The Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) operates under the Medical Act of 1971, which defines its core functions related to (a) the registration and practice of medical practitioners (b) the period of compulsory service (c) provisions to be enacted for purposes of (a) and (b). In the early years the MMC used the list of recognised colleges or Universities that appeared in the list of degrees recognised by the General Medical Council of United Kingdom (GMC). Over the years the MMC has undertaken the role of granting recognition to other medical schools in the country and overseas, and added the name of these schools to the existing register of recognised medical degrees in the second schedule of the Act. For the purpose of recognition of medical schools the MMC endorsed a guideline on standards and procedures on accreditation developed in 1996, which was later realigned with international and regional guidelines, in 2000 and 2001. It is recommended that the MMC establishes an active functional 'Education Committee' and that the role of MMC in medical education should be clearly and explicitly stated in the Act. An amendment to the Act would require the MMC to be responsible not only for undergraduate medical education but medical education in its entire phase.
In an effort to determine the reason behind excellent nitrate remediation capacity at Kelantan region, a multivariate approach is employed to evaluate extent to which the influence of sea on soil geochemical composition affect variation pattern of groundwater quality. The results obtained from geochemical analysis of paleo-beach soil in coastal site at Bachok revealed multiple redox activity at different soil strata, involving both heterotrophic and autotrophic denitrification. In soil and water analysis, eight of the fourteen hydro-geochemical parameters (conductivity, temperature, soil texture, oxidation reduction potential, pH, total organic carbon, Fe, Cu, Mn, Cl-, SO42-, NO2-, NO3- and PO43-) measured using standard procedures were subjected to multivariate analysis. Evaluation of general variation pattern across the area reveals that the principal component analysis (PCA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are in consonance with one another on apportioning three parameters (SO42-, Cl- and conductivity) to the coastal sites and two parameters (Fe and NH4+ or NO3-) to inland sites. The step forward analysis of LDA reveals four parameters in order of decreasing significance as Cl-, Fe and SO42-, while the two-way HCA identifies three clusters on location basis, respectively. In addition to the significant data reduction obtained, the results indicate that proximity to sea and location/geological-based influence are more significant than temporal-based influence in denitrification. By extension, the research reveals that influence of labile portion of natural resources is explorable for broader application in other remediation strategies.