SUMMARY A technique of transrectal aspiration biopsy of the prostate gland is presented by which material may be obtained for cytological study. This procedure, which may prove useful for detecting early prostatic carcinoma, has been performed about a hundred times without complications of any kind.

In a prospective study, 288 women were tested for Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) in the cervix prior to legal abortion. In the control group (n = 259), CT culturing was carried out only when postoperative infection was suspected. CT was isolated in 14.2% of asymptomatic women. These patients were treated preoperatively with Doxycycline. In this group, no cases of postoperative infection were detected. Among those cases where CT was not detected, 4.9% contracted the infection, while in the control group the rate of infection was 9.7%. In the control group all the infections due to CT gave late symptoms after the operation (1-4 weeks).

Editor's note Dr Giertz discusses the principles of controlled trials and their potential for objective assessment of advantages and disadvantages of new drugs or other clinical methods. He points out that trials in which another method is compared with placebo or inaction, while potentially yielding valuable information, may also give rise to moral objections.

A series of 602 patients with verified urinary bladder cancer have been treated with full irradiation in the period 1957--1970. As expected, the survival rate decreased with increasing stage of the tumour. Another group was randomized and treated according to either of two fractionation schemes. This trial started in 1971 and shows that there is increased survival and tumour clearance rate with superfractionation.

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