Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge, however, has not been clearly established. The current research tested whether an 8-week shared reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize elements of story knowledge. Participants were 40 English-speaking 5- and 6-year-olds who were assigned to either the dialogic reading group or an alternative treatment group. Analysis of covariance results found that the dialogic reading children's posttest narratives were significantly better on structure and context measures than those for the alternative treatment children, but results differed for produced or retold narratives. The dialogic reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains. Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.

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Forty-nine patients with atopic dermatitis entered a double blind placebo controlled cross-over study of mupirocin, a new topical antistaphylococcal antibiotic. Forty-five patients were evaluable. Quantitative bacteriological assessment before treatment showed that heavy colonization of the skin with Staphylococcus aureus was present in nearly all patients even in the absence of overt infection. However, the bacterial count was significantly reduced by 2 weeks' treatment with topical mupirocin, but not by the placebo. Moreover, a significant reduction of clinical severity was also observed after treatment with mupirocin, which was maintained over the following 4 weeks, although recolonization occurred during this period, with bacterial counts rising to pre-treatment levels. Despite recolonization, clinical deterioration was not observed during the trial period. No serious side-effects were observed. Phage typing showed that 50% of patients carried more than one bacterial phage type. Recolonization in eight patients (17%) was with a 'new' strain that had not previously been isolated.

We conclude that narrowband UVB phototherapy is a useful and well-tolerated treatment for children with severe or intractable inflammatory skin disease, but concerns remain regarding long-term side-effects.

The mean reduction in surface area affected by eczema was significantly greater (p = 0.02) in the group receiving dietary advice (from 19.6% to 10.9% area affected) than in the control group (from 21.9% to 18.9%). A significant improvement also occurred in severity score (p = 0.04): from 33.9 to 24.0 units for the diet group compared with a decrease from 36.7 to 33.5 in the control group. The study suggests that advice on the dietary exclusion of eggs is useful as part of the overall management of young children with atopic eczema and sensitivity to eggs.

The aerobic bacterial flora of 20 patients with atopic dermatitis and 19 control subjects was extensively sampled using the Williamson and Kligman scrub technique and a contact-plate method (cysteine lactose electrolyte deficient media). Comparison of the two quantitative techniques showed that the contact plate is a reliable and convenient alternative to the scrub technique for the quantification of Staphylococcus aureus, micrococci and coagulasc negative staphylococci. Quantification of bacterial flora using both techniques showed high rates of colonization by 5. aureus on both involved and clinically normal skin of patients with atopic dermatitis. A linear increase in 5". aureus counts with increasing severity of dermatitis was found. In contrast, diphtheroids showed a trend of decreasing isolation rates and counts as the severity of the dermatitis increased. Isolation rates and absolute counts for micrococci/ coagulase negative cocci were unaffected by the severity of the dermatitis.

92 children (45 girls, 47 boys), mean age 9.3 years (3-14.75), were referred to the Contact Dermatitis Investigation Unit, Belvidere Hospital, Glasgow, for patch testing during the period 1979-93 for the investigation of allergic contact dermatitis (ACD). The diagnoses at the time of referral were atopic dermatitis (45), non-atopic with localized dermatitis (26), juvenile plantar dermatosis (15), orofacial granulomatosis (2), vaccination reaction (2) and atypical psoriasis (2). In total, there were 55 positive reactions in 30 children. The commonest allergens were metals (18), fragrances (11) and rubber compounds (6). The patient groups with the highest yield of positive patch tests were those patients with atopic dermatitis who had a good history of a precipitating contact factor (4/5), and non-atopic patients with dermatitis of hand and/or feet (7/14). Our findings suggest that allergic contact dermatitis is more common in children than generally appreciated and that patch testing is a practicable and clinically worthwhile procedure in children.

The goal of the present intervention research was to test whether guided invented spelling would facilitate entry into reading for at-risk kindergarten children. The 56 participating children had poor phoneme awareness, and as such, were at risk of having difficulty acquiring reading skills. Children were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: invented spelling, phoneme segmentation, or storybook reading. All children participated in 16 small group sessions over eight weeks. In addition, children in the three training conditions received letter-knowledge training and worked on the same 40 stimulus words that were created from an array of 14 letters. The findings were clear: on pretest, there were no differences between the three conditions on measures of early literacy and vocabulary, but, after training, invented spelling children learned to read more words than did the other children. As expected, the phoneme-segmentation and invented-spelling children were better on phoneme awareness than were the storybook-reading children. Most interesting, however, both the invented spelling and the phoneme-segmentation children performed similarly on phoneme awareness suggesting that the differential effect on learning to read was not due to phoneme awareness per se. As such, the findings support the view that invented spelling is an exploratory process that involves the integration of phoneme and orthographic representations. With guidance and developmentally appropriate feedback, invented spelling provides a milieu for children to explore the relation between oral language and written symbols that can facilitate their entry in reading.