Current status of malaria parasite among blood donors in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria

This study was carried out to determine the prevalence of malaria parasite among blood donors at the  Police Clinic Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. The standard parasitological techniques using both thick and thin blood films from the donors for the detection of malaria parasite was followed. Venous blood was collected from 200 blood donors and films were made on clean greese-free glass slide and stained with 10%Giemsa stains and viewed under the microscope using the oil immersion objective. Of the 200 samples examined, 56 (28.00%) were positive with Plasmodium falciparium. The highest prevalence among the males 53(26.50%) and between the ages 21-30years and only 3 (1.50%) of females were positive. Donors having the blood group O were more infected (60.70%) than the other blood groups and the lowest was blood group AB (5.40%). This result shows that there is a relatively high prevalence of malaria parasite among the blood donors in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. It is, therefore, recommended that malaria parasite screening test be included among other blood screening tests before any transfusion to avert the deleterious effects of malaria on recipients. © JASEMKeywords: Malaria parasite; Prevalence; Blood Donors; Port Harcourt; Rivers State

RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation League: Evaluation Challenges

We summarise the results of RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation League in 2016 (Leipzig), including the main competition and the evaluation round. The evaluation round held in Leipzig confirmed the strength of RoboCup-2015 champion (WrightEagle, i.e. WE2015) in the League, with only eventual finalists of 2016 competition capable of defeating WE2015. An extended, post-Leipzig, round-robin tournament which included the top 8 teams of 2016, as well as WE2015, with over 1000 games played for each pair, placed WE2015 third behind the champion team (Gliders2016) and the runner-up (HELIOS2016). This establishes WE2015 as a stable benchmark for the 2D Simulation League. We then contrast two ranking methods and suggest two options for future evaluation challenges. The first one, "The Champions Simulation League", is proposed to include 6 previous champions, directly competing against each other in a round-robin tournament, with the view to systematically trace the advancements in the League. The second proposal, "The Global Challenge", is aimed to increase the realism of the environmental conditions during the simulated games, by simulating specific features of different participating countries.Comment: 12 pages, RoboCup-2017, Nagoya, Japan, July 201

Decentralised Monte Carlo Tree Search for Active Perception

We propose a decentralised variant of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) that is suitable for a variety of tasks in multi-robot active perception. Our algorithm allows each robot to optimise its own individual action space by maintaining a probability distribution over plans in the joint-action space. Robots periodically communicate a compressed form of these search trees, which are used to update the locally-stored joint distributions using an optimisation approach inspired by variational methods. Our method admits any objective function defined over robot actions, assumes intermittent communication, and is anytime. We extend the analysis of the standard MCTS for our algorithm and characterise asymptotic convergence under reasonable assumptions. We evaluate the practical performance of our method for generalised team orienteering and active object recognition using real data, and show that it compares favourably to centralised MCTS even with severely degraded communication. These examples support the relevance of our algorithm for real-world active perception with multi-robot systems

Acquired perforating dermatosis: A clinical and dermatoscopic correlation

Acquired Perforating Dermatosis (APD) is a perforating disease characterized by transepidermal elimination of dermal material [1,2]. This disease usually develops in adulthood. APD has been reported to occur in association with various diseases, but is most commonly associated with dialysis-dependent chronic renal failure (CRF) or diabetes mellitus (DM) [1,2,3,4]. Morton et al found that APD occurs in up to 10% of patients undergoing hemodialysis [5]. Additionally, Saray et al found that sixteen of twenty-two cases with APD were associated with CRF [3]

Adverse drug reactions in West Africa

Adverse drug reaction (ADR) reports of countries varies due to differences in the prevalence of diseases and hence the types of drugs used. ADRs are a major health and economic burden worldwide. National health authorities monitor the safety of medicines to protect consumers from the hazards of drugs. ADR databases are also maintained from where reports are regularly evaluated to detect signals of new ADRs and determine the increase of those already known. A review of paediatric and general population studies conducted on ADRs from national ADR databases was carried out. The majority of studies identified were from countries in Europe and North America, and only one study on the general population was conducted from the Ethiopian ADR database in Africa. No paediatric study was identified in Africa. Skin reactions associated with antiretroviral drugs were the most frequent ADRs in the study conducted from the Ethiopian ADR database. Anti-infective agents, mostly vaccines, were mostly associated with the ADRs in children in Europe and Latin America, and drugs used for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHD) were implicated with the ADRs reported for children in North America. The ADR databases of Ghana and Nigeria were analysed to evaluate the ADRs reported for children and adults. The fatalities reported and the associated drugs in the two databases were also evaluated. The ADR reporting rates for children and the general population in Ghana and Nigeria were lower than the corresponding rates observed in the review. The majority of the ADRs in Nigerian adults were reported for antiretroviral drugs, and most of those who died suffered Stevens Johnson syndrome with antimalarials as the suspect drugs. ADRs reported for Nigerian children were mainly skin reactions associated with antibiotics. Most of the reported fatalities resulted from renal failure, linked with suspected contaminated teething mixtures. Antimalarials and anthelmintics were mostly associated with the ADRs in Ghanaian adults. Most of the reported fatalities resulted from Stevens Johnson syndrome. ADRs in Ghanaian children were mostly associated with vaccines. The majority of the reported deaths resulted from unknown causes linked with antimalarials

