Know your tuberculosis epidemic–Is it time to add Mycobacterium tuberculosis immunoreactivity back into global surveillance?

Tuberculosis (TB) still causes 1.5 million deaths globally each year. Over recent decades, slow and uneven declines in TB incidence have resulted in a falling prevalence of TB disease, which increasingly concentrates in vulnerable populations. Falling prevalence, while welcome, poses new challenges for TB surveillance. Cross-sectional disease surveys require very large sample sizes to accurately estimate disease burden, and even more participants to detect trends over time or identify high-risk areas or populations, making them prohibitively resource-intensive. In the past, tuberculin skin surveys measuring Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) immunoreactivity were widely used to monitor TB epidemiology in high-incidence settings, but were limited by challenges with both delivering and interpreting the test. Here we argue that the shifting epidemiology of tuberculosis, and the development of new tests for Mtb infection, make it timely and important to revisit the strategy of TB surveillance based on infection or immunoreactivity. Mtb infection surveys carry their own operational challenges and fundamental questions, for example: around survey design and frequency; which groups should be included; how the prevalence of immunoreactivity in a population should be used to estimate force of infection; how individual results should be interpreted and managed; and how surveillance can be delivered efficiently and ethically. However, if these knowledge gaps are addressed, the relative feasibility and lower costs of Mtb infection surveillance offer a powerful and affordable opportunity to better “know your TB epidemic”, understand trends, identify high-risk and underserved communities, and tailor public health responses to dynamic epidemiology

Entanglement generation and transfer between remote atomic qubits interacting with squeezed field

A pair of two level atoms A1A2, prepared either in a separable state or in an entangled state, interacts with a single mode of two mode squeezed cavity field while a third atomic qubit B interacts with the second mode of the squeezed field in a remote cavity. We analyze, numerically, the generation, sudden death and revival of three qubit entanglement as a function of initial entanglement of qubits A1A2 and degree of squeezing of electromagnetic field. Global negativity of partially transposed state operator is used to quantify the entanglement of three atom state. It is found that the initial entanglement of two mode field as well as that of the pair A1A2, both, contribute to three atom entanglement. A maximally entangled single excitation Bell pair in first cavity and two mode field with squeeze parameter s=0.64 are the initial conditions that optimize the peak value of three qubit mixed state entanglement. A smaller value of s=0.4 under similar conditions is found to generate a three qubit mixed state with comparable entanglement dynamics free from entanglement sudden death.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, sections III and IV merged with section II and analytic expressions moved to Appendices A and B. Figures improved and corrected typo

The SPTPoL extended cluster survey

We describe the observations and resultant galaxy cluster catalog from the 2770 deg2 SPTpol Extended Cluster Survey (SPT-ECS). Clusters are identified via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect and confirmed with a combination of archival and targeted follow-up data, making particular use of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). With incomplete follow-up we have confirmed as clusters 244 of 266 candidates at a detection significance ξ ≥ 5 and an additional 204 systems at 4 4 threshold, and 10% of their measured SZ flux. We associate SZ-selected clusters, from both SPT-ECS and the SPT-SZ survey, with clusters from the DES redMaPPer sample, and we find an offset distribution between the SZ center and central galaxy in general agreement with previous work, though with a larger fraction of clusters with significant offsets. Adopting a fixed Planck-like cosmology, we measure the optical richness-SZ mass (l - M) relation and find it to be 28% shallower than that from a weak-lensing analysis of the DES data-a difference significant at the 4σ level-with the relations intersecting at λ = 60. The SPT-ECS cluster sample will be particularly useful for studying the evolution of massive clusters and, in combination with DES lensing observations and the SPT-SZ cluster sample, will be an important component of future cosmological analyses

Amino Acid Transport Mechanisms in Mouse Oocytes During Growth and Meiotic Maturation1

Amino acids are transported into cells by a number of different transport systems, each with their own specific range of substrates. The amino acid transport systems active in preimplantation embryos and the amino acids required by embryos for optimal development have been extensively investigated. Much less is known about amino acid transport systems active in growing and meiotically maturing oocytes or about developmental changes in their activity. As a first step in determining the array of amino acid transporters active in oocytes, the transport characteristics of nine amino acids were measured in small, medium, and large growing oocytes; in fully grown germinal vesicle (GV)-stage oocytes; in metaphase I oocytes; and in metaphase II eggs. Whether each of 11 classically defined amino acid transport systems was likely active in oocytes at each stage was determined using assays based on measuring the transport of radiolabeled amino acids into oocytes and the effect of a limited set of potential competitive inhibitors. Six amino acid transport systems were found to be active during oocyte growth or maturation. L, b0,+, and ASC/asc were active throughout oocyte growth and maturation, increasing during growth. In contrast, GLY, beta, and xc− had little or no activity during growth but became activated during meiotic maturation. Surprisingly, the presence of follicular cells surrounding medium growing oocytes or cumulus cells surrounding GV oocytes did not confer amino acid transport by additional transport systems not present in the oocyte. In some cases, however, follicular cells coupled to the oocyte enhanced uptake of amino acids by the same systems present in the oocyte