Tularemia Outbreak Investigation in Kosovo: Case Control and Environmental Studies

A large outbreak of tularemia occurred in Kosovo in the early postwar period, 1999-2000. Epidemiologic and environmental investigations were conducted to identify sources of infection, modes of transmission, and household risk factors. Case and control status was verified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, Western blot, and microagglutination assay. A total of 327 serologically confirmed cases of tularemia pharyngitis and cervical lymphadenitis were identified in 21 of 29 Kosovo municipalities. Matched analysis of 46 case households and 76 control households suggested that infection was transmitted through contaminated food or water and that the source of infection was rodents. Environmental circumstances in war-torn Kosovo led to epizootic rodent tularemia and its spread to resettled rural populations living under circumstances of substandard housing, hygiene, and sanitation

Year in review in Intensive Care Medicine 2009: II. Neurology, cardiovascular, experimental, pharmacology and sedation, communication and teaching

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On C-infinity well-posedness of hyperbolic systems with multiplicities

In this paper we study first order hyperbolic systems of any order with multiple characteristics (weakly hyperbolic) and time-dependent analytic co- efficients. The main question is when the Cauchy problem for such systems is well-posed in C ∞ and in D 0 . We prove that the analyticity of the coefficients com- bined with suitable hypotheses on the eigenvalues guarantee the C ∞ well-posedness of the corresponding Cauchy problem

On hyperbolic systems with time-dependent Holder characteristics

In this paper we study the well-posedness of weakly hyperbolic systems with time dependent coefficients. We assume that the eigenvalues are low regular, in the sense that they are H¨older with respect to t. In the past these kind of systems have been investigated by Yuzawa [15] and Kajitani [14] by employing semigroup techniques (Tanabe-Sobolevski method). Here, under a certain uniform property of the eigenvalues, we improve the Gevrey well-posedness result of [15] and we obtain well-posedness in spaces of ultradistributions as well. Our main idea is a reduction of the system to block Sylvester form and then the formulation of suitable energy estimates inspired by the treatment of scalar equations in