EU External Relations: Exclusive Competence Revisited

This Article will focus on the question of exclusive competence in the field of EU external relations, especially in the light of recent developments. After a brief discussion on the origins and development of exclusive competence, a distinction will be made between common commercial policy, which has traditionally been the most important area of an explicit “a priori” exclusive competence, and what is often called an implicit exclusive competence, which, as it is today based on some general criteria enshrined in TFEU Article 3(2), may be called “supervening” exclusive competence. With regard to both categories, the main focus will be on recent developments, notably the impact of the Treaty of Lisbon, which introduced the TFEU and its Articles 2 and 3, as well as the case law of the European Court of Justice (“ECJ” or the “Court”) following the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, on December 1, 2009

PCA-Correlated SNPs for Structure Identification in Worldwide Human Populations

Existing methods to ascertain small sets of markers for the identification of human population structure require prior knowledge of individual ancestry. Based on Principal Components Analysis (PCA), and recent results in theoretical computer science, we present a novel algorithm that, applied on genomewide data, selects small subsets of SNPs (PCA-correlated SNPs) to reproduce the structure found by PCA on the complete dataset, without use of ancestry information. Evaluating our method on a previously described dataset (10,805 SNPs, 11 populations), we demonstrate that a very small set of PCA-correlated SNPs can be effectively employed to assign individuals to particular continents or populations, using a simple clustering algorithm. We validate our methods on the HapMap populations and achieve perfect intercontinental differentiation with 14 PCA-correlated SNPs. The Chinese and Japanese populations can be easily differentiated using less than 100 PCA-correlated SNPs ascertained after evaluating 1.7 million SNPs from HapMap. We show that, in general, structure informative SNPs are not portable across geographic regions. However, we manage to identify a general set of 50 PCA-correlated SNPs that effectively assigns individuals to one of nine different populations. Compared to analysis with the measure of informativeness, our methods, although unsupervised, achieved similar results. We proceed to demonstrate that our algorithm can be effectively used for the analysis of admixed populations without having to trace the origin of individuals. Analyzing a Puerto Rican dataset (192 individuals, 7,257 SNPs), we show that PCA-correlated SNPs can be used to successfully predict structure and ancestry proportions. We subsequently validate these SNPs for structure identification in an independent Puerto Rican dataset. The algorithm that we introduce runs in seconds and can be easily applied on large genome-wide datasets, facilitating the identification of population substructure, stratification assessment in multi-stage whole-genome association studies, and the study of demographic history in human populations

Metabolite changes in blood predict the onset of tuberculosis

Immunogenetics and cellular immunology of bacterial infectious disease

A Method to Address Differential Bias in Genotyping in Large-Scale Association Studies

In a previous paper we have shown that, when DNA samples for cases and controls are prepared in different laboratories prior to high-throughput genotyping, scoring inaccuracies can lead to differential misclassification and, consequently, to increased false-positive rates. Different DNA sourcing is often unavoidable in large-scale disease association studies of multiple case and control sets. Here, we describe methodological improvements to minimise such biases. These fall into two categories: improvements to the basic clustering methods for identifying genotypes from fluorescence intensities, and use of “fuzzy” calls in association tests in order to make appropriate allowance for call uncertainty. We find that the main improvement is a modification of the calling algorithm that links the clustering of cases and controls while allowing for different DNA sourcing. We also find that, in the presence of different DNA sourcing, biases associated with missing data can increase the false-positive rate. Therefore, we propose the use of “fuzzy” calls to deal with uncertain genotypes that would otherwise be labeled as missing

Accuracy of diabetes screening methods used for people with tuberculosis, Indonesia, Peru, Romania, South Africa

Objective To evaluate the performance of diagnostic tools for diabetes mellitus, including laboratory methods and clinical risk scores, in newly-diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis patients from four middle-income countries. Methods In a multicentre, prospective study, we recruited 2185 patients with pulmonary tuberculosis from sites in Indonesia, Peru, Romania and South Africa from January 2014 to September 2016. Using laboratory-measured glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) as the gold standard, we measured the diagnostic accuracy of random plasma glucose, point-of-care HbA1c, fasting blood glucose, urine dipstick, published and newly derived diabetes mellitus risk scores and anthropometric measurements. We also analysed combinations of tests, including a two-step test using point-of-care HbA1cwhen initial random plasma glucose was ≥ 6.1 mmol/L. Findings The overall crude prevalence of diabetes mellitus among newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients was 283/2185 (13.0%; 95% confidence interval, CI: 11.6–14.4). The marker with the best diagnostic accuracy was point-of-care HbA1c (area under receiver operating characteristic curve: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.75–0.86). A risk score derived using age, point-of-care HbA1c and random plasma glucose had the best overall diagnostic accuracy (area under curve: 0.85; 95% CI: 0.81–0.90). There was substantial heterogeneity between sites for all markers, but the two-step combination test performed well in Indonesia and Peru. Conclusion Random plasma glucose followed by point-of-care HbA1c testing can accurately diagnose diabetes in tuberculosis patients, particularly those with substantial hyperglycaemia, while reducing the need for more expensive point-of-care HbA1c testing. Risk scores with or without biochemical data may be useful but require validation

