Infection Control for the Otolaryngologist in the Era of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has affected more than 8400 persons in 28 countries, with more than 800 deaths. The current SARS outbreak, especially in North American health care centers, has motivated a re-evaluation of infection control practices in the hospital and clinic environment. These considerations are particularly important to otolaryngology, in which examination and diagnostic procedures often bring the otolaryngologist in close--if not direct--contact with the patient's upper airway, mucosa, and secretions. The otolaryngologist is at increased risk of contracting a respiratory pathogen. METHOD: A joint effort by the Department of Otolaryngology at Queen's University and the Infection Control Services of the Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston, Ontario, was carried out to develop specific infection control guidelines for the otolaryngologists using strategies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and the Laboratory Center for Disease Control, Health Canada. RESULTS: A set of specific recommendations was developed for the otolaryngologists to augment current infection control, including diligent use of personal protective equipment with every patient encounter. Moreover, this equipment should be removed according to specific protocol, to avoid contamination of self, others, and surroundings. Finally, a number of practice modifications are being adopted as prudent precautionary measures. CONCLUSION: It is essential to adhere to these recommendations in order to protect the health and safety of clinicians, colleagues, and patients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".