Nonprofit managers often report difficulties in hiring and retaining top-quality professional staff members. The goals of this study were to assess the seriousness of the problems and to identify some best practices that can be used by nonprofit managers. The study focused on small and mid-sized nonprofits in the human service and community development fields in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Although the problems identified were not of crisis proportion, organizations faced particular difficulties in hiring and retaining staff members in information technology and development. Use of contemporary recruitment techniques, including the Internet, was surprisingly limited, but some organizations had creative approaches to retaining valued employees.

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Our data indicate that cSLPI reflects chymase activity in AR and asthma. Hence, cSLPI may serve as a biomarker for disease activity and for monitoring the efficacy of novel anti-inflammatory treatments in chymase-mediated diseases.

This study argues that the costs associated with El Salvador's dollarization clearly outweigh the benefits and that the decision to dollarize was prompted not only by the need to promote economic growth, but also by the impluse to serve the interests of the financial sector and the large entrepreneurs who control the ruling ARENA party. Although the policy facilitates investment and international financial transactions, it has a negative effect on the poor by increasing inequality. To develop this argument, the authors discuss the socioeconomic and political situation in El Salvador at the time of dollarization, examine the Law of Monetary Integration, and analyze die effect of the dollarization policy on the poor.

4618 Background: CCL2 (MCP-1) is a chemoattractant protein highly expressed in a variety of cancer types. The expression level of CCL2 has been linked to aggressive disease progression, early dissemination, and poor survival in certain cancers. Therefore, we assessed the potential association between CCL2 expression and patient prognosis in pancreatic cancer. Methods: Cylindrical tissue cores from a large retrospective, nonrandomized series covering 133 patients with resected pancreatic cancer were used to build a tissue microarray. CCL2 expression was determined using immunohistochemistry. Results: High intratumoral CCL2 expression and low intratumoral CCL2 expression were present in 44 (33%) and 89 (67%) tumors, respectively. Kaplan-Meier median survival among patients with low intratumoral CCL2 expression (19.1 months) was longer than that among those with high CCL2 expression (12.1 months). In multivariate analysis, more advanced pathological stage [risk ratio (RR) = 1.57; P = 0.038], poorly differentiated histology (RR = 1.68; P = 0.019), and high CCL2 expression [RR = 1.62; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.05–2.49; P = 0.028] were independent predictors of mortality. Conclusions: High CCL2 expression is a marker of poor prognosis in resected pancreatic cancer. [Table: see text]