Editor's note
The UTI papers
This issue of MFP contains two articles on urinary tract infections (UTI). Loh et al (pages 54-57) reviewed the diagnosis of management of UTI in pregnancy, and Keah et al (page 64-69) conducted a microbiological survey of patients with UTI presenting to general practice. UTI may be an old issue, but do we really know enough about its peculiarity in this country? How well it is being managed in the health centres and general practice clinics? Keah et al’s study documented high level of resistance to commonly used antibiotics in two general practice clinics in Johor. Perhaps the commonly used antibiotics guideline in this country (*) is woefully out-of-date? More studies in the local primary care setting on this common condition are clearly warranted. To stimulate this, we have provided a list of relevant papers from Malaysia on page 69.
*http://www.acadmed.org.my/cpg/rational_use_of_antibiotics.htm
Conflicts of interest
It is the policy of MFP to request authors to declare conflicts of interest (usually done at the point of acceptance of the paper). In view of recent enquiry from some authors regarding this issue, we wish to draw the attention of the readers and potential authors to the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication” (www.icmje.org) which states
- “Conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author’s institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions.”
- “When authors submit a manuscript, whether an article or a letter, they are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias their work. To prevent ambiguity, authors must state explicitly whether potential conflicts do or do not exist.”
- “Increasingly, individual studies receive funding from commercial firms, private foundations, and government. The conditions of this funding have the potential to bias and otherwise discredit the research.”
Research for primary care
The raison d'être of research is to improve patient care. To encourage this further, we highlights some presentations in three conferences (page 76). We would like to encourage the presenters to submit their full papers to this journal for consideration of publication. Research conducted within primary care by primary care workers is likely to be most applicable in this setting. However, research conducted elsewhere may also have potential impact. We wish to demonstrate this by the Research Digest (page 78) –“bite chunks” of Malaysian original works – and snippets that fill the white spaces at the end of each article.
CL Teng
tengcl@gmail.com