Naar een Europese BV? Het voorstel voor een SPE-Verordening nader bezien in het licht van de SE en enkele recente Europese ontwikkelingen

Op 22 oktober 1959 sprak Piet Sanders zijn rede Naar een Europese N.V.? uit in Rotterdam. Dit bracht de Europese Commissie ertoe om het idee van een Europese vennootschap, in eerste instantie met behulp van Sanders, verder uit te werken. Nadat de Commissie in 1970 haar eerste voorstel had gepubliceerd, duurde het uiteindelijk tot oktober 2001 voordat de Verordening betreffende het statuut van de Europese vennootschap (Societas Europaea; verder: SE-VO) en de bijbehorende Richtlijn tot aanvulling van het statuut met betrekking tot de rol van werknemers een feit waren. De SE-VO trad in werking op 8 oktober 2004

Cartesio en het perspectief op concurrentie tussen rechtstelsels

In 1983 heeft het tijdschrift TVVS een jubileum-nummer uitgebracht over vernieuwingen in het vennootschaps- en ondernemingsrecht. De titel van het themanummer luidt: ‘De Tweede golf’. Een van de bijdragen aan het themanummer is van de hand van de heer Timmermans en heeft als titel: ‘De tweede golf: de Europese onderstroom’. Daarin merkt Timmermans in de eerste zin op: ‘De tweede golf is in belangrijke mate opgestuwd door een krachtige instroom uit het stuwmeer van Europese projecten.’ In de laatste twee zinnen van de bijdrage werpt hij een blik op de toekomst, waarbij een betrekkelijk somber beeld wordt schetst. De laatste zinnen luiden: ‘Zonder nieuwe politieke impulsen voor de besluitvorming is de kans op een derde Europese harmonisatiegolf van eenzelfde omvang als de tweede golf klein. Eerder lijkt dood tij in aantocht

Kinetic Equations for Longwavelength Excitations of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

We show that longwavelength excitations of the quark-gluon plasma are described by simple kinetic equations which represent the exact equations of motion at leading order in $g$. Properties of the so-called ``hard thermal loops'', i.e. the dominant contributions to amplitudes with soft external lines, find in this approach a natural explanation. In particular, their generating functional appears here as the effective action describing long wavelength excitations of the plasma.Comment: January 8, 1993; 8 pages; SPhT/93-

Survival of Staphylococcus aureus ST398 in the human nose after artificial inoculation.

There is evidence that MRSA ST398 of animal origin is only capable of temporarily occupying the human nose, and it is therefore, often considered a poor human colonizer.We inoculated 16 healthy human volunteers with a mixture of the human MSSA strain 1036 (ST931, CC8) and the bovine MSSA strain 5062 (ST398, CC398), 7 weeks after a treatment with mupirocin and chlorhexidine-containing soap. Bacterial survival was studied by follow-up cultures over 21 days. The human strain 1036 was eliminated faster (median 14 days; range 2-21 days) than the bovine strain 5062 (median 21 days; range 7-21 days) but this difference was not significant (p = 0.065). The bacterial loads were significantly higher for the bovine strain on day 7 and day 21. 4/14 volunteers (28.6%) showed elimination of both strains within 21 days. Of the 10 remaining volunteers, 5 showed no differences in bacterial counts between both strains, and in the other 5 the ST398 strain far outnumbered the human S. aureus strain. Within the 21 days of follow-up, neither human strain 1036 nor bovine strain 5062 appeared to acquire or lose any mobile genetic elements. In conclusion, S. aureus ST398 strain 5062 is capable of adequately competing for a niche with a human strain and survives in the human nose for at least 21 days

Serotyping, ribotyping, PCR-mediated ribosomal 16S-23S spacer analysis and arbitrarily primed PCR for epidemiological studies on Legionella pneumophila

Fifty clinical and environmental isolates of Legionella pneumophila were typed serologically and by DNA fingerprinting using arbitrarily primed polymerase chain reaction (AP-PCR). Furthermore, variability in and around ribosomal operons was assessed by conventional ribotyping and PCR-mediated amplification of the spacer region separating the 16S and 23S genes. It appears that serotyping suffers from low resolution capabilities, and ribotyping and spacer PCR display intermediate resolving capabilities, whereas AP-PCR is more discriminating. Results from AP-PCR and both forms of ribotyping analysis correlate with epidemiological and environmental data. It is suggested that AP-PCR typing may be the method of choice for rapidly determining clonality among L. pneumophila isolates

Use of pharmacodynamic parameters to predict efficacy of combination therapy by using fractional inhibitory concentration kinetics

