Mass Burns Casualties: Ethical Dilemmas

Mass burns casualty disasters occur rarely, but they are difficult to manage. Management of these cases are often further complicated in poorly resourced settings found in the developing world as triage decisions often have to be made early. This case report discusses ethical dilemmas that have been encountered when treating a mass burns casualty’s incident in the setting of a regional burns unit in South Africa

A Tragic Miscommunication: Ethical Decision Making in Burns Care

Patients with extensive burns injuries are often given a poor prognosis. Those who survive after an initial early resuscitation phase often require extensive operative and critical care input, a prolonged hospital stay, and associated significant complications. The overwhelmingly high volume of patients already using the resource-stricken burns care service places extreme pressure on clinicians in respect of decisions they make about who should and should not be resuscitated. In this paper, we present the case of a young woman who sustained significant burn injuries, and discuss the ethical dilemmas encountered during the subsequent management of her care

Development of Self-Compacting Engineered Cementitious Composites

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84749/1/iwscc_self-c_ecc_98.pd

Chemical-free inactivated whole influenza virus vaccine prepared by ultrashort pulsed laser treatment

There is an urgent need for rapid methods to develop vaccines in response to emerging viral pathogens. Whole inactivated virus (WIV) vaccines represent an ideal strategy for this purpose; however, a universal method for producing safe and immunogenic inactivated vaccines is lacking. Conventional pathogen inactivation methods such as formalin, heat, ultraviolet light, and gamma rays cause structural alterations in vaccines that lead to reduced neutralizing antibody specificity, and in some cases, disastrous T helper type 2-mediated immune pathology. We have evaluated the potential of a visible ultrashort pulsed (USP) laser method to generate safe and immunogenic WIV vaccines without adjuvants. Specifically, we demonstrate that vaccination of mice with laser-inactivated H1N1 influenza virus at about a 10-fold lower dose than that required using conventional formalin-inactivated influenza vaccines results in protection against lethal H1N1 challenge in mice. The virus, inactivated by the USP laser irradiation, has been shown to retain its surface protein structure through hemagglutination assay. Unlike conventional inactivation methods, laser treatment did not generate carbonyl groups in protein, thereby reducing the risk of adverse vaccine-elicited T helper type 2 responses. Therefore, USP laser treatment is an attractive potential strategy to generate WIV vaccines with greater potency and safety than vaccines produced by current inactivation techniques

Hybrid quantum systems with artificial atoms in solid state

The development of single-platform qubits, predominant for most of the last few decades, has driven the progress of quantum information technologies but also highlighted the limitations of various platforms. Some inherent issues such as charge/spin noise in materials hinder certain platforms, while increased decoherence upon attempts to scale-up severely impact qubit quality and coupling on others. In addition, a universal solution for coherent information transfer between quantum systems remains lacking. By combining one or more qubit platforms, one could potentially create new hybrid platforms that might alleviate significant issues that current single platform qubits suffer from, and in some cases, even facilitate the conversion of static to flying qubits on the same hybrid platform. While nascent, this is an area of rising importance that could shed new light on robust and scalable qubit development and provide new impetus for research directions. Here, we define the requirements for hybrid systems with artificial atoms in solid state, exemplify them with systems that have been proposed or attempted, and conclude with our outlook for such hybrid quantum systems.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figure

Design and simulation of heat exchangers using Aspen HYSYS, and Aspen exchanger design and rating for paddy drying application

Air heating unit is one of the most important parts in paddy drying to ensure the efficiency of a drying process. In addition, an optimized air heating unit does not only promise a good paddy quality, but also save more for the operating cost. This study determined the suitable and best specifications heating unit to heat air for paddy drying in the LAMB dryer. In this study, Aspen HYSYS v7.3 was used to obtain the minimum flow rate of hot water needed. The resulting data obtained from Aspen HYSYS v7.3 were used in Aspen Exchanger Design and Rating (EDR) to generate heat exchanger design and costs. The designs include shell and tubes and plate heat exchanger. The heat exchanger was designed in order to produce various drying temperatures of 40, 50, 60 and 70°C of air with different flow rate, 300, 2500 and 5000 LPM. The optimum condition for the heat exchanger were found to be plate heat exchanger with 0.6 mm plate thickness, 198.75 mm plate width, 554.8 mm plate length and 11 numbers of plates operating at 5000 LPM air flow rate