Cluster of legionnaires’ disease in an Italian prison

Background: Legionella pneumophila (Lp) is the most common etiologic agent causing Legionnaires’ Disease (LD). Water systems offer the best growth conditions for Lp and support its spread by producing aerosols. From 2015 to 2017, the Regional Reference Laboratory of Clinical and Environmental Surveillance of Legionellosis of Palermo monitored the presence of Lp in nine prisons in Western Sicily. During this investigation, we compared Lp isolates from environmental samples in a prison located in Palermo with isolates from two prisoners in the same prison. Methods: We collected 93 water samples from nine Sicilian prisons and the bronchoalveolar lavages (BALs) of two prisoners considered cases of LD. These samples were processed following the procedures described in the Italian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Legionellosis of 2015. Then, genotyping was performed on 19 Lp colonies (17 from water samples and 2 from clinical samples) using the Sequence-Based Typing (SBT) method, according to European Study Group for Legionella Infections (ESGLI) protocols. Results: Lp serogroup (sg) 6 was the most prevalent serogroup isolated from the prisons analyzed (40%), followed by Lp sg 1 (16%). Most of all, in four penitentiary institutions, we detected a high concentration of Lp >104 Colony Forming Unit/Liter (CFU/L). The environmental molecular investigation found the following Sequence Types (STs) in Lp sg 6: ST 93, ST 292, ST 461, ST 728, ST 1317 and ST 1362, while most of the isolates in sg 1 belonged to ST 1. We also found a new ST that has since been assigned the number 2451 in the ESGLI-SBT database. From the several Lp sg 1 colonies isolated from the two BALs, we identified ST 2451. Conclusions: In this article, we described the results obtained from environmental and epidemiological investigations of Lp isolated from prisons in Western Sicily. Furthermore, we reported the first cluster of Legionnaires’ in an Italian prison and the molecular typing of Lp sg 1 from one prison’s water system and two BALs, identified the source of the contamination, and discovered a new ST

Adjustment and transformation strategies of ItalPoS Permanent GNSS Network

A private network of 133 Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) permanent sites, named ItalPoS (Italian Positioning Service) and uniformly covering the entire Italian territory, was established in April 2006 by the Italian Division of Leica Geosystems S.p.A. This network also involves several GPS stations of the INGV (Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology) RING (Real-time Integrated National Gps) network and GPS stations from other public and private bodies. Indeed Leica Geosystems contributed with its experience and its products to these networks which currently fulfil the national coverage where there are no ItalPoS stations. For instance, the purpose of the ItalPoS network is mainly GNSS data distribution in terms of real time corrections and RINEX files for the post-processing. In order to compute and distribute to private and scientific users a set of adjusted coordinates of the ItalPoS network in the IGS05 and ETRF89-2000 reference frames, a dataset of RINEX of about 120 GPS permanent sites was created and processed, using the distributed sessions approach, by means of Gamit/Globk 10.3 GPS data processor, also using some SOPAC (Scripps Orbits and Permanent Array Center) and EUREF (European Permanent Network) solutions to improve the reference frame definition and the internal constraints. This paper describes all the strategies adopted to estimate coordinates and velocities of the ItalPoS Network in IGS05 and in ETRF89-2000 reference frames in the whole Italian territory

Thirteen years of integrated precipitable water derived by GPS at Mario Zucchelli Station, Antarctica

Since 1998, the Italian Antarctic Programme is funding space geodetic activities based on the use of episodic and permanent GPS observations. Beside their exploitation in geodynamics, the data can be used to sense the atmosphere and retrieve the water vapour content and variation. The surface pressure and temperature at the GPS tracking sites are necessary to compute the precipitable water; at sites where no information is available, the values can be retrieved from a global grid model. We process the data series of the permanent GPS site TNB1 (Mario Zucchelli Station, Antarctica) from 1998 up to 2010 comparing the use of grid values to the implementation of real surface records. With both approaches, we estimate almost 70000 hourly values of precipitable water over 13 years and we find discrepancies varying between (1.8 ± 0.2) mm in summer and (3.3 ± 0.5) mm in winter. In addition, the discrepancies of the two solutions exhibit a clear seasonal dependency. We validate our results using radio soundings measurements. They agree better with the precipitable water values derived from real surface data. Nevertheless, these latter exhibit dry biases and detect the (77±21) % of the content of moisture measured by the radio soundings. Both GPS and radio sounding observations are processed adopting the most up-to-date strategies to reduce and dominate known systematic errors

The Geant4-DNA project

The Geant4-DNA project proposes to develop an open-source simulation software based and fully included in the general-purpose Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit. The main objective of this software is to simulate biological damages induced by ionising radiation at the cellular and sub-cellular scale. This project was originally initiated by the European Space Agency for the prediction of deleterious effects of radiation that may affect astronauts during future long duration space exploration missions. In this paper, the Geant4-DNA collaboration presents an overview of the whole ongoing project, including its most recent developments already available in the last Geant4 public release (9.3 BETA), as well as an illustration example simulating the direct irradiation of a chromatin fibre. Expected extensions involving several research domains, such as particle physics, chemistry and cellular and molecular biology, within a fully interdiciplinary activity of the Geant4 collaboration are also discussed.Comment: presented by S. Incerti at the ASIA SIMULATION CONFERENCE 2009, October 7-9, 2009, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japa

Erratum to: Proximal humeral fractures in elderly patients

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