Gamma-ray signatures of cosmic ray acceleration, propagation, and confinement in the era of CTA

Galactic cosmic rays are commonly believed to be accelerated at supernova remnants via diffusive shock acceleration. Despite the popularity of this idea, a conclusive proof for its validity is still missing. Gamma-ray astronomy provides us with a powerful tool to tackle this problem, because gamma rays are produced during cosmic ray interactions with the ambient gas. The detection of gamma rays from several supernova remnants is encouraging, but still does not constitute a proof of the scenario, the main problem being the difficulty in disentangling the hadronic and leptonic contributions to the emission. Once released by their sources, cosmic rays diffuse in the interstellar medium, and finally escape from the Galaxy. The diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Galactic disk, as well as the gamma-ray emission detected from a few galaxies is largely due to the interactions of cosmic rays in the interstellar medium. On much larger scales, cosmic rays are also expected to permeate the intracluster medium, since they can be confined and accumulated within clusters of galaxies for cosmological times. Thus, the detection of gamma rays from clusters of galaxies, or even upper limits on their emission, will allow us to constrain the cosmic ray output of the sources they contain, such as normal galaxies, AGNs, and cosmological shocks. In this paper, we describe the impact that the Cherenkov Telescope Array, a future ground-based facility for very-high energy gamma-ray astronomy, is expected to have in this field of research.Comment: accepted to Astroparticle Physics, special issue on Physics with the Cherenkov Telescope Arra

The European Large Area ISO Survey: ELAIS

The European Large Area ISO Survey (ELAIS) has surveyed 12 square degrees of the sky at 15 and 90 microns, and subsets of this area at 6.75 and 175 microns, using the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). This project was the largest single open time programme executed by ISO, taking 375 hours of data. A preliminary catalogue of more than 1000 galaxies has been produced. In this talk we describe the goals of the project, describe the follow-up programmes that are in progress, and present some first scientific results including a provisional number count analysis at 15 and 90 microns.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, to appear in 'The universe as seen by ISO', eds P.Cox and M.F.Kessler, 1998, UNESCO, Paris, ESA Special Publications Series (SP-427

Dynamics and risk of transmission of bovine tuberculosis in the emerging dairy regions of Ethiopia

The Ethiopian government has several initiatives to expand and intensify the dairy industry; however, the risk of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) spread is a challenge. To assess the rate of expansion and risk factors for transmission of bTB within-herds, we carried out a repeated cross-sectional survey at two time points, 2016/17 and 2018, in three regional cities, namely, Gondar, Hawassa and Mekelle, representing the emerging dairy belts of Ethiopia. The total number of herds involved was 128, comprising an average of 2303 cattle in each round. The Single Intradermal Comparative Cervical Tuberculin (SICCT) test was used to identify reactor status and data on herd-level risk factors were collected using a structured questionnaire. In the first survey, the apparent prevalence of bTB, as measured by the SICCT test, was 4.5% (95% CI 3.7-5.4%) at the individual animal-level and 24% (95% CI 17.5-32%) at the herd-level. There was no statistically significant change in the overall apparent prevalence or regional distribution at the second survey, consistent with the infection being endemic. The incidence rate was estimated at 3.6 (95% CI 2.8-4.5) and 6.6 (95% CI 3.0-12.6) cases/100 cattle (or herd)-years at the animal- and herd-levels, respectively. Risk factors significantly associated with the within-herd transmission of bTB were age group and within-herd apparent prevalence at the start of the observation period. We noted that farmers voluntarily took steps to remove reactor cattle from their herds as a consequence of the information shared after the first survey. Removal of reactors between surveys was associated with a reduced risk of transmission within these herds. However, with no regulatory barriers to the sale of reactor animals, such actions could potentially lead to further spread between herds. We therefore advocate the importance of setting up regulations and then establishing a systematic bTB surveillance programme to monitor the impact prior to implementing any control measures in Ethiopia

Expected performance of the ASTRI-SST-2M telescope prototype

ASTRI (Astrofisica con Specchi a Tecnologia Replicante Italiana) is an Italian flagship project pursued by INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) strictly linked to the development of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, CTA. Primary goal of the ASTRI program is the design and production of an end-to-end prototype of a Small Size Telescope for the CTA sub-array devoted to the highest gamma-ray energy region. The prototype, named ASTRI SST-2M, will be tested on field in Italy during 2014. This telescope will be the first Cherenkov telescope adopting the double reflection layout in a Schwarzschild-Couder configuration with a tessellated primary mirror and a monolithic secondary mirror. The collected light will be focused on a compact and light-weight camera based on silicon photo-multipliers covering a 9.6 deg full field of view. Detailed Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to estimate the performance of the planned telescope. The results regarding its energy threshold, sensitivity and angular resolution are shown and discussed.Comment: In Proceedings of the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2013), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). All CTA contributions at arXiv:1307.223