Perceptions of Child Caregivers About Factors Influencing Childhood Corneal Blindness in a Rural Community in Southern Nigeria

Objectives: Corneal scarring secondary to measles keratopathy and vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of childhood blindness in Nigeria and can be prevented by simple primary health care measures. Nutrition, health education and measles immunization are crucial components of preventive eye health services in the prevention of corneal blindness. This study explores the perceptions of child caregivers in a rural community in southern Nigeria to the uptake of preventive health services and child weaning practices which may influence corneal blindness.Methods: Qualitative methods were used to explore infant feeding practices and barriers to immunization services in a typical rural setting in southern Nigeria. The views of mothers, health workers and other  important members of the community were sought. Document study was used to assess the implementation of the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation that vitamin A prophylaxis be administered to allmeasles patients to prevent vitamin A deficiency.Results: Traditional views had a strong influence on infant feeding practices and the utilization of immunization services. The interplay between nutrition and corneal blindness was unknown to mothers in this study. The strong influence of the views of members of the extended family on child rearing and health-seeking behaviour was also discovered.Conclusion: This study highlights the need for cultural sensitivity in designing and implementing health programmes and clearly demonstrates the importance of community support and participation to ensure theireffectiveness and sustainability. It was suggested that the target group of health education programmes be expanded to include influential members of the family and the community.Key words: corneal blindness, exclusive breastfeeding, measles keratopathy, vitamin A deficiency

BORIS/CTCFL is an RNA-binding protein that associates with polysomes

© 2013 Ogunkolade et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

A degradatory fate for CCR4 suggests a primary role in Th2 inflammation.

CCR4 is the sole receptor for the chemokines CCL22 and CCL17. Clinical studies of asthmatic airways have shown levels of both ligands and CCR4+ Th2 cells to be elevated, suggestive of a role in disease. Consequently, CCR4 has aroused much interest as a potential therapeutic target and an understanding of how its cell surface expression is regulated is highly desirable. To this end, receptor expression, receptor endocytosis, and chemotaxis were assessed using transfectants expressing CCR4, CCR4+ human T cell lines, and human Th2 cells polarized in vitro. CCL17 and CCL22 drove rapid endocytosis of CCR4 in a dose-dependent manner. Replenishment at the cell surface was slow and sensitive to cycloheximide, suggestive of de novo synthesis of CCR4. Constitutive CCR4 endocytosis was also observed, with the internalized CCR4 found to be significantly degraded over a 6-h incubation. Truncation of the CCR4 C-terminus by 40 amino acids had no effect on cell surface expression, but resulted in significant impairment of ligand-induced endocytosis. Consequently, migration to both CCL17 and CCL22 was significantly enhanced. In contrast, truncation of CCR4 did not impair constitutive endocytosis or degradation, suggesting the use of alternative receptor motifs in these processes. We conclude that CCR4 cell surface levels are tightly regulated, with a degradative fate for endocytosed receptor. We postulate that this strict control is desirable, given that Th2 cells recruited by CCR4 can induce the further expression of CCR4 ligands in a positive feedback loop, thereby enhancing allergic inflammation

Variation in Interleukin 6 Receptor Gene Associates with Risk of Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis

Interleukin 6 (IL6) is an inflammatory cytokine; signaling via its receptor (IL6R) is believed to contribute to development of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). The single nucleotide polymorphism rs2228145 in IL6R associates with increased levels of soluble IL6R (s-IL6R), as well as reduced IL6R signaling and risk of inflammatory disorders; its effects are similar to those of a therapeutic monoclonal antibody that blocks IL6R signaling. We used the effect of rs2228145 on s-IL6R level as an indirect marker to investigate whether reduced IL6R signaling associates with risk of ulcerative colitis (UC) or Crohn’s disease (CD). In a genome-wide meta-analysis of 20,550 patients with CD, 17647 patients with UC, and more than 40,000 individuals without IBD (controls), we found that rs2228145 (scaled to a 2-fold increase in s-IL6R) was associated with reduced risk of CD (odds ratio, 0.876; 95% CI, 0.822–0.933; P=.00003) or UC (odds ratio, 0.932; 95% CI, 0.875–0.996; P=.036). These findings indicate that therapeutics designed to block IL6R signaling might be effective in treatment of IBD

Optical Coherence Tomography in the UK Biobank Study - Rapid Automated Analysis of Retinal Thickness for Large Population-Based Studies

