A prospective study to estimate the outcome of patellar fracture fixation with suture material of high resistance properties

Background: Patella fractures make from 0.5% to 1.5% of all bone fractures.  The most common fracture type, transverse fracture, impairs knee extension mechanics due to fragment displacement. In the years that followed, newer procedures were pursued in order to alleviate the aforementioned difficulties. K-wires were successfully replaced with cannulated screws. Furthermore, cerclage wiring was replaced with alternative implants without jeopardising the figure-of-eight tension band build. Methods: A prospective study was conducted over a period of 18 months to evaluate the outcome of patellar fractures fixation with newer techniques and sutures. The study had 35 participants. Results: This study included patients in the age group of 21-77 years. Among the total of 35 patients in the study, Maximum number of patients in our study were in the age range of 41-60 years which comprised 42.86%.  In this study of 35 patients, 20 were male patients and 15 patients were female i.e. 57.14% of our study group comprised of male patients while 42.86% comprised of female patients. Conclusions: The above study clearly demonstrates that the high resistance suture materials can be used as a potential alternative or may even be better to the existing prevalent fixation of patella fractures with stainless steel and wires. Fibertape fixation presents a lot of advantages over the traditional stainless steel and wire fixation. Biomechanically, fibertape has demonstrated tensile strength and stiffness equal to stainless steel and in certain specific parameters proved even more stronger than the stainless steel

A Multiscale Mathematical Model of Plasmodium Vivax Transmission

Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites which are transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito. Plasmodium vivax is distinct from other malaria species in its ability to remain dormant in the liver (as hypnozoites) and activate later to cause further infections (referred to as relapses). Mathematical models to describe the transmission dynamics of P. vivax have been developed, but most of them fail to capture realistic dynamics of hypnozoites. Models that do capture the complexity tend to involve many governing equations, making them difficult to extend to incorporate other important factors for P. vivax, such as treatment status, age and pregnancy. In this paper, we have developed a multiscale model (a system of integro-differential equations) that involves a minimal set of equations at the population scale, with an embedded within-host model that can capture the dynamics of the hypnozoite reservoir. In this way, we can gain key insights into dynamics of P. vivax transmission with a minimum number of equations at the population scale, making this framework readily scalable to incorporate more complexity. We performed a sensitivity analysis of our multiscale model over key parameters and found that prevalence of P. vivax blood-stage infection increases with both bite rate and number of mosquitoes but decreases with hypnozoite death rate. Since our mathematical model captures the complex dynamics of P. vivax and the hypnozoite reservoir, it has the potential to become a key tool to inform elimination strategies for P. vivax

Optimal Interruption of P. vivax Malaria Transmission Using Mass Drug Administration

Plasmodium vivax is the most geographically widespread malaria-causing parasite resulting in significant associated global morbidity and mortality. One of the factors driving this widespread phenomenon is the ability of the parasites to remain dormant in the liver. Known as ‘hypnozoites’, they reside in the liver following an initial exposure, before activating later to cause further infections, referred to as ‘relapses’. As around 79–96% of infections are attributed to relapses from activating hypnozoites, we expect it will be highly impactful to apply treatment to target the hypnozoite reservoir (i.e. the collection of dormant parasites) to eliminate P. vivax. Treatment with radical cure, for example tafenoquine or primaquine, to target the hypnozoite reservoir is a potential tool to control and/or eliminate P. vivax. We have developed a deterministic multiscale mathematical model as a system of integro-differential equations that captures the complex dynamics of P. vivax hypnozoites and the effect of hypnozoite relapse on disease transmission. Here, we use our multiscale model to study the anticipated effect of radical cure treatment administered via a mass drug administration (MDA) program. We implement multiple rounds of MDA with a fixed interval between rounds, starting from different steady-state disease prevalences. We then construct an optimisation model with three different objective functions motivated on a public health basis to obtain the optimal MDA interval. We also incorporate mosquito seasonality in our model to study its effect on the optimal treatment regime. We find that the effect of MDA interventions is temporary and depends on the pre-intervention disease prevalence (and choice of model parameters) as well as the number of MDA rounds under consideration. The optimal interval between MDA rounds also depends on the objective (combinations of expected intervention outcomes). We find radical cure alone may not be enough to lead to P. vivax elimination under our mathematical model (and choice of model parameters) since the prevalence of infection eventually returns to pre-MDA levels

