Background: For clinicians, a practical bedside tool for severity assessment and prognosis of patients with Clostridium difficileinfection is a highly desirable unmet medical need.Setting: Two general teaching hospitals in northeast Mexico.Population: Adult patients with C. difficileinfection.Methods: Prospective observational study.Results: Patients included had a median of 48 years of age, 54% of male gender and an average of 24.3 days length of hospital stay. Third generation cephalosporins were the antibiotics most commonly used prior to C. difficileinfection diagnosis. Patients diagnosed with C. difficileinfection had a median ATLAS score of 4 and 56.7% of the subjects had a score between 4 and 7 points. Patients with a score of 8 through 10 points had 100% mortality.Conclusion: The ATLAS score is a potentially useful tool for the routine evaluation of patients at the time of C. difficileinfection diagnosis. At 30 days post-diagnosis, patients with a score of ≤3 points had 100% survival while all of those with scores ≥8 died. Patients with scores between 4 and 7 points had a greater probability of colectomy with an overall cure rate of 70.1%.

Although seasonal foreign worker admissions to Switzerland and France declined precipitously after 1986, a new generation of post-Cold War temporary foreign worker policies has emerged in the European Union. The new policies are quite modest Germany admits several hundred thousand seasonal workers each year. Spain admits 20,000 to 30,000 workers, although most of them actually reside illegally in the country. Preliminary assessment of Spain's contingents of supposedly recruited foreign workers suggests that the new generation of temporary foreign worker policies went awry, as the postwar generation had by 1973. Other working hypotheses derived from the "wisdom" of the postwar generation include the expectation that the new policies will result in significant, unexpected settlement, will undermine declared policies of controlling migration, and exacerbate bilateral relations between host and sending societies.

A pesar de que la admisión temporal de trabajadores en Suiza y Francia decayó precipitadamente después de 1986, una nueva generación de políticas para los trabajadores temporales extranjeros de la posguerra fría ha surgido en la Unión Europea. Estas nuevas políticas son modestas. Alemania admite a cientos de miles de trabajadores temporales al año. España admite de 20 mil a 30 mil trabajadores temporales por año, aunque la mayor parte de ellos residen ilegalmente en el país. Los primeros análisis sobre los supuestos trabajadores inmigrantes contratados sugieren que la nueva generación de políticas de trabajadores extranjeros temporales se desviaron como lo hiaciron las de la generación de la posguerra hacia 1973. Otras hipótesis de trabajo derivadas de la "sabiduría" de la generación de la posguerra incluyen la expectativa de que las nuevas políticas darán como resultado un significativo e inesperado establecimiento de trabajadores, la socavación de las políticas de control de la migración y la exacerbación de las relaciones bilaterales entre las sociedades receptoras y expulsoras.