Combination therapy with antimicrobial agents can be used against bacteria that have reduced susceptibilities to single agents. We studied various tobramycin and ceftazidime dosing regimens against four resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains in an in vitro pharmacokinetic model to determine the usability of combination therapy for the treatment of infections due to resistant bacterial strains. For the selection of an optimal dosing regimen it is necessary to determine which pharmacodynamic parameter best predicts efficacy during combination therapy and to find a simple method for susceptibility testing. An easy-to-use, previously described E-test method was evaluated as a test for susceptibility to combination therapy. That test resulted in a MICcombi, which is the MIC of, for example, tobramycin in the presence of ceftazidime. By dividing the tobramycin and ceftazidime concentration by the MICcombi at each time point during the dosing interval, fractional inhibitory concentration (FIC) curves were constructed, and from these curves new pharmacodynamic parameters for combination therapy were calculated (i.e., AUCcombi, Cmax-combi, T>MIC-combi, and T>FICi, where AUCcombi, Cmax-combi, T>MIC-combi, and T>FICi are the area under the FICcombi curve, the peak concentration of FICcombi, the time that the concentration of the combination is above the MICcombi, and the time above the FIC index, respectively). By stepwise multilinear regression analysis, the pharmacodynamic parameter T>FICi proved to be the best predictor of therapeutic efficacy during combination therapy with tobramycin and ceftazidime (R2 = 0.6821; P < 0.01). We conclude that for combination therapy with tobramycin and ceftazidime the T>FICi is the parameter best predictive of efficacy and that the E-test for susceptibility testing of combination therapy gives promising results. These new pharmacodynamic parameters for combination therapy promise to provide better insight into the rationale behind combination therapy

Density and molecular epidemiology of Aspergillus in air and relationship to outbreaks of Aspergillus infection

After five patients were diagnosed with nosocomial invasive aspergillosis caused by Aspergillus fumigatus and A. flavus, a 14-month surveillance program for pathogenic and nonpathogenic fungal conidia in the air within and outside the University Hospital in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) was begun. A. fumigatus isolates obtained from the Department of Hematology were studied for genetic relatedness by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis. This was repeated with A. fumigatus isolates contaminating culture media in the microbiology laboratory. The density of the conidia of nonpathogenic fungi in the outside air showed a seasonal variation: higher densities were measured during the summer, while lower densities were determined during the fall and winter. Hardly any variation was found in the numbers of Aspergillus conidia. We found decreasing numbers of conidia when comparing air from outside the hospital to that inside the hospital and when comparing open areas within the hospital to the closed department of hematology. The increase in the number of patients with invasive aspergillosis could not be explained by an increase in the number of Aspergillus conidia in the outside air. The short-term presence of A. flavus can only be explained by the presence of a point source, which was probably patient related. Genotyping A. fumigatus isolates from the department of hematology showed that clonally related isolates were persistently present for more than 1 year. Clinical isolates of A. fumigatus obtained during the outbreak period were different from these persistent clones. A. fumigatus isolates contaminating culture media were all genotypically identical, indicating a causative point source. Kn

Survival of Chlamydia pneumoniae following contact with various surfaces

Objective: In this study, the survival and recovery of Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cp) strains TW‐183, AR‐39, AR‐388 and CWL‐029 were measured after inoculation on glass, stainless steel, FormicaR laminate, paper, fabric and human skin. Methods: Inoculum in throat washes from healthy volunteers was applied to each surface. Samples were taken immediately after inoculum application and at specified intervals thereafter to determine infectivity. Results: Infectious Cp was recovered from glass for up to 4 h, from paper and fabric for up to 3 h, from FormicaR laminate for up to 2 h, from stainless steel for up to 60 min and from human skin for up to 30 min. Drying of the inoculated area had no significant effect on the recovery of infectious Cp. Further experiments demonstrated that infectious Cp could be transferred to hands by touching these contaminated surfaces and could be recovered from these hands for up to 3 min. Addition of albumin, surfactant or phosphatidylcholine had no significant effect on the survival of Cp. Conclusions: These results suggest that contact with contaminated surfaces may be a potential mode of transmission of Cp. 1995 European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Disease

High-throughput typing of Staphylococcus aureus by amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) or multi-locus variable number of tandem repeat analysis (MLVA) reveals consistent strain relatedness

This study investigates aspects of the general assumption that, in bacteria, genetic variation in functionally-constrained genomic regions accumulates at a lower rate than in regions of hypermutability such as DNA repeat loci. We compared whole genome polymorphism (using high-throughput amplified fragment length polymorphism [ht-AFLP]) as well as short sequence repeat length variation (using multi-locus variable number of tandem repeat analysis [MLVA]) for 994 Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from both healthy carriers and invasive infections. MLVA and ht-AFLP minimum spanning trees (MSTs) were similar in their identification of totally different types of genetic variants. This suggests that, despite the enhanced inherent variability of repeats, clusters of strains remain traceable. Finally, no specific molecular marker of epidemicity or virulence was identified in this large strain collection by the MLVA approach. We demonstrate that there is a difference in the rates of cross-genome mutation versus regional repeat variability in the clonal bacterial pathogen S. aureus. Despite these dynamic differences, a conservation of type assignments as based upon these two inherently different typing techniques was observed