In vivo pathogenicity of hydropericardium hepatitis syndrome (Angara disease)

This study was conducted on 175 one day old broiler chicks in order to observe in vivo pathogenicity of hydropericardium hepatitis syndrome (Angara disease). Chicks were grouped into A (25 chicks; reared at the Poultry Research institute (PRI), Rawalpindi) and B groups (150 chicks; reared at National Veterinary Laboratories (NVL) Islamabad in poultry rearing units). Feed and water were provided adlibitum to all the birds in both groups. The LD50 (lethal dose 50) of the virus was determined at the age of 26 days of broiler chickens divided into sub-groups a, b, c, d and e (each having 5 birds). The LD50 titre of the viral suspension (10%) was prepared from liver extract and determined as 10-2.5 per ml. During the study, potency of the vaccines was determined by vaccinating 150 chicks of sub-group k, l, m, n and o (each having 30 birds) with a dose of 0.2 ml. The vaccinated and non-vaccinated chicks of sub-groups were challenged with viral dose of 2 ml at day 17 post-vaccination to know the protection potency of the vaccines. No chick showed clinical manifestation of disease up to five days post challenge. On the 6th day post challenge, all the chicks were slaughtered and subjected to postmortem. Some of the chicks showed the lesions of hydropericarium. Histopathological findings of liver of all sub-groups revealed different stages of necrosis, cloudy swelling, liquefactive necrosis, cytoplasmic blabing, fatty degeneration and intranuclear inclusion bodies of virus.Key words: In vivo pathogenicity, hydropericardium hepatitis syndrome, Angara disease

Editorial: EBV-Associated Carcinomas: Presence, Role, and Prevention Strategies.

This special issue addresses an important topic related to the role of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in human carcinomas initiation and progression, which is one of the most common viral infections worldwide. Today, the relationship between EBV infection and several types of human lymphomas is clearly established, including Hodgkin and Burkitt's lymphoma; meanwhile, it was recently pointed out that EBV is present in nasopharyngeal carcinomas as well as other epithelial cancers (1). EBV is ubiquitous human herpesvirus 4, its genome codes more than 85 proteins of which only few are well-understood; More specifically, six nuclear antigens (EBNA: 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 3C, and LP); three latent membrane proteins/genes (LMP: 1, 2A, 2B) as well as small non-polyadenylated RNAs, EBERs 1 and 2 in addition to few microRNAs have been identified so far, as key regulators, of the oncogenic activity of this virus (2, 3). Present estimates indicate that EBV causes 200,000 new cancer cases annually, accounting for ~2% of cancers worldwide (Cancer Research UK). On the other hand, it is important to emphasize that recent investigations have revealed the possible involvement of EBV in other cancers such as cervical, gliomas, and breast, which are highlighted in this issue.This work is supported by Qatar University grants# GCC-2017-002 QU/KU and QUCG-CMED-20182019-3

Effect of Alcohol and Nicotine on Fertility of Male Albino Mice

Abuse of recreational drugs such as alcohol and nicotine may be genotoxic and may have detrimental effect on the male fertility which was aimed to be investigated through this present study using mice model systems. A total of 60 mice were divided into three groups, viz.; control group (n=20), and two groups of alcohol treated (n=20) and nicotine treated mice groups (n=20), administered in recommended dose amount for 90 days. Representative numbers of mice were sacrificed on 10th, 30th and 90th day from each group and the testes were collected. DNA and RNA was extracted from the collected tissue following standard protocol; followed by RAPD-PCR and Real time PCR based analysis of extracted DNA and cDNA, prepared from isolated RNA, for Rbmy1 gene expression analysis, respectively. ?-actin was used as internal normalization control for Real time PCR analysis. Remarkable changes were observed in the RAPD profiles, based on difference in band pattern profile as observed in alcohol treated and nicotine induced cases compared to controls; thereby clearly indicating the effect of recreational drug on the genome of the host in comparison to untreated controls. The differential expression profile of Rbmy1 mRNA in the nicotine model, showed significant down regulation compared to control (p=0.045), and non-significant when compared to alcoholic model cohorts (p=0.307).The observation also showed differences of Rbmy1 mRNA expression in alcoholic cases compared to controls (p=0.782). The present study indicates that consumption of recreation drugs such as nicotine may play an important role in disturbing the genome integrity and expression of key gene associated with male fertility, thereby disposing to male infertility

