Management of severe acute malnutrition

Malnutrition remains a global health concern and contributes significantly to childhood mortality. Nearly half of all deaths in children <5 years of age are attributed to undernutrition, especially in developing countries. It is important to differentiate between acute and chronic malnutrition, as the management and mortality for these two conditions differ. Management should follow integrative management protocols to ensure that mortality and morbidity are minimised. General principles for inpatient management of acute malnutrition can be divided into two phases, i.e. the initial stabilisation phase (usually in the first week) for acute complications, and the much longer rehabilitation phase. The initial phase lasts approximately 1 week and involves intensive monitoring and treatment. Severe acute malnutrition remains a problem in public health, especially in developing countries. Adhering to programmatic approaches for diagnosis and management ensures lower mortality rates and better outcomes

Ion Beam, Synchrotron Radiation, and Related Techniques in Biomedicine: Elemental Profiling of Hair

Elements play an imperative role in the physiological and metabolic processes of the human body. When elemental levels deviate from physiologically accepted levels due to for example poor nutrition, the body’s intricate elemental and metabolic balance is disturbed. Over time, disease may develop as a result of elemental dyshomeostasis or alternatively, disease may trigger elemental dyshomeostasis as an adaptive metabolic response to an unhealthy environment. There is now a growing interest in screening human tissue to identify and quantify elemental changes as biomarkers of disease or alternatively, as outcomes of disease. The unique properties of human hair brand it the ideal substrate for the quantitative identification of elements in the body. Hair bioaccumulates elements, provides a historical overview of elemental status depending on length, and is easy and economical to sample and store. The fundamental outcome and application of hair elemental screening, however, are strongly influenced by a range of factors, including choice of analytical method. This chapter will provide a background summary of ion beam and synchrotron radiation techniques and its diverse applications for unraveling the elemental signature of hair in various fields

Observations and Conclusions of Dynamics Students’ Mathematical Fluency

The course Dynamics I in mechanical engineering is a challenging course for many reasons, one of them being its mathematical demands. A collaboration between the first author (a mathematics lecturer and mathematics education researcher) and the second author (a mechanical engineer and the Dynamics I lecturer) sought to answer the question “What specific and identifiable mathematical difficulties are experienced by the Dynamics I students?” The observational results of this, in essence, ethnographic case study suggest that there are two levels of mathematical challenge, namely specific symbolic and computational difficulties as well as the need for well-developed problem-solving processes. We discuss our observations and provide pedagogic advice for lecturers of mathematics to help ease the transition to Dynamics I

Simple rule, hidden meaning: the scalar product in engineering mathematics

Engineering is a highly mathematical field of study with different university courses requiring proficiency at different types of mathematics. Engineering dynamics requires the skilful use of vectors in various ways and proficiency at vector arithmetic, algebra and geometry is of vital importance to incoming students. This paper reports on findings from the administering of a vector proficiency assessment instrument across two semesters of a dynamics course. Findings suggest that problems requiring use of the scalar product embedded within a context are of the highest difficulty level. We argue that the geometric role of the scalar product is weakly understood by the majority of students, leading to poor performance at any problem requiring more than a basic calculation. We suggest that lecturers of engineering mathematics foreground the geometric role and that lecturers of engineering courses be aware of the level of challenge manifest in these problems

Management of severe acute malnutrition

Malnutrition remains a global health concern and contributes significantly to childhood mortality. Nearly half of all deaths in children <5 years ofage are attributed to undernutrition, especially in developing countries. It is important to differentiate between acute and chronic malnutrition,as the management and mortality for these two conditions differ. Management should follow integrative management protocols to ensurethat mortality and morbidity are minimised. General principles for inpatient management of acute malnutrition can be divided into twophases, i.e. the initial stabilisation phase (usually in the first week) for acute complications, and the much longer rehabilitation phase. Theinitial phase lasts approximately 1 week and involves intensive monitoring and treatment. Severe acute malnutrition remains a problemin public health, especially in developing countries. Adhering to programmatic approaches for diagnosis and management ensures lowermortality rates and better outcomes

An investigation of impact breakage of rocks using the split Hopkinson pressure bar

Discrete element methods (DEM) are being used to provide detailed impact histories of the particles in comminution devices, such as mills. To match this immense detail of information, far more informative breakage tests than those that are generally conducted are now required. The split Hopkinson pressure bar apparatus is used in this study, as it allows the calculation of breakage forces and absorbed energies. The geometry of rock particles has been identified as significant, so this project undertook to identify the influence of shape on the breakage pattern of blue stone. Comparisons are then made between the breakage pattern of angular rocks and rounded, milled rocks for single impact fracture and consecutive impact loading at low energy. Results of this experiment indicate that although breakage for both geometries occurs over a similar energy range, rounded particles have the greater probability of fracture because they absorb more of the impact energy for a given loading. Size distributions of progeny show that five pebbles or more are sufficient to predict the distribution of most particles in small energy regimes. Cumulative impact testing shows that considerably more energy is required to break a rock through cumulative damage than through a single impact—this is of considerable importance in the light of the indications from DEM simulations that most breakage in a mill will be from cumulative damage rather than single impact breakage

