 * 10(9) cells/L, 9.9 and 0.15 * 10 cells/L, respectively. As a result of comparison of the cells having CD28 surface molecules on CD8(+) T cells in the long-term nonprogressor and the rapid progressor group, they showed over 5 times lower than that in the normal group. Especially, the long-term nonprogressor regarded to the healthy HIV-infected patient showed much lower CD28 expression on total T, CD4(+) T, and CD8(+) T cells than those of the normal person. The proportions of CD4'CD28 T and CD3CD28 T cell subsets showed the significant difference between the LTNP and the RP group. In conclusion, although HIV-infected patients were LTNPs having the steady CD4(+) T cell counts and no clinical symptoms, we suggested that HIV led to abnormality within the lymphocyte subsets such as the altered expression of CD28 molecules on various T cell subsets and this result would cause deficiency of host immune function and failure of control of HIV replication by anergy in T cell subsets.
Cell Count ; HIV ; HIV Infections ; HIV-1 ; Humans ; Immune System ; Lymphocyte Subsets ; Major Histocompatibility Complex ; T-Lymphocyte Subsets* ; T-Lymphocytes

In order to investigate the extent and growth of SCI publication activity of Korean medicine, DIALOG's SCISearch database was searched and the number of SCI Korean medical papers in each medical specialty was measured by publication year and by document type for 1996 and 1997. The percentage contribution of Korean medical papers to SCI database and the SCI publication productivity ratio were analyzed for each of 57 medical specialties. The data obtained in this study was compared with the data representing the 1980s and the data for the first half of the 1990s. The absolute productivity of SCI Korean medical papers as measured by the number of SCI Korean papers has increased about ten times from 306 papers in 1990 to 3,261 papers in 1997. More than 15% of SCI Korean publication output has resulted from six Korean medical journals indexed in SCI from 1995. The relative productivity of SCI Korean medical papers as measured by the percentage contribution from Korea to SCI and by its corresponding productivity ratio is not as impressive as the absolute productivity and its growth rate. It has increased three times from 0.245% to 0.642% during the same period. The relative productivity of SCI Korean medical publication output is not as great as the SCI Korean publication output of all sciences combined (1.02%).
Databases, Factual ; Human ; Korea ; Publishing/statistics & numerical data* ; Research/trends ; Research/statistics & numerical data* ; Schools, Medical/trends ; Schools, Medical/statistics & numerical data ; Specialties, Medical/trends ; Specialties, Medical/statistics & numerical data* ; World Health

The Korean Journal of Parasitology (KJP) is the official journal of the Korean Society for Parasitology which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2009. To assess the contributions and achievements of the KJP, bibliometric analysis was conducted based on the citation data retrieved from 4 major databases; SCI, PubMed, Synapse, and Scopus. It was found that the KJP articles were constantly cited by the articles published in major international journals represented in these databases. More than 60% of 1,370 articles published in the KJP from 1963 to June 2009 were cited at least once by SCI articles. The overall average times cited by SCI articles are 2.6. The rate is almost 3 times higher for the articles published in the last 10 years compared to 1.0 for the articles of the 1960s. The SCI journal impact factor for 2008 is calculated as 0.871. It is increasing and it is expected to increase further with the introduction of the KJP in the database in 2008. The more realistic h-indixes were measured from the study data set covering all the citations to the KJP; 17 for SCI, 6 for PubMed, 19 for Synapse, and 17 for Scopus. Synapse extensively picked up the citations to the earlier papers not retrievable from the other 3 databases. It identified many papers published in the 1960s and in the 1980s which have been cited heavily, proving the central role of the KJP in the dissemination of the important research findings over the last 5 decades.
*Databases, Bibliographic ; *Journal Impact Factor ; Parasitology/*statistics & numerical data ; *Periodicals as Topic