Despite published guidelines for pain management, many patients with cancer have considerable pain and receive inadequate analgesia.

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The awareness that minority patients do not receive adequate pain control and that better assessment of pain is needed may improve control of cancer-related pain in this patient population.

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Summary Background Expanded access to combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the resource-poor setting is dependent on “task-shifting” from doctors to other health care providers. We compared “doctor-initiated-nurse-monitored” care to the current standard of care, “doctor-initiated-doctor-monitored” ART. Methods A randomised strategy trial to determine whether treatment outcomes of “nurse-monitored” ART were non-inferior to “doctor-monitored” ART was conducted at two South African primary-care clinics. HIV-positive individuals with a CD4 count of <350cells/mm3 or WHO stage 3 or 4 disease were eligible. The primary objective was a composite end-point of treatment limiting events, incorporating mortality, viral failure, treatment-limiting toxicities and visit schedule adherence. Intention-to-treat analyses were performed. This study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT00255840. Findings The hazard ratio for composite failure was 1.09 (95% CI= 0.89-1.33) which lay within the limits for non-inferiority. The analysis was performed on 812 HIV-positive adults with either doctor-(n=408) or nurse-monitored ART (n=404). At baseline 573 (70%) patients were female, 282 (34.7%) had prior AIDS diagnoses and the median CD4 was 164 cells/mm3. After a median follow-up of 24.3 months, deaths (10 vs. 11), virological failures (44 vs. 39), CD4 gain (270 vs. 248 cells/mm3), toxicity failures (68 vs. 66) and program losses (70 vs. 63) were similar in nurse and doctor arms respectively. 371(46%) patients reached an endpoint of treatment failure; 192(47.5%) and 179(43.9%) in the nurse and doctor arms respectively. Interpretation Nurse-monitored ART was shown to be non-inferior to doctor-monitored therapy. This study supports task-shifting to appropriately trained nurses for monitoring ART.

VeIP is capable of producing durable complete remissions in patients with disseminated germ cell cancer who relapse after cisplatin-etoposide-based induction therapy. Long-term disease-free survival is not seen in those patients with extragonadal nonseminomatous germ cell tumors.

Late relapse of testis cancer is more common than previously thought. Surgery is the preferred mode of therapy. Chemotherapy has only modest success in this entity, in contrast to the excellent results in de novo germ cell tumors. Patients treated for testicular germ cell cancer need annual follow-up evaluations throughout their life due to the possibility of late relapse.

Three levels of risk for bacteremia are defined using the AMoC and temperature at the time of admission for fever and neutropenia. Trials now should be conducted to test whether these factors may be used to assign some children to less intensive or outpatient antibiotic therapy at the time of presentation with fever and neutropenia.