Prevention of occupational exposure of tuberculosis to health care workers

The resurgence of tuberculosis in the United States within the past decade has prompted the health care community to develop tuberculosis elimination policies. However, recent outbreaks of tuberculosis have proved to be resistant to multiple antibiotics. Tuberculosis infections among health care workers is also rising. This increase in occupational exposures has prompted the examination of current exposure control measures. The occupational exposure to tuberculosis is prevented by the use of administrative policies, engineering controls and personal protective equipment. Each control measure has inherent strengths and weaknesses and when implemented through an exposure control plan the risk of occupational exposure can be reduced. Control techniques currently utilized may benefit from additional research and development. The research will not be squandered if tuberculosis is ultimately eliminated, as the knowledge gained may prove beneficial for exposure protection from future bio-hazardous aerosols

The Abandoned Side of the Internet: Hijacking Internet Resources When Domain Names Expire

The vulnerability of the Internet has been demonstrated by prominent IP prefix hijacking events. Major outages such as the China Telecom incident in 2010 stimulate speculations about malicious intentions behind such anomalies. Surprisingly, almost all discussions in the current literature assume that hijacking incidents are enabled by the lack of security mechanisms in the inter-domain routing protocol BGP. In this paper, we discuss an attacker model that accounts for the hijacking of network ownership information stored in Regional Internet Registry (RIR) databases. We show that such threats emerge from abandoned Internet resources (e.g., IP address blocks, AS numbers). When DNS names expire, attackers gain the opportunity to take resource ownership by re-registering domain names that are referenced by corresponding RIR database objects. We argue that this kind of attack is more attractive than conventional hijacking, since the attacker can act in full anonymity on behalf of a victim. Despite corresponding incidents have been observed in the past, current detection techniques are not qualified to deal with these attacks. We show that they are feasible with very little effort, and analyze the risk potential of abandoned Internet resources for the European service region: our findings reveal that currently 73 /24 IP prefixes and 7 ASes are vulnerable to be stealthily abused. We discuss countermeasures and outline research directions towards preventive solutions.Comment: Final version for TMA 201

CAIR: Using Formal Languages to Study Routing, Leaking, and Interception in BGP

The Internet routing protocol BGP expresses topological reachability and policy-based decisions simultaneously in path vectors. A complete view on the Internet backbone routing is given by the collection of all valid routes, which is infeasible to obtain due to information hiding of BGP, the lack of omnipresent collection points, and data complexity. Commonly, graph-based data models are used to represent the Internet topology from a given set of BGP routing tables but fall short of explaining policy contexts. As a consequence, routing anomalies such as route leaks and interception attacks cannot be explained with graphs. In this paper, we use formal languages to represent the global routing system in a rigorous model. Our CAIR framework translates BGP announcements into a finite route language that allows for the incremental construction of minimal route automata. CAIR preserves route diversity, is highly efficient, and well-suited to monitor BGP path changes in real-time. We formally derive implementable search patterns for route leaks and interception attacks. In contrast to the state-of-the-art, we can detect these incidents. In practical experiments, we analyze public BGP data over the last seven years

The Rise of Certificate Transparency and Its Implications on the Internet Ecosystem

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of Certificate Transparency (CT) over time and explore the implications of exposing certificate DNS names from the perspective of security and privacy. We find that certificates in CT logs have seen exponential growth. Website support for CT has also constantly increased, with now 33% of established connections supporting CT. With the increasing deployment of CT, there are also concerns of information leakage due to all certificates being visible in CT logs. To understand this threat, we introduce a CT honeypot and show that data from CT logs is being used to identify targets for scanning campaigns only minutes after certificate issuance. We present and evaluate a methodology to learn and validate new subdomains from the vast number of domains extracted from CT logged certificates.Comment: To be published at ACM IMC 201

Validation of treatment escalation as a definition of atopic eczema flares.

BACKGROUND: Atopic eczema (AE) is a chronic disease with flares and remissions. Long-term control of AE flares has been identified as a core outcome domain for AE trials. However, it is unclear how flares should be defined and measured. OBJECTIVE: To validate two concepts of AE flares based on daily reports of topical medication use: (i) escalation of treatment and (ii) days of topical anti-inflammatory medication use (topical corticosteroids and/or calcineurin inhibitors). METHODS: Data from two published AE studies (studies A (n=336) and B (n=60)) were analysed separately. Validity and feasibility of flare definitions were assessed using daily global bother (scale 0 to 10) as the reference standard. Intra-class correlations were reported for continuous variables, and odds ratios and area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve for binary outcome measures. RESULTS: Good agreement was found between both AE flare definitions and change in global bother: area under the ROC curve for treatment escalation of 0.70 and 0.73 in studies A and B respectively, and area under the ROC curve of 0.69 for topical anti-inflammatory medication use (Study A only). Significant positive relationships were found between validated severity scales (POEM, SASSAD, TIS) and the duration of AE flares occurring in the previous week - POEM and SASSAD rose by half a point for each unit increase in number of days in flare. Smaller increases were observed on the TIS scale. Completeness of daily diaries was 95% for Study A and 60% for Study B over 16 weeks). CONCLUSION: Both definitions were good proxy indicators of AE flares. We found no evidence that 'escalation of treatment' was a better measure of AE flares than 'use of topical anti-inflammatory medications'. Capturing disease flares in AE trials through daily recording of medication use is feasible and appears to be a good indicator of long-term control. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN71423189 (Study A)

The Mental and Physical Health of Mothers of Children with Special Health Care Needs in the United States

OBJECTIVE: To determine the prevalence of poor mental and physical health among mothers of children with special health care needs (CSHCN) and to determine the association between maternal health and the child\u27s number of special health care needs (SHCN) and severity of ability limitation. METHODS: We used the combined 2016-2018 National Survey of Children\u27s Health Dataset of 102,341 children ages 0-17 including 23,280 CSHCN. We used regression models to examine the associations of a child\u27s number of SHCN and ability limitations with maternal health. RESULTS: Twice as many mothers of CSHCN had poor mental and physical health compared to non-CSHCN (mental 10.3% vs. 4.0%, p \u3c .001; physical 11.9% vs 5.0%, p \u3c .001). In regression models, increased number of SHCN and severity of activity limitations were associated with significantly increased odds of poor maternal health. CONCLUSIONS FOR PRACTICE: Mothers of CSHCN have worse health compared to mothers of non-CSHCN, especially those who experience social disadvantage and those with children with complex SHCN or severe ability limitations. Interventions to improve the health of these particularly vulnerable caregivers of CSHCN are warranted

Mercury's Weather-Beaten Surface: Understanding Mercury in the Context of Lunar and Asteroid Space Weathering Studies

Understanding the composition of Mercury's crust is key to comprehending the formation of the planet. The regolith, derived from the crustal bedrock, has been altered via a set of space weathering processes. These processes are the same set of mechanisms that work to form Mercury's exosphere, and are moderated by the local space environment and the presence of an intrinsic planetary magnetic field. The alterations need to be understood in order to determine the initial crustal compositions. The complex interrelationships between Mercury's exospheric processes, the space environment, and surface composition are examined and reviewed. The processes are examined in the context of our understanding of these same processes on the lunar and asteroid regoliths. Keywords: Mercury (planet) Space weathering Surface processes Exosphere Surface composition Space environment

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