Management of Major Trauma and the Role of Interventional Radiology

This study aimed at exploring the management of major trauma and analyzing the role of interventional radiology for major trauma patients. As there are no prospective randomized controlled trials of interventional radiology in major trauma. Therefore, this review aims to summarize the evidence supporting the use of interventional radiological techniques in the management of major trauma. The study concluded that interventional radiology has become an essential part of the modern trauma unit. Roles in pelvic haemorrhage and aortic injury are now well established and have contributed to improving patient survival and reducing long-term morbidity

A critical look at studies applying over-sampling on the TPEHGDB dataset

Preterm birth is the leading cause of death among young children and has a large prevalence globally. Machine learning models, based on features extracted from clinical sources such as electronic patient files, yield promising results. In this study, we review similar studies that constructed predictive models based on a publicly available dataset, called the Term-Preterm EHG Database (TPEHGDB), which contains electrohysterogram signals on top of clinical data. These studies often report near-perfect prediction results, by applying over-sampling as a means of data augmentation. We reconstruct these results to show that they can only be achieved when data augmentation is applied on the entire dataset prior to partitioning into training and testing set. This results in (i) samples that are highly correlated to data points from the test set are introduced and added to the training set, and (ii) artificial samples that are highly correlated to points from the training set being added to the test set. Many previously reported results therefore carry little meaning in terms of the actual effectiveness of the model in making predictions on unseen data in a real-world setting. After focusing on the danger of applying over-sampling strategies before data partitioning, we present a realistic baseline for the TPEHGDB dataset and show how the predictive performance and clinical use can be improved by incorporating features from electrohysterogram sensors and by applying over-sampling on the training set

Religion and religious education : comparing and contrasting pupils’ and teachers’ views in an English school

This publication builds on and develops the English findings of the qualitative study of European teenagers’ perspectives on religion and religious education (Knauth et al. 2008), part of ‘Religion in Education: A contribution to dialogue or a factor of conflict in transforming societies of European countries?’ (REDCo) project. It uses data gathered from 27 pupils, aged 15-16, from a school in a multicultural Northern town in England and compares those findings with data gathered from ten teachers in the humanities faculty of the same school, collected during research for the Warwick REDCo Community of Practice. Comparisons are drawn between the teachers’ and their pupils’ attitudes and values using the same structure as the European study: personal views and experiences of religion, the social dimension of religion, and religious education in school. The discussion offers an analysis of the similarities and differences in worldviews and beliefs which emerged. These include religious commitment/observance differences between the mainly Muslim-heritage pupils and their mainly non-practising Christian-heritage teachers. The research should inform the ways in which the statutory duties to promote community cohesion and equalities can be implemented in schools. It should also facilitate intercultural and interreligious understanding between teachers and the pupils from different ethnic and religious backgrounds

A Novel Reading Scheme for Assessing the Extent of Radiographic Abnormalities and Its Association with Disease Severity in Sputum Smear-Positive Tuberculosis: An Observational Study in Hyderabad/India.

Existing reading schemes for chest X-ray (CXR) used to grade the extent of disease severity at diagnosis in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) are often based on numerical scores that summate specific radiographic features. However, since PTB is known to exhibit a wide heterogeneity in pathology, certain features might be differentially associated with clinical parameters of disease severity.We aimed to grade disease severity in PTB patients at diagnosis and after completion of DOTS treatment by developing a reading scheme based on five different radiographic manifestations and analyze their association with the clinical parameters of systemic involvement and infectivity.141 HIV-negative adults with newly diagnosed sputum smear-positive PTB were enrolled in a prospective observational study in Hyderabad, India. The presence and extent on CXRs of five radiographic manifestations, i.e., lung involvement, alveolar infiltration, cavitation, lymphadenopathy and pleural effusion, were classified using the new reading scheme by using a four-quadrant approach. We evaluated the inter-reader reliability of each manifestation, and its association with BMI and sputum smear positivity at diagnosis. The presence and extent of these radiographic manifestations were further compared with CXRs on completion of DOTS treatment.At diagnosis, an average lung area of 51.7% +/- 23.3% was affected by radiographic abnormalities. 94% of the patients had alveolar infiltrates, with 89.4% located in the upper quadrants, suggesting post primary PTB and in 34.8% of patients cavities were found. We further showed that the extent of affected lung area was a negative predictor of BMI (β value -0.035, p 0.019). No significant association of BMI with any of the other CXR features was found. The extent of alveolar infiltrates, along with the presence of cavitation, were strongly associated with sputum smear positivity. The microbiological cure rate in our cohort after 6 months of DOTS treatment was 95%. The extent of the affected lung area in these patients decreased from 56.0% +/- 21.5% to 31.0 +/- 20% and a decrease was also observed in the extent of alveolar infiltrates from 98.4% to 25.8% in at least one quadrant, presence of cavities from 34.8% to 1.6%, lymphadenopathy from 46.8% to 16.1%, and pleural effusion from 19.4% to 6.5%.We established a new assessment scheme for grading disease severity in PTB by specifically considering five radiographic manifestations which were differently associated with the BMI and sputum smear positivity, changed to a different extent after 6 months of treatment and exhibited an excellent agreement between radiologists. Our results suggest that this reading scheme might contribute to the estimation of disease severity with respect to differences in disease pathology. Further studies are needed to determine a correlation with short and long-term pulmonary function impairment and whether there would be any benefit in lengthening or modulating therapy based on this CXR severity assessment