The molecular evolution and epidemiology of Rubella virus

>Magister Scientiae - MScDespite widespread rubella virus (RV) vaccination programs, annually RV still causes severe congenital defects in an estimated 100,000 children globally. A concerted attempt to eradicate RV is currently underway and analytical tools to monitor the global decline of the last remaining RV lineages will be useful for assessing the effectiveness of this endeavour. Importantly, RV evolves rapidly enough that much of its epidemiological information might be inferable from RV genomic sequence data. Using BEASTv1.8.0, I analysed publically available RV sequence data to estimate genome-wide and gene-specific nucleotide substitution rates, to test whether the current estimates of RV substitution rates are representative of the entire RV genome. During these investigations, I specifically accounted for possible confounders of nucleotide substitution rate estimates, such as temporally biased sampling, sporadic recombination, and natural selection favouring either increased or decreased genetic diversity (estimated by the PARRIS and FUBAR methods) at nucleotide sites within RV nucleic acid secondary structures (predicted by the NASP method). I determined that RV nucleotide substitution rates range from 1.19×10-3 substitutions/site/year (in the E1 region) to 7.52×10-4 substitutions/site/year (in the P150 region). I found that these differences between nucleotide substitution rate estimates in various RV gene regions are largely attributable to temporal sampling biases, such that datasets containing a higher proportion of recently sampled sequences will tend to have inflated estimates of mean substitution rates. Although there exists little evidence of positive selection or natural genetic recombination in RV, I revealed that RV genomes possess extensive biologically functional nucleic acid secondary structures and that purifying selection acting to maintain these structures contributes substantially to variations in estimated nucleotide substitution rates across RV genomes. Although both temporal sampling biases and purifying selection favouring the conservation of RV nucleic acid secondary structures have an appreciable impact on substitution rate estimates, I find that these biases do not preclude the use of RV sequence data to date ancestral sequences and evaluate the associated RV phylodynamics. The combination of uniformly high substitution rates across the RV genome and strong temporal signal within the available sequence data enabled me to analyse the epidemiological and demographical dynamics of this virus during these attempts to eradicate it. By implementing a generalized linear model (GLM) and symmetrical model of discretized phylogeographic spread, I was able to identify several predictive variables of geographical RV spread and detect transmission linkages between distinct geographical regions. These results suggest that, in addition to strengthened vaccination strategies, there also needs to be an increased effort to educate people about the effects of vaccination and risks of RV infection

Genetic parameters of testicular measurements in Merino rams and the influence of scrotal circumference on total flock fertility

Genetic parameter estimates for scrotal circumference (SC), testis diameter (TD) and two-tooth liveweight (LW) were obtained for 1380 two-tooth Merino rams born from 1986 to 1998 on the Tygerhoek Experimental Farm. The effect of SC of service sires (n = 263) on ewe fertility was also investigated. Year of birth, selection group and LW were significant sources of variation for both SC and TD. SC had a significant effect on ewe fertility. Heritability estimates ranged from 0.29 to 0.40, 0.25 to 0.38 and from 0.49 to 0.52 for SC, TD and LW, respectively. Adjustment for LW decreased heritability estimates of SC and TD and the genetic correlations between the latter traits. Rams with an unadjusted SC of less than 30 cm should not be used. South African Journal of Animal Science Vol.32(2) 2002: 76-8

Improvement of digest2 NEO Classification Code -- utilizing the Astrometry Data Exchange Standard

We describe enhancements to the digest2 software, a short-arc orbit classifier for heliocentric orbits. Digest2 is primarily used by the Near-Earth Object (NEO) community to flag newly discovered objects for a immediate follow-up and has been a part of NEO discovery process for more than 15 years. We have updated the solar system population model used to weight the digest2 score according to the 2023 catalog of known solar system orbits and extended the list of mean uncertainties for 140 observatory codes. Moreover, we have added Astrometry Data Exchange Standard (ADES) input format support to digest2, which provides additional information for the astrometry, such as positional uncertainties for each detection. The digest2 code was also extended to read the roving observer astrometric format as well as the ability to compute a new parameter from the provided astrometric uncertainties ($RMS'$) that can serve as an indicator of in-tracklet curvature when compared with tracklet's great-circle fit RMS. Comparison with the previous version of digest2 confirmed the improvement in accuracy of NEO identification and found that using ADES XML input significantly reduces the computation time of the digest2.Comment: 14 pages, 8 tables, 6 figures, appendi

Assessment of the genetic diversity of geographical unrelated Microcystis aeruginosa strains using amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs)

Molecular marker analysis is becoming increasingly capable of identifying informative genetic variation. Amplified fragment length polymorphism markers (AFLPs) are among the recent innovations in genetic marker technologies, and provide a greater capacity for genome coverage and more reproducible results than previous technologies. We have investigated the usefulness of AFLP, which is based on the selective amplification of genomic restriction fragments by PCR, to differentiate between geographical unrelated Microcystis strains. In total 23 strains were subjected to the AFLP fingerprinting. After analysis of the data on the basis of the average linkage method, known as the Unweighted Pair Group Method using Arithmetic averages (UPGMA), a dendrogram with four clusters was obtained. Cluster 1 consisted mainly of the NIES strains that originated from Japan, while in cluster 2 the European strains grouped together. The South African strains that originated from the northern part of the country group together in cluster 3, while the strains collected from the central and southern regions group together with the US strains in cluster 4. The study had reveals extensive evidence for the applicability of AFLP in cyanobacterial taxonomy, and furthermore clearly demonstrates the superior discriminative power of AFLP towards the differentiation of geographical unrelated Microcystis aeruginosa strains that belong to the same species, as well as highlighting the potential of this fingerprinting method in evolutionary studies.African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 4 (5), pp. 389-399, 200