It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a tension between growing consumer demands for access to information and a healthcare system that may not be prepared to meet these demands. Designing an effective solution for this problem will require a thorough understanding of the barriers that now stand in the way of giving patients electronic access to their health data. This paper reviews the following challenges related to the sharing of electronic health records: cost and security concerns, problems in assigning responsibilities and rights among the various players, liability issues and tensions between flexible access to data and flexible access to physicians.

Coccidioidal meningitis is a potentially lethal infection. Disease progression while taking fluconazole is a common complication and safe, effective, alternative treatments are limited. Posaconazole therapy resulted in symptomatic and laboratory improvement in 2 patients and clinical improvement in a third patient with chronic, previously unresponsive coccidioidal meningitis.

Since culture shock was first coined in the mid-1950s, the term has become a fixture of popular discourse and continues to organize general understandings of the way individuals experience cultural difference. This essay examines the emergence of culture shock in relation to the 1961 establishment of the US Peace Corps, an institution that contributed to both scholarly and popular understandings of the concept. Through an analysis of both the early scholarship on culture shock and the term’s appearance in volunteers’ accounts and Peace Corps histories, the essay identifies two complementary discourses at play in the culture shock story, which together supported the Peace Corps’ project of “educating Americans for overseasmanship”: the concept of culture shock harnessed the expert authority of an emerging American social science to a classically sentimental narrative of individual crisis, growth, and recovery. Ultimately, the essay argues, culture shock offered volunteers a framework through which to make sense of their unsettling encounters abroad, but one that individualized, psychologized, and depoliticized their confrontations not only with cultural difference but also with inequality, poverty, racism, and imperialism.

This article explores the factors that contributed to the use of different names for H1N1 by diverse actors in the early stages of the pandemic of 2009 and discusses the implications of inconsistent naming practices for the public's understanding of the virus and the credibility of scientists and health authorities. The authors propose a naming protocol for novel variants modeled after the World Meteorological Association's practice for naming weather events, a model that would enable accurate transmission of technical information among experts and provide a stable name for public use, even in the context of incomplete or changing scientific understanding of the nature of the pathogen.

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