Combustibles des ménages et modes d’utilisation à l’échelle du terroir de Vipalogo, en zone nord soudanienne du Burkina Faso

Au Burkina Faso, les besoins en combustibles énergétiques sont satisfaits surtout par le bois d’énergie. En milieu rural, le bois contribue pour 95% à la satisfaction des besoins énergétiques des ménages. Une meilleure connaissance de l’importance du bois et autres combustibles dans la satisfaction des besoins et des modes de consommation du combustible permettraient une meilleure gestion des formations végétales. Pour ce faire, à l’échelle du terroir de Vipalogo, 30 exploitations ont été retenues au hasard, et enquêtées sur les combustibles énergétiques utilisés. Des mesures de consommation de combustibles ont aussi été menées régulièrement à trois périodes de l’année, période froide et sèche, saison sèche et chaude et en saison pluvieuse. A Vipalogo, les ménages utilisent 1129,8 m3 de bois par an. La consommation maximale de bois par personne et par jour atteint 1,12 kg en période froide contre 0,90 kg en période chaude et 0,67 kg en période pluvieuse. En outre, il ressort qu’il y a des espèces préférentielles qui répondent à un certain nombre de critères en fonction de l’usage. Si pour tous les usages, l’aspect abondance est cité, pour le bois de feu, le critère qualité de combustion est le plus signalé. Les ressources ligneuses sont prélevées à 29,6% dans les champs de cases et de brousse et le reste dans les zones non cultivées,  essentiellement les savanes. Les brousses et les jachères apportent la plus grande contribution à la satisfaction des besoins des populations en ressources ligneuses. Il ressort aussi un éloignement progressif des lieux de collecte qui dénote d’une raréfaction du produit.Mots clés : combustibles énergétiques, ménage, bois, résidus de récolte, champ, jachère

Seroprevalence Of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection Among Tuberculosis Patients In The Nylon District Hospital Tuberculosis Treatment Centre

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) incidence in Cameroon is high with 32% of adult TB patients, all forms, co-infected with HIV. The Nylon District Hospital in Douala runs a centre for the diagnosis and treatment of TB since 2001 and a pioneer Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immune deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) management programme at district level since 2000. Objective: To determine the prevalence of HIV infection in TB patients from 2003 to 2006 and to analyse the pattern of TB/HIV co-infection rate over time. Design: A retrospective study. Setting: Nylon District Hospital, Douala, Cameroon. Results: The prevalence of HIV infection in TB patients was 51.6%. This was greater for patients living out of the Nylon Health District (P= 0.001). Smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis (SPPT) was the most frequent (65%) form of TB diagnosed but extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPT) and smear negative pulmonary tuberculosis (SNPT) were more frequently associated with HIV co-infection (80% and 68.6% respectively). While men and women presented equally with TB, women (61.4%) were significantly (P< 0.0001) more TB/HIV co-infected than men (42%). The co-infection rate was highest among individuals aged 25-44 years (61.4%) and least among the 0-24 years age group (22.5%). The increase in TB/HIV co-infection rate is monotonic over time with a stronger trend among females aged 25-44 years (P= 0.037) and above 45 years (P= 0.001). Conclusion: The NDH selectively attracted HIV positive patients to adhere to their HIV programme. The creation of HIV / AIDS treatment units in institutions providing TB diagnosis and treatment services will reduce the movement of TB/HIV co-infected patients across provinces and health districts as well as enhancing TB/HIV co-infection diagnosis and notification. East African Medical Journal Vol. 85 (11) 2008: pp. 529-53

Sustainable Farming Systems in the Sub-Sahelian Zone of Burkina Faso : Key Factors

Rapid population growth and climatic change threatens the sustainability of natural resources. Farming practices can mitigate environmental change and degradation. The aim of this research conducted in Yatenga region was to describe and to analyse manure practices management. In 2005, a survey was carried out to assess the evolution of farming practices. A survey was initially conducted with a sample of 44 farmers, selected randomly in the three neighbouring villages. Subsequently, 18 farms were selected for in-depth interviews. The grain yield was measured and the different practices of soil and water conservation developed by farmers were compared. According to the enquiries, two practices, called “zaï” and “djengo”, were largely used in cereals production. The “zaï” practice, known as a traditional technique for restoration of degraded soil, is characterized by the capture of runoff by micro-watersheds and a localized organic matter supply at the soil-plant system scale. The “djengo” practice is based on the same principle of the “zaï” practice but was applied on the sandy soil as traditionally “zaï” concerned the degraded and crusty soils. The two practices could increase grain crop production but moreover could limit the risk of crops failure. In addition, our observations also showed that frequent tree regenerations occurred in plots and watersheds where “zaï” or “djengo” practices were used. This study highlights the necessity of better controlling soil, water and organic matter to improve agrosystem sustainability in sub Saharan Africa.Rapid population growth and climatic change threatens the sustainability of natural resources. Farming practices can mitigate environmental change and degradation. The aim of this research conducted in Yatenga region was to describe and to analyse manure practices management. In 2005, a survey was carried out to assess the evolution of farming practices. A survey was initially conducted with a sample of 44 farmers, selected randomly in the three neighbouring villages. Subsequently, 18 farms were selected for in-depth interviews. The grain yield was measured and the different practices of soil and water conservation developed by farmers were compared. According to the enquiries, two practices, called “zaï” and “djengo”, were largely used in cereals production. The “zaï” practice, known as a traditional technique for restoration of degraded soil, is characterized by the capture of runoff by micro-watersheds and a localized organic matter supply at the soil-plant system scale. The “djengo” practice is based on the same principle of the “zaï” practice but was applied on the sandy soil as traditionally “zaï” concerned the degraded and crusty soils. The two practices could increase grain crop production but moreover could limit the risk of crops failure. In addition, our observations also showed that frequent tree regenerations occurred in plots and watersheds where “zaï” or “djengo” practices were used. This study highlights the necessity of better controlling soil, water and organic matter to improve agrosystem sustainability in sub Saharan Africa

Sheep Updates 2005 - Part 3

This session covers seven papers from different authors: CUSTOMER 1. Benefits VIAscanR to producers and WAMMCO, Rob Davidson, Supply Development Manager, David Pethick, School of Veterinary and Biomedical Studies, Murdock University. 2. Healthy fats in lamb: how WA lambs compare with others, C. F. Engelke Animal Biology, University of Western Australia, bCSIRO Livestock Industries, Western Australia B.D. Siebert, Department of Animal Science, University of Adelaide, South Australia, K. Gregg, Centre for High-Throughput Agricultural Genetic Analysis, Murdoch University, Western Australia. A-D.G. Wright CSIRO Livestock Industries, Western Australia, P.E Vercoe Animal Biology, University of Western Australia 3. Shelf life of fresh lamb meat: lamb age & electrