Regionalization: a strategy that will assist with bovine tuberculosis control and facilitate trade.

It is expected that the revised chapter on bovine tuberculosis in the Terrestrial Animal Health Code of the Office Internationale des Epizooties (OIE) will embrace regionalization as a functional means of assisting countries, states or regions to meet the requirements for freedom from tuberculosis and to facilitate trade. The benefits and applications of regionalization, which comprises zoning and compartmentalisation, are discussed. Regionalization requires that a country's veterinary administration is able to implement transparent and auditable biosecurity measures that will ensure that the tuberculosis-free status of a subpopulation of cattle is maintained despite the presence of infection in another cattle subpopulation, or in other domestic or wild animal species. Zoning, which requires cattle subpopulations to be separated by geographic boundaries, provides a practical basis whereby countries, states or regions, can progress towards freedom from tuberculosis, regardless of the source of infection for defined cattle subpopulations. Compartmentalisation however, requires that husbandry or management practices will be used to prevent a tuberculosis-free cattle subpopulation from contacting interspecific and intraspecific sources of infection. This will be difficult to achieve except for specialised cases such as artificial breeding centers.

Foreign body aspiration of grass inflorescences as a cause of hemoptysis.

Although the sparsity of reports in the literature suggest aspiration of grass inflorescence is rare, in certain areas of the southern United States, aspiration of this type of foreign body is not so uncommon. Four cases of aspiration of Hordeum pusillium, often referred to as "cheat grass" are reported: three of the four patients had hemoptysis. The highest incidence of inhaled foreign bodies usually occur in young children, but all our four patients were older children or adolescents. The clinical manifestations of grass inflorescence are of the following two types: (1) the "lodging" type in which inflorescences remain in the respiratory passages causing bronchial obstruction with pneumonitis; and (2) the "extrusive type" in which the inflorescences migrate into the periphery of the lung and through the chest wall.