Sacred ceremony and magical praxis in Jewish texts of early and late antiquity

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 13/12/1999.The thesis examines texts that indicate how Jews of Early and Late Antiquity dealt with a world ruled by an omnipotent God who governed a cosmos where disorder vied with order. God's bounty reflected his good will towards those faithful to his laws, and disobedience resulted in the infliction of misfortune. A state of disorder, labelled “the ways of the Emorites”, was perceived by Judaeans as the realm of superstition and foreign practices, typified by idolatry, incest and bloodshed. Sacrifice in the Temple allowed people to fulfil God's commandments, drawing near to him by means of animal or cereal offerings. When the Temple was destroyed, prayer rituals replaced the sacrifices. The absence of priestly authority allowed Rabbis to take control of everyday religious laws and customs. Concepts such as the sacred and mundane, and ritual purity and impurity, are integral to the scriptural texts. Later texts retained paradoxical notions relating to these older traditions concerning ambiguity or ambivalence associated with purification and pollution, and these notions remained within the ambit of the rabbinic purview. The transformation of public sacrifice into communal prayer was accompanied by aspirations to draw near to God, no longer simply as an act of obedience, but to attain aspects of his wisdom and power. God was no longer present in his Temple, but had taken on the role of King of Heaven, seated upon his Throne in the celestial heights, and the power attained by some Rabbinic sages in mystical ascents enabled them to perform miraculous feats. Ideas of the sacrificial cult and notions of ritual purity retained their influence in prayers, and esoteric Rabbinic traditions were appropriated by exponents of private magical rituals. Angels and demons inhabited the Talmudic cosmology, and angelic forces summoned in God's name might control the misfortune resulting from demonic intrusions

‘The Phone is My Boss and My Helper’ – A Gender Analysis of an mHealth Intervention with Health Extension Workers in Southern Ethiopia

Mobile health (mHealth) provides health services and information via mobile technologies, including mobile phones. There is considerable optimism in mHealth’s potential to overcome health systems’ deficiencies to ensure access to safe, effective and affordable health services. This has led to an ‘explosion of mHealth activities’ and ‘large-scale adoption and deployment of mobile phones’ by Community Health Worker (CHW) programmes. MHealth innovation in relation to CHWs, on which low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) disproportionately depend, has been reported to be ‘particularly promising’. CHWs’ use of mHealth has the potential to improve their motivation; decision-making; training; adherence to guidelines; data entry and quality; planning and efficiency; and communication and health promotion; while also enhancing coverage and timeliness of services and reducing costs. MHealth also allows the monitoring and tracking of health indicators in real time, providing crucial insights to policy makers and enabling CHWs to better serve communities

Mutation Bias Favors Protein Folding Stability in the Evolution of Small Populations

Mutation bias in prokaryotes varies from extreme adenine and thymine (AT) in obligatory endosymbiotic or parasitic bacteria to extreme guanine and cytosine (GC), for instance in actinobacteria. GC mutation bias deeply influences the folding stability of proteins, making proteins on the average less hydrophobic and therefore less stable with respect to unfolding but also less susceptible to misfolding and aggregation. We study a model where proteins evolve subject to selection for folding stability under given mutation bias, population size, and neutrality. We find a non-neutral regime where, for any given population size, there is an optimal mutation bias that maximizes fitness. Interestingly, this optimal GC usage is small for small populations, large for intermediate populations and around 50% for large populations. This result is robust with respect to the definition of the fitness function and to the protein structures studied. Our model suggests that small populations evolving with small GC usage eventually accumulate a significant selective advantage over populations evolving without this bias. This provides a possible explanation to the observation that most species adopting obligatory intracellular lifestyles with a consequent reduction of effective population size shifted their mutation spectrum towards AT. The model also predicts that large GC usage is optimal for intermediate population size. To test these predictions we estimated the effective population sizes of bacterial species using the optimal codon usage coefficients computed by dos Reis et al. and the synonymous to non-synonymous substitution ratio computed by Daubin and Moran. We found that the population sizes estimated in these ways are significantly smaller for species with small and large GC usage compared to species with no bias, which supports our prediction

RMND1-related leukoencephalopathy with temporal lobe cysts and hearing loss—another mendelian mimicker of congenital cytomegalovirus infection

Background Leukoencephalopathy with temporal lobe cysts may be associated with monogenetic conditions such as Aicardi–Goutières syndrome or RNASET2 mutations and with congenital infections such as cytomegalovirus. In view of the fact that congenital cytomegalovirus is difficult to confirm outside the neonatal period, excluding a Mendelian disorder is extremely relevant, changing family planning and medical management in affected families. We performed diagnostic testing in individuals with leukoencephalopathy with temporal lobe cysts without a definitive diagnosis of congenital cytomegalovirus infection. Methods We reviewed a large-scale biorepository of patients with unsolved leukodystrophies and identified two individuals with required for meiotic nuclear division 1 (RMND1) mutations and similar magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features, including temporal lobe cysts. Ten additional subjects with confirmed RMND1 mutations were identified as part of a separate disease specific cohort. Brain MRIs from all 12 individuals were reviewed for common neuroradiological features. Results MRI features in RMND1 mutations included temporal lobe swelling, with rarefaction and cystic evolution, enlarged tips of the temporal lobes, and multifocal subcortical white matter changes with confluent periatrial T2 signal hyperintensity. A combination of these features was present in ten of the 12 individuals reviewed. Conclusions Despite the small number of reported individuals with RMND1 mutations, a clinically recognizable phenotype of leukoencephalopathy with temporal lobe swelling, rarefaction, and cystic changes has emerged in a subset of individuals. Careful clinical phenotyping, including for lactic acidosis, deafness, and severe muscle involvement seen in RMND1 mutation positive individuals, and MRI pattern recognition will be important in differentiating these patients from children with congenital infections like cytomegalovirus

Spread of a SARS-CoV-2 variant through Europe in the summer of 2020

[EN] Following its emergence in late 2019, the spread of SARS-CoV-21,2 has been tracked by phylogenetic analysis of viral genome sequences in unprecedented detail3,4,5. Although the virus spread globally in early 2020 before borders closed, intercontinental travel has since been greatly reduced. However, travel within Europe resumed in the summer of 2020. Here we report on a SARS-CoV-2 variant, 20E (EU1), that was identified in Spain in early summer 2020 and subsequently spread across Europe. We find no evidence that this variant has increased transmissibility, but instead demonstrate how rising incidence in Spain, resumption of travel, and lack of effective screening and containment may explain the variant’s success. Despite travel restrictions, we estimate that 20E (EU1) was introduced hundreds of times to European countries by summertime travellers, which is likely to have undermined local efforts to minimize infection with SARS-CoV-2. Our results illustrate how a variant can rapidly become dominant even in the absence of a substantial transmission advantage in favourable epidemiological settings. Genomic surveillance is critical for understanding how travel can affect transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and thus for informing future containment strategies as travel resumes.S