A scoping review of mathematical models of Plasmodium vivax

Plasmodium vivax is one of the most geographically widespread malaria parasites in the world due to its ability to remain dormant in the human liver as hypnozoites and subsequently reactivate after the initial infection (i.e. relapse infections). More than 80% of P. vivax infections are due to hypnozoite reactivation. Mathematical modelling approaches have been widely applied to understand P. vivax dynamics and predict the impact of intervention outcomes. In this article, we provide a scoping review of mathematical models that capture P. vivax transmission dynamics published between January 1988 and May 2023 to provide a comprehensive summary of the mathematical models and techniques used to model P. vivax dynamics. We aim to assist researchers working on P. vivax transmission and other aspects of P. vivax malaria by highlighting best practices in currently published models and highlighting where future model development is required. We provide an overview of the different strategies used to incorporate the parasite's biology, use of multiple scales (within-host and population-level), superinfection, immunity, and treatment interventions. In most of the published literature, the rationale for different modelling approaches was driven by the research question at hand. Some models focus on the parasites' complicated biology, while others incorporate simplified assumptions to avoid model complexity. Overall, the existing literature on mathematical models for P. vivax encompasses various aspects of the parasite's dynamics. We recommend that future research should focus on refining how key aspects of P. vivax dynamics are modelled, including the accumulation of hypnozoite variation, the interaction between P. falciparum and P. vivax, acquisition of immunity, and recovery under superinfection

The cientificWorldJOURNAL Research Article Immunostimulant Effect of Egyptian Propolis in Rabbits

The present experiment was conducted to study the effect of ethanolic extract of Egyptian propolis given alone or in combination with inactivated Pasteurella multocida vaccine on rabbits challenged with a virulent strain of Pasteurella multocida. Fifty-six NewZealand rabbits, 6-8 weeks old and non-vaccinated against pasteurellosis, were randomly divided into eight equal groups. The first group was kept as a control for the experiment. The other groups received different treatments with propolis extract, inactivated vaccine, or both. The experiment continued for seven weeks during which clinical signs, body weight, and mortality rate were monitored, and blood samples were collected weekly for evaluating the leukogram, serum biochemistry, and immune response in all groups of animals. At the end of the seventh week, the animals were subjected to challenge with a virulent strain of Pasteurella multocida. Two weeks later, tissue specimens were collected from different organs for histopathological examination. Results showed that rabbits of the groups treated with both propolis and the vaccine by different routes appeared healthy after challenge. It has been concluded that alcoholic extract of propolis administrated in combination with inactivated Pasteurella multocida vaccine has no adverse effects on the general health conditions and enhances immune response in rabbits

Ruffle: Rapid 3-party shuffle protocols

Secure shuffle is an important primitive that finds use in several applications such as secure electronic voting, oblivious RAMs, secure sorting, to name a few. For time-sensitive shuffle-based applications that demand a fast response time, it is essential to design a fast and efficient shuffle protocol. In this work, we design secure and fast shuffle protocols relying on the techniques of secure multiparty computation. We make several design choices that aid in achieving highly efficient protocols. Specifically, we consider malicious 3-party computation setting with an honest majority and design robust ring-based protocols. Our shuffle protocols provide a fast online (i.e., input-dependent) phase compared to the state-of-the-art for the considered setting. To showcase the efficiency improvements brought in by our shuffle protocols, we consider two distinct applications of anonymous broadcast and secure graph computation via the GraphSC paradigm. In both cases, multiple shuffle invocations are required. Hence, going beyond standalone shuffle invocation, we identify two distinct scenarios of multiple invocations and provide customised protocols for the same. Further, we showcase that our customized protocols not only provide a fast response time, but also provide improved overall run time for multiple shuffle invocations. With respect to the applications, we not only improve in terms of efficiency, but also work towards providing improved security guarantees, thereby outperforming the respective state-of-the-art works. We benchmark our shuffle protocols and the considered applications to analyze the efficiency improvements with respect to various parameters

Population heterogeneity in Plasmodium vivax relapse risk

A key characteristic of Plasmodium vivax parasites is their ability to adopt a latent liver-stage form called hypnozoites, able to cause relapse of infection months or years after a primary infection. Relapses of infection through hypnozoite activation are a major contributor to blood-stage infections in P vivax endemic regions and are thought to be influenced by factors such as febrile infections which may cause temporary changes in hypnozoite activation leading to ‘temporal heterogeneity’ in reactivation risk. In addition, immunity and variation in exposure to infection may be longer-term characteristics of individuals that lead to ‘popula-tion heterogeneity’ in hypnozoite activation. We analyze data on risk of P vivax in two previously published data sets from Papua New Guinea and the Thailand-Myanmar border region. Modeling different mechanisms of reactivation risk, we find strong evidence for population heterogeneity, with 30% of patients having almost 70% of all P vivax infections. Model fitting and data analysis indicates that individual variation in relapse risk is a primary source of heterogeneity of P vivax risk of recurrences. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01640574, NCT01074905, NCT02143934