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Severed foot / Sea squirt, Holy ghostwriters, Tasty worms

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Legless on the shore — Extremities can bring confusion even to trained experts. Joanna Glengarry and Melanie Archer at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia warn that forensic pathologists and anthropologists “should be prepared to […]

The case for medical fist bumping, then and now

Last year, 2013, medical researchers at West Virginia University published the study “Reducing pathogen transmission in a hospital setting. Handshake verses fist bump: a pilot study,” P.A. Ghareeb, T. Bourlai, W. Dutton, W.T. McClellan, Journal of Hospital Infection, vol. 85, no. 4, December 2013, pp. 321–323 (epub September 19, 2013). (We mentioned that here then.) That study says: Handshaking […]

A Preliminary Public Health Look at Hospital Fist-Bumps

On the theory that sometimes little things help lessen problems caused by little things, comes this little paper: “Reducing pathogen transmission in a hospital setting. Handshake verses fist bump: a pilot study,” P.A. Ghareeb, T. Bourlai, W. Dutton, W.T. McClellan, Journal of Hospital Infection, epub September 19, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Marek Hlavac for bringing […]

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