Tuberculosis in the Russian Federation: Situation, Challenges and Perspectives

Tuberculosis (TB) is a significant problem of public health both in Russia and abroad. About one third of the world’s population is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Every year more than 10 million new TB cases are registered in the world, and about 1.7 million people die from TB. In the Russian Federation, due to the measures taken by the Government and health authorities the epidemic TB situation has been noticeably improved since the sharp deterioration in the 90s of the last century. At the same time, the spread of drug-resistant TB and its low treatment effectiveness, the spread of combined HIV and TB infection reduces the effectiveness of anti-tuberculosis interventions. The research conducted by CTRI, the WHO Collaborating Center for TB in the Russian Federation, is aimed at solving such urgent problems as studying latent infection mechanisms, developing new test systems for accelerated diagnostics of drug resistance, clinical approbation and introduction of short effective regimens of chemotherapy, developing new antituberculosis agents. The achieved successes in the study of tuberculosis in the 21st century creates preconditions for eliminating its epidemic both in Russia and the world, though suggesting imminent breakthrough for tuberculosis is a hasty conclusion.

The Abuses of Argument: Understanding Fallacies on Toulmin’s Layout of Argument

This paper provides a preliminary account of fallacies on Toulmin’s model of argument, one that improves upon previous attempts to understand fallacies on this argument scheme. To do this Johnson and Blair’s (1983) taxonomy of three basic fallacies (irrelevant reason, hasty conclusion and problematic premise) is examined using Toulmin’s layout.

Response to ‘Comment on “Boundary conditions for surface waves propagating along the interface of plasma flow and free space” ’

Shoucri (1999) has commented on our paper (Lee and Cho 1997) in view of his relativistic calculation, and has stated that the boundary condition and the dispersion relation obtained there are incorrect. In this response, we reaffirm that all the results contained in Lee and Cho (1997) are correct in so far as one uses the nonrelativistic equation of motion. In particular, the boundary condition that we used (equation (57) in Lee and Cho 1997) is valid in both the nonrelativistic and the relativistic theory, and is equivalent to equation (11) of Shoucri (1999). Shoucri's hasty conclusion that our boundary condition (57) is incorrect appears to be due to his neglect of the fact that a boundary condition can be put into different forms depending upon problems under consideration.One way to derive a boundary condition for the surface-wave problem with a sharp boundary is to assume an inhomogeneous plasma having a varying density N(x) (in the notation of Lee and Cho 1997), integrate the inhomogeneous wave equation or the Maxwell equations across the infinitesimal transition layer, and specialize N(x) as a step function, as was done in Lee (1995). Starting from the Maxwell equations on p. 418 of Lee and Cho (1997) and calculating the currents relativistically, we find that the following three boundary conditions are equivalent, and any one of them is acceptable:(i) equation (57) in Lee and Cho (1997);(ii) equation (11) in Shoucri (1999);(iii) formula here(in the notation of Lee and Cho (1997), with γ as the relativistic factor).