PURPOSE: To describe an approach to the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging in large, population-based studies, including methods for OCT image acquisition, storage, and the remote, rapid, automated analysis of retinal thickness. METHODS: In UK Biobank, OCT images were acquired between 2009 and 2010 using a commercially available “spectral domain” OCT device (3D OCT-1000, Topcon). Images were obtained using a raster scan protocol, 6 mm x 6 mm in area, and consisting of 128 B-scans. OCT image sets were stored on UK Biobank servers in a central repository, adjacent to high performance computers. Rapid, automated analysis of retinal thickness was performed using custom image segmentation software developed by the Topcon Advanced Biomedical Imaging Laboratory (TABIL). This software employs dual-scale gradient information to allow for automated segmentation of nine intraretinal boundaries in a rapid fashion. RESULTS: 67,321 participants (134,642 eyes) in UK Biobank underwent OCT imaging of both eyes as part of the ocular module. 134,611 images were successfully processed with 31 images failing segmentation analysis due to corrupted OCT files or withdrawal of subject consent for UKBB study participation. Average time taken to call up an image from the database and complete segmentation analysis was approximately 120 seconds per data set per login, and analysis of the entire dataset was completed in approximately 28 days. CONCLUSIONS: We report an approach to the rapid, automated measurement of retinal thickness from nearly 140,000 OCT image sets from the UK Biobank. In the near future, these measurements will be publically available for utilization by researchers around the world, and thus for correlation with the wealth of other data collected in UK Biobank. The automated analysis approaches we describe may be of utility for future large population-based epidemiological studies, clinical trials, and screening programs that employ OCT imaging

The effect of surveillance and appreciative inquiry on puerperal infections : a longitudinal cohort study in India

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Graph Adaptive Knowledge Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation has caught appealing attentions as it facilitates the unlabeled target learning by borrowing existing well-established source domain knowledge. Recent practice on domain adaptation manages to extract effective features by incorporating the pseudo labels for the target domain to better solve cross-domain distribution divergences. However, existing approaches separate target label optimization and domain-invariant feature learning as different steps. To address that issue, we develop a novel Graph Adaptive Knowledge Transfer (GAKT) model to jointly optimize target labels and domain-free features in a unified framework. Specifically, semi-supervised knowledge adaptation and label propagation on target data are coupled to benefit each other, and hence the marginal and conditional disparities across different domains will be better alleviated. Experimental evaluation on two cross-domain visual datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our designed approach on facilitating the unlabeled target task learning, compared to the state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches

Deep generative modeling for single-cell transcriptomics.

Single-cell transcriptome measurements can reveal unexplored biological diversity, but they suffer from technical noise and bias that must be modeled to account for the resulting uncertainty in downstream analyses. Here we introduce single-cell variational inference (scVI), a ready-to-use scalable framework for the probabilistic representation and analysis of gene expression in single cells ( https://github.com/YosefLab/scVI ). scVI uses stochastic optimization and deep neural networks to aggregate information across similar cells and genes and to approximate the distributions that underlie observed expression values, while accounting for batch effects and limited sensitivity. We used scVI for a range of fundamental analysis tasks including batch correction, visualization, clustering, and differential expression, and achieved high accuracy for each task

Participatory analysis for adaptation to climate change in Mediterranean agricultural systems: possible choices in process design (versão Pre Print)

There is an increasing call for local measures to adapt to climate change, based on foresight analyses in collaboration with actors. However, such analyses involve many challenges, particularly because the actors concerned may not consider climate change to be an urgent concern. This paper examines the methodological choices made by three research teams in the design and implementation of participatory foresight analyses to explore agricultural and water management options for adaptation to climate change. Case studies were conducted in coastal areas of France, Morocco, and Portugal where the groundwater is intensively used for irrigation, the aquifers are at risk or are currently overexploited, and a serious agricultural crisis is underway. When designing the participatory processes, the researchers had to address four main issues: whether to avoid or prepare dialogue between actors whose relations may be limited or tense; how to select participants and get them involved; how to facilitate discussion of issues that the actors may not initially consider to be of great concern; and finally, how to design and use scenarios. In each case, most of the invited actors responded and met to discuss and evaluate a series of scenarios. Strategies were discussed at different levels, from farming practices to aquifer management. It was shown that such participatory analyses can be implemented in situations which may initially appear to be unfavourable. This was made possible by the flexibility in the methodological choices, in particular the possibility of framing the climate change issue in a broader agenda for discussion with the actors