Chlamydia infections of the eye and the use of copper sulphate for the symptomatic relief of trachoma

Chlamydia trachomatis is responsible for two of the most prevalent infectious eye diseases in the world today, trachoma and inclusion conjunctivitis. Trachoma is still the leading cause of preventable blindness in the Third World and the incidence of inclusion conjunctivitis is on the in the industrialized world. Both ocular infections have been reviewed. This paper investigates a unique treatment regimen for the subjective symptoms of trachoma utilized in many practices in Southeast Asia. The data was gathered from one particular ophthalmological practice in Hong Kong. The procedure uses copper sulphate crystals 1n conjunction with conventional antibiotic therapy for patients with moderate to severe symptoms. For severe cases, topical dexamethasone is added to the treatment regimen. Ninety-one files of patients who underwent this mode of treatment were randomly selected from the Hong Kong practice and were described according to distribution of age, phase of treatment, and length of treatment. A survey of these patients revealed a significant percentage (75%) of satisfaction and relief of symptoms. We propose that copper sulphate should be considered for similar use with inclusion conjunctivitis to accelerate the relief of ocular symptomology

Embracing assay heterogeneity with neural processes for markedly improved bioactivity predictions

Predicting the bioactivity of a ligand is one of the hardest and most important challenges in computer-aided drug discovery. Despite years of data collection and curation efforts by research organizations worldwide, bioactivity data remains sparse and heterogeneous, thus hampering efforts to build predictive models that are accurate, transferable and robust. The intrinsic variability of the experimental data is further compounded by data aggregation practices that neglect heterogeneity to overcome sparsity. Here we discuss the limitations of these practices and present a hierarchical meta-learning framework that exploits the information synergy across disparate assays by successfully accounting for assay heterogeneity. We show that the model achieves a drastic improvement in affinity prediction across diverse protein targets and assay types compared to conventional baselines. It can quickly adapt to new target contexts using very few observations, thus enabling large-scale virtual screening in early-phase drug discovery

Experimental Measurement of Effective Diffusion Coefficient in Gas Diffusion Layer/Microporous Layer in PEM Fuel Cells

Accuracy in the effective diffusion coefficient of the gas diffusion layer (GDL)/microporous layer (MPL) is important to accurately predict the mass transport limitations for high current density operation of polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells. All the previous studies regarding mass transport limitations were limited to pure GDLs, and experimental analysis of the impact of the MPL on the overall diffusion in the porous GDL is still lacking. The MPL is known to provide beneficial water management properties at high current operating conditions of PEM fuel cells but its small pore sizes become a resistance in the diffusion path for mass transport to the catalyst layer. A modified Loschmidt cell with an oxygen-nitrogen mixture is used in this work to determine the effect of MPL on the effective diffusion coefficients. It is found that Knudsen effects play a dominant role in the diffusion through the MPL where pore diameters are less than 1 μm. Experimental results show that the effective diffusion coefficient of the MPL is only about 21% that of its GDL substrate and Knudsen diffusion accounts for 80% of the effective diffusion coefficient of the GDL with MPL measured in this study. No existing correlations can correlate the effective diffusion coefficient with significant Knudsen contribution

A generalization of primitive sets and a conjecture of Erd\H{o}s

A set of integers greater than 1 is primitive if no element divides another. Erd\H{o}s proved in 1935 that the sum of $1/(n \log n)$ for $n$ running over a primitive set $A$ is universally bounded over all choices for $A$. In 1988 he asked if this universal bound is attained by the set of prime numbers. We answer the Erd\H{o}s question in the affirmative for 2-primitive sets. Here a set is 2-primitive if no element divides the product of 2 other elements.Comment: 13 page

On the critical exponent for kk-primitive sets

A set of positive integers is primitive (or 1-primitive) if no member divides another. Erd\H{o}s proved in 1935 that the weighted sum $\sum1/(n \log n)$ for $n$ ranging over a primitive set $A$ is universally bounded over all choices for $A$. In 1988 he asked if this universal bound is attained by the set of prime numbers. One source of difficulty in this conjecture is that $\sum n^{-\lambda}$ over a primitive set is maximized by the primes if and only if $\lambda$ is at least the critical exponent $\tau_1 \approx 1.14$. A set is $k$-primitive if no member divides any product of up to $k$ other distinct members. One may similarly consider the critical exponent $\tau_k$ for which the primes are maximal among $k$-primitive sets. In recent work the authors showed that $\tau_2 < 0.8$, which directly implies the Erd\H{o}s conjecture for 2-primitive sets. In this article we study the limiting behavior of the critical exponent, proving that $\tau_k$ tends to zero as $k\to\infty$.Comment: 14 page

Severe Lactic Acidosis in a Patient with B-Cell Lymphoma: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

Lactic acidosis is commonly observed in clinical situations such as shock and sepsis, as a result of tissue hypoperfusion and hypoxia. Lymphoma and leukemia are among other clinical situations where lactic acidosis has been reported. We present a case of a 59-year-old female with lactic acidosis who was found to have aggressive B-cell lymphoma. There have been 29 cases of lymphoma induced lactic acidosis reported thus far; however all reported cases have abnormal vital signs or concomitant medical conditions that may lead to lactic acidosis. The pathogenesis of malignancy-induced lactic acidosis is not well understood; however associated factors include increased glycolysis, increased lactate production by cancer cells, and decreased hepatic clearance of lactate. When it occurs, lactic acidosis is a poor prognostic sign in these patients. Prompt diagnosis and treatment of underlying lymphoma or leukemia remains the only way to achieve complete resolution of lactic acidosis in these patients

PENGAWASAN DINAS KESEHATAN TERHADAP PENGELOLAAN LIMBAH MEDIS PUSKESMAS DI KOTA YOGYAKARTA (STUDI KASUS DI PUSKESMAS TEGALREJO)

This thesis is the result of research on the supervision of the health office on medical waste management at the Tegalrejo Health Center. The purpose of this study was to determine the proper and correct implementation of medical waste management at the puskesmas so that environmental pollution does not occur through the puskesmas' medical waste. The research method used is an empirical research method that focuses on social facts, where the type of data used is primary data with interviews and secondary data from literature studies. The health office's supervision of the management of puskesmas medical waste, especially at the Tegalrejo puskesmas as one of the health service facilities in the City of Yogyakarta, has been going well, but in general the management of puskesmas medical waste in the City of Yogyakarta has not been optimal because there are still several obstacles experienced by the government such as a reduced number of reports Medical waste by other health care facilities, the lack of land needed for temporary disposal sites and knowledge regarding how to properly manage medical waste

Using rhythmic nonces for puzzle-based DoS resistance

To protect against replay attacks, many Internet proto-cols rely on nonces to guarantee freshness. In practice, the server generates these nonces during the initial hand-shake, but if the server is under attack, resources con-sumed by managing certain protocols can lead to DoS vulnerabilities. To help alleviate this problem, we pro-pose the concept of rhythmic nonces, a cryptographic tool that allows servers to measure request freshness with minimal bookkeeping costs. We explore the impact of this service in the context of a puzzle-based DoS re-sistance scheme we call “SYN puzzles”. Our preliminary results based on mathematical analysis and evaluation of a prototype suggests that our scheme is more resistant than existing techniques. 1

Aircraft route forecasting under adverse weather conditions

In this paper storm nowcasts in the terminal manoeuvring area (TMA) of Hong Kong International Airport are used to forecast deviation routes through a field of storms for arriving and departing aircraft. Storms were observed and nowcast by the nowcast system SWIRLS from the Hong Kong Observatory. Storms were considered as no-go zones for aircraft and deviation routes were determined with the DIVSIM software package. Two days (21 and 22 May 2011) with 22 actual flown routes were investigated. Flights were simulated with a nowcast issued at the time an aircraft entered the TMA or departed from the airport. These flights were compared with a posteriori simulations, in which all storm fields were known and circumnavigated. Both types of simulated routes were then compared with the actual flown routes. The qualitative comparison of the various routes revealed generally good agreement. Larger differences were found in more complex situations with many active storms in the TMA. Route differences resulted primarily from air traffic control measures imposed such as holdings, slow-downs and shortcuts, causing the largest differences between the estimated and actual landing time. Route differences could be enhanced as aircraft might be forced to circumnavigate a storm ahead in a different sense. The use of route forecasts to assist controllers coordinating flights in a complex moving storm field is discussed. The study emphasises the important application of storm nowcasts in aviation meteorology

Tumor Vascular Permeability to a Nanoprobe Correlates to Tumor-Specific Expression Levels of Angiogenic Markers

© 2009 Karathanasis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005843Background. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) receptor-2 is the major mediator of the mitogenic, angiogenic, and vascular hyperpermeability effects of VEGF on breast tumors. Overexpression of VEGF and VEGF receptor-2 is associated with the degree of pathomorphosis of the tumor tissue and unfavorable prognosis. In this study, we demonstrate that non-invasive quantification of the degree of tumor vascular permeability to a nanoprobe correlates with the VEGF and its receptor levels and tumor growth. Methodology/Principal Findings. We designed an imaging nanoprobe and a methodology to detect the intratumoral deposition of a 100 nm-scale nanoprobe using mammography allowing measurement of the tumor vascular permeability in a rat MAT B III breast tumor model. The tumor vascular permeability varied widely among the animals. Notably, the VEGF and VEGF receptor-2 gene expression of the tumors as measured by qRT-PCR displayed a strong correlation to the imaging-based measurements of vascular permeability to the 100 nm-scale nanoprobe. This is in good agreement with the fact that tumors with high angiogenic activity are expected to have more permeable blood vessels resulting in high intratumoral deposition of a nanoscale agent. In addition, we show that higher intratumoral deposition of the nanoprobe as imaged with mammography correlated to a faster tumor growth rate. This data suggest that vascular permeability scales to the tumor growth and that tumor vascular permeability can be a measure of underlying VEGF and VEGF receptor-2 expression in individual tumors. Conclusions/Significance. This is the first demonstration, to our knowledge, that quantitative imaging of tumor vascular permeability to a nanoprobe represents a form of a surrogate, functional biomarker of underlying molecular markers of angiogenesi