A single-centre study from the Czech Republic

The goal of this study is to describe the temporary state of faecal occult blood screening in the Czech Republic. Qualitative and quantitative methods of faecal immunochemical testing for haemoglobin were compared and evaluated retrospectively for a period of four years. Screening was actively offered to asymptomatic individuals within their preventive check-ups, starting at the age of 50. Two types of faecal immunochemical tests were used for screening: a qualitative and a quantitative method. Any positive tests detected during screening were followed up by a total colonoscopy. The research sample contained 454 persons; 191 individuals (42.07%) were tested using the qualitative method and 263 individuals (57.83%) were tested through the quantitative method. The qualitative test’s specificity for our sample was 75.84%. Better results were yielded by the quantitative test, where the specificity of the sample reached 94.69%. The latter represented an improvement in faecal occult blood test (FOBT) screening in the Czech Republic that can result in more frequent detection of the disease and a lower mortality rate. Occult blood test screening is ideal for the successful prevention of colorectal cancer (CRC) developing from polyps.peer-reviewe

The Future Monitoring Role of GATT in an International Arena of Non-Tariff Barriers: A Proposal from a Law and Economics Perspective

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was implemented to provide uniform guidelines in the regulation of international trade. While the GATT is an agreement based on legal rules of construction and enforceability, the underlying impetus to its creation is economic in nature. This article examines the hindered effectiveness of the legal aspects of the GATT, and it provides insight into the economic theory that promotes this inefficiency

The Future Monitoring Role of GATT in an International Arena of Non-Tariff Barriers: A Proposal from a Law and Economics Perspective

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was implemented to provide uniform guidelines in the regulation of international trade. While the GATT is an agreement based on legal rules of construction and enforceability, the underlying impetus to its creation is economic in nature. This article examines the hindered effectiveness of the legal aspects of the GATT, and it provides insight into the economic theory that promotes this inefficiency

The Future Monitoring Role of GATT in an International Arena of Non-Tariff Barriers: A Proposal from a Law and Economics Perspective

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was implemented to provide uniform guidelines in the regulation of international trade. While the GATT is an agreement based on legal rules of construction and enforceability, the underlying impetus to its creation is economic in nature. This article examines the hindered effectiveness of the legal aspects of the GATT, and it provides insight into the economic theory that promotes this inefficiency

New Host Records and Range Extensions for Helminth Parasites from Wading Birds in Southeastern Florida

Six species of wading birds collected from wildlife centers throughout South Florida were dissected for parasites. Twenty-six species of parasites represent new host records and five parasite species represent new geographic range extensions

Evidence of Spatial Stability in Core Fauna Community Structure of Holopelagic Sargassum

As Sargassum biomass continues to increase globally, it is critical to develop a better understanding of how it functions as habitat, therefore, community structure of Sargassum-associated organisms was examined from 11 sampling locations spanning the tropical Florida Straits to the more temperate Gulf Stream off the coast of Savannah, Georgia from May to September 2018 using a combination of modified shrimp trawls and dip nets. A total of 5413 organisms were collected from Sargassum habitat representing 14 species from 10 families. A core group of organisms (Platynereis dumerilii, Litiopa melanostoma, Portunus sayi, Portunus spinimanus, Leander tenuicornis, and Latreutes fucorum) were found throughout the entirety of the geographic range surveyed. This core community did not vary significantly with increasing distance to shore or latitude, nor did it correlate with environmental variables such as salinity and temperature. However, community structure did vary with clump size, with larger clumps harboring more speciose communities. The Sargassum community in the Florida Straits and Gulf Stream appear to provide habitat for a consistent group of epifaunal organisms. In turn, this stable group offers a consistent prey source for a variety of important, higher trophic level organisms

Modeling and simulation of Caenorhabditis elegans chemotaxis in response to a dynamic engineered bacteria

Parasitic helminthes remain important causative agents of human, plant and animal diseases. Helminthes seek out food sources and navigate toward potential hosts using olfaction of simple chemical cues in a process called chemoattraction. While several studies have examined how nematodes, including Caenorhabditis elegans, behave in response to a chemoattractant, how the characteristics of the chemoattractant affect worm behavior has yet to explored. In this manuscript, we develop a mathematical model to examine how characteristics of common chemoattractants affect movement and behavior in the model nematode C. elegans. Specifically, we model a scenario where a toxic, engineered bacteria designed to express a chemoattractant influences the behavior of a population of worms. Through the model we observe that, under static conditions, the diffusion rate of the chemoattractant is critical in influencing choice of C. elegans. Here, the higher diffusion rate, the more the worms are attracted to the chemoattractant. We then show that if the worms learn that the chemoattractant is associated with toxicity, choice index is counterintuitively more strongly reduced with increasing diffusion rate. Finally, our model predicts a tradeoff between pulse period and attractant strength when the chemoattractant is dynamically pulsed in the environment. Our results reveal unique tradeoffs that govern chemoattraction in worms and may have implications in designing novel strategies for preventing or treating infections with parasitic worms

Supplemental FOS Article Materials

This extended table documents the endoparasites found within great egrets, great blue herons, green herons, yellow-crowned night herons, black-crowned night herons and white ibis from this study and previous studies

A Monolithic Time Stretcher for Precision Time Recording

Identifying light mesons which contain only up/down quarks (pions) from those containing a strange quark (kaons) over the typical meter length scales of a particle physics detector requires instrumentation capable of measuring flight times with a resolution on the order of 20ps. In the last few years a large number of inexpensive, multi-channel Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) chips have become available. These devices typically have timing resolution performance in the hundreds of ps regime. A technique is presented that is a monolithic version of ``time stretcher'' solution adopted for the Belle Time-Of-Flight system to address this gap between resolution need and intrinsic multi-hit TDC performance.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figures, minor corrections made, to appear as JINST_008