Linezolid therapy for infective endocarditis

AbstractLinezolid is not yet recognised as a standard therapy for infective endocarditis. This report describes nine patients with endocarditis treated with linezolid and 33 similar cases from the medical literature. The majority of cases involved multiresistant strains, and the reasons for administering linezolid were refractory disease (60%), intolerance (28%), sequential therapy (12%) and a resistant pathogen (1%). Linezolid was administered for a mean of 37 days, with a successful outcome in 79% of cases. Reversible adverse effects were described in ten cases. The mean follow-up period was 8.5 months. Further data from randomised controlled clinical trials are needed to determine the efficacy and safety of linezolid for treating endocarditis

Estudio cinético del sistema de molienda de una fábrica de cemento cubana

A kinetic study realized in a moulding system in a cement factory ("Palmarito de Cauto" Santiago de Cuba) is presented. This objective of this study is the production of a pozzolonic cement PZ-250 with an addition until 40% of pozzolan. The present paper confirms the satisfactory predictions and permits to recommend the utilization it as a available way of economical efficiency.Se presentan resultados obtenidos en el estudio cinético realizado al sistema de molienda de la fábrica de cemento de "Palmarito de Cauto", Santiago de Cuba, con vistas a la producción de cemento puzolánico PZ-250 con adición de hasta un 40 % de puzolanas. El presente trabajo avala satisfactoriamente las predicciones realizadas y permiten recomendar su utilización como un medio idóneo de eficiencia económica

Differences in the robustness of clusters involving the Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains most frequently isolated from immigrant cases in Madrid

AbstractTuberculosis cases infected by the same Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) strain are considered to be clustered and involved in a transmission chain. Large clusters are assumed to represent active transmission chains in a population. In the present study, we focused on the analysis of large clusters defined by IS6110-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) typing in the immigrant population in Madrid. We identified 12 large clusters (involving 43% of the isolates) comprising 4–23 representatives. We proposed a gradient of epidemiological certainty for these large clusters. For a cluster to be considered robust and a good indicator of recent transmission, the MTB strain involved should not have been identified in a geographically and epidemiologically unrelated population and the cluster had to be re-confirmed by another highly discriminative molecular marker (MIRU-VNTR). The clusters that we discovered were classified into three categories: high, intermediate and low expected epidemiological value. In the largest cluster in the study (cluster M6; 23 representatives), failures by both criteria were identified: the representative seven-band RFLP pattern was also the most prevalent in the unrelated population (25 cases) and the cluster was fully split by MIRU-15, suggesting a lack of epidemiological value. The RFLP pattern representative of this cluster was also identified in 64 isolates from five countries in the Latin American genotype database, and again proved to be heterogeneous according to the MIRU-15 analysis. Specific analysis of large clusters, combined with the application of criteria for evaluating their robustness, could help identify uninformative clusters and target epidemiological resources towards those clusters with higher expected epidemiological value

Constraints on the χ_(c1) versus χ_(c2) polarizations in proton-proton collisions at √s = 8 TeV

The polarizations of promptly produced χ_(c1) and χ_(c2) mesons are studied using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, in proton-proton collisions at √s=8  TeV. The χ_c states are reconstructed via their radiative decays χ_c → J/ψγ, with the photons being measured through conversions to e⁺e⁻, which allows the two states to be well resolved. The polarizations are measured in the helicity frame, through the analysis of the χ_(c2) to χ_(c1) yield ratio as a function of the polar or azimuthal angle of the positive muon emitted in the J/ψ → μ⁺μ⁻ decay, in three bins of J/ψ transverse momentum. While no differences are seen between the two states in terms of azimuthal decay angle distributions, they are observed to have significantly different polar anisotropies. The measurement favors a scenario where at least one of the two states is strongly polarized along the helicity quantization axis, in agreement with nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics predictions. This is the first measurement of significantly polarized quarkonia produced at high transverse momentum