Sugar Ka Saathi – A Case Study Designing Digital Self-management Tools for People Living with Diabetes in Pakistan

This paper presents the results of an iterative participatory process to design a smart self-management tool for less-literate people living with diabetes in Pakistan. Initially, interviews and focus groups with sixty-nine people living with diabetes identified issues that they face when self-managing including un-controllable factors, lack of diabetes awareness, low-tech mobile phones, and poor internet availability. We developed personas grounded in the scoping results and adjusted our PD approach to focus on more tangible design artefacts before running narrative scoping PD sessions. Working from older, illiterate persona, we designed a phone-line delivered Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. We developed a functional IVR Prototype “Sugar ka Saathi” (Diabetes Companion) with input from a group of 4 Pakistan-based healthcare professionals, to act as a design probe in the PD process. We tested the IVR probe with fifty-seven of the original scoping participants which validated the knowledge transferred by the IVR and its acceptability. Invisible design videos were shown to elaborate the IVR and community concept to thirteen participants through two filmed videos using our existing persona characters from the scoping studies, these videos helped to engage older people with diabetes in PD sessions

Study of the role of dysprosium substitution in tuning structural, optical, electrical, dielectric, ferroelectric, and magnetic properties of bismuth ferrite multiferroic

Magnetoelectric multiferroics, which combine ferroelectric and magnetic characteristics, have potential use in a variety of electronic devices. In this work, Dy3+ substituted bismuth ferrites with the chemical formula Bi1−xDyxFeO3 (x = 0.0, 0.15, 0.30, 0.45, and 0.60) were synthesized using the sol-gel auto combustion process. The effect of Dysprosium substitution in BiFeO3 (BFO), on its structural, surface morphology, optical, electrical, dielectric, ferroelectric, and magnetic properties were studied. The rhombohedral perovskite structure of the space group (R3c) was confirmed via X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. Moreover, the crystallite size had a maximum value of 59.57 nm for x = 0.30. XRD and FTIR confirmed the substitution of Dy3+ into BFO ferrite. Further, the structural change and absorption bands confirmed the substitution of Dy3+ ions into the lattice. For x = 0.30, the energy bandgap of 2.81 eV was found. The resistivity and activation energy were minimum and drift mobility was maximum at x = 0.30 as compared to Dy3+ doped BFO samples. At low frequency, the dielectric loss was reduced, while at high frequency, the dielectric loss increased with increasing frequency. The saturated polarization (PS), electric polarization (EC), and remnant polarization (Pr) have values of 6.95 µC/cm2, 3.49 µC/cm2, and 1.53 kV/cm for x = 0.30, respectively. The maximum saturation magnetization and microwave frequencies were 10.89 emu/g and 2.41 GHz, respectively at Dy3+ concentration x = 0.30. These materials are suitable for electronic and microwave devices

Water-Induced Reversal of the TiO₂(011)-(2 × 1) Surface Reconstruction: Observed with in Situ Surface X-ray Diffraction

The (011) termination of rutile TiO2 is reported to be particularly effective for photocatalysis. Here, the structure of the interface formed between this substrate and water is revealed using surface X-ray diffraction. While the TiO2(011) surface exhibits a (2 × 1) reconstruction in ultra-high vacuum (UHV), this is lifted in the presence of a multilayer of water at room temperature. This change is driven by the formation of Ti-OH at the interface, which has a bond distance of 1.93 ± 0.02 Å. The experimental solution is in good agreement with density functional theory and first-principles molecular dynamics calculations. These results point to the important differences that can arise between the structure of oxide surfaces in UHV and technical environments and will ultimately lead to an atomistic understanding of the photocatalytic process of water splitting on TiO2 surfaces