Relationship between Processing Method and the Glycemic Indices of Ten Sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas) Cultivars Commonly Consumed in Jamaica

This study investigated the effect of different traditional cooking methods on glycemic index (GI) and glycemic response of ten Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) cultivars commonly eaten in Jamaica. Matured tubers were cooked by roasting, baking, frying, or boiling then immediately consumed by the ten nondiabetic test subjects (5 males and 5 females; mean age of 27 ± 2 years). The GI varied between 41 ± 5–93 ± 5 for the tubers studied. Samples prepared by boiling had the lowest GI (41 ± 5–50 ± 3), while those processed by baking (82 ± 3–94 ± 3) and roasting (79 ± 4–93 ± 2) had the highest GI values. The study indicates that the glycemic index of Jamaican sweet potatoes varies significantly with the method of preparation and to a lesser extent on intravarietal differences. Consumption of boiled sweet potatoes could minimize postprandial blood glucose spikes and therefore, may prove to be more efficacious in the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus

Host--parasite models on graphs

The behavior of two interacting populations, ``hosts''and ``parasites'', is investigated on Cayley trees and scale-free networks. In the former case analytical and numerical arguments elucidate a phase diagram, whose most interesting feature is the absence of a tri-critical point as a function of the two independent spreading parameters. For scale-free graphs, the parasite population can be described effectively by Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible-type dynamics in a host background. This is shown both by considering the appropriate dynamical equations and by numerical simulations on Barab\'asi-Albert networks with the major implication that in the termodynamic limit the critical parasite spreading parameter vanishes.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to PRE; analytics redone, new calculations added, references added, appendix remove

On the geometry of C^3/D_27 and del Pezzo surfaces

We clarify some aspects of the geometry of a resolution of the orbifold X = C3/D_27, the noncompact complex manifold underlying the brane quiver standard model recently proposed by Verlinde and Wijnholt. We explicitly realize a map between X and the total space of the canonical bundle over a degree 1 quasi del Pezzo surface, thus defining a desingularization of X. Our analysis relys essentially on the relationship existing between the normalizer group of D_27 and the Hessian group and on the study of the behaviour of the Hesse pencil of plane cubic curves under the quotient.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. JHEP style. Added references. Corrected typos. Revised introduction, results unchanged

¹H, ¹⁵N, ¹³C backbone resonance assignments of human phosphoglycerate kinase in a transition state analogue complex with ADP, 3-phosphoglycerate and magnesium trifluoride

Human phosphoglycerate kinase (PGK) is an energy generating glycolytic enzyme that catalyses the transfer of a phosphoryl group from 1,3-bisphosphoglycerate (BPG) to ADP producing 3-phosphoglycerate (3PG) and ATP. PGK is composed of two α/β Rossmann-fold domains linked by a central α-helix and the active site is located in the cleft formed between the N-domain which binds BPG or 3PG, and the C-domain which binds the nucleotides ADP or ATP. Domain closure is required to bring the two substrates into close proximity for phosphoryl transfer to occur, however previous structural studies involving a range of native substrates and substrate analogues only yielded open or partly closed PGK complexes. X-ray crystallography using magnesium trifluoride (MgF3(-)) as a isoelectronic and near-isosteric mimic of the transferring phosphoryl group (PO3(-)), together with 3PG and ADP has been successful in trapping human PGK in a fully closed transition state analogue (TSA) complex. In this work we report the (1)H, (15)N and (13)C backbone resonance assignments of human PGK in the solution conformation of the fully closed PGK:3PG:MgF3:ADP TSA complex. Assignments were obtained by heteronuclear multidimensional NMR spectroscopy. In total, 97% of all backbone resonances were assigned in the complex, with 385 out of a possible 399 residues assigned in the (1)H-(15)N TROSY spectrum. Prediction of solution secondary structure from a chemical shift analysis using the TALOS-N webserver is in good agreement with the published X-ray crystal structure of this complex