Drug resistance is widespread among children who receive long-term antiretroviral treatment at a rural Tanzanian hospital

To assess long-term virological efficacy and the emergence of drug resistance in children who receive antiretroviral treatment (ART) in rural Tanzania. Haydom Lutheran Hospital has provided ART to HIV-infected individuals since 2003. From February through May 2009, a cross-sectional virological efficacy survey was conducted among children (200 copies/mL. Virological response was measured in 19 of 23 eligible children; 8 of 19 were girls and median age at ART initiation was 5 years (range 2–14 years). Median duration of ART at the time of the survey was 40 months (range 11–61 months). Only 8 children were virologically suppressed (≤40 copies/mL), whereas 11 children had clinically relevant resistance mutations in the reverse transcriptase gene. The most frequent mutations were M184V (n = 11), conferring resistance to lamivudine and emtricitabine, and Y181C (n = 4), G190A/S (n = 4) and K103N (n = 4), conferring resistance to NNRTIs. Of concern, three children had thymidine analogue mutations, associated with cross-resistance to all nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Despite widespread resistance, however, only one child experienced a new WHO stage 4 event and none had a CD4 cell count of <200 cells/mm3. Among children on long-term ART in rural Tanzania, >50% harboured drug resistance. Results for children were markedly poorer than for adults attending the same programme, underscoring the need for improved treatment strategies for children in resource-limited settings

Training Neural Nets to Learn Reactive Potential Energy Surfaces using Interactive Quantum Chemistry in Virtual Reality

Whilst the primary bottleneck to a number of computational workflows was not so long ago limited by processing power, the rise of machine learning technologies has resulted in a paradigm shift which places increasing value on issues related to data curation - i.e., data size, quality, bias, format, and coverage. Increasingly, data-related issues are equally as important as the algorithmic methods used to process and learn from the data. Here we introduce an open source GPU-accelerated neural network (NN) framework for learning reactive potential energy surfaces (PESs), and investigate the use of real-time interactive ab initio molecular dynamics in virtual reality (iMD-VR) as a new strategy for rapidly sampling geometries along reaction pathways which can be used to train NNs to learn reactive PESs. Focussing on hydrogen abstraction reactions of CN radical with isopentane, we compare the performance of NNs trained using iMD-VR data versus NNs trained using a more traditional method, namely molecular dynamics (MD) constrained to sample a predefined grid of points along hydrogen abstraction reaction coordinates. Both the NN trained using iMD-VR data and the NN trained using the constrained MD data reproduce important qualitative features of the reactive PESs, such as a low and early barrier to abstraction. Quantitatively, learning is sensitive to the training dataset. Our results show that user-sampled structures obtained with the quantum chemical iMD-VR machinery enable better sampling in the vicinity of the minimum energy path (MEP). As a result, the NN trained on the iMD-VR data does very well predicting energies in the vicinity of the MEP, but less well predicting energies for 'off-path' structures. The NN trained on the constrained MD data does better in predicting energies for 'off-path' structures, given that it included a number of such structures in its training set

Legal Aid in Norway

The chapter analyses civil legal aid in Norway. It gives a brief review of the history of the legal aid scheme in Norway, a detailed description of the public legal aid scheme, and how the public scheme relates to third sector legal aid initiatives. In general, the chapter paints a picture of the Norwegian legal aid scheme as a traditional oriented and well-funded social support scheme, originating on the basis of a traditional welfare state ideology. However, the public scheme is struggling to meet the need for legal aid. The third sector legal aid, such as student run legal aid clinics and special outreach legal aid organisations, has developed alongside the public scheme. This development gives reason to question whether the current legal aid scheme is in keeping with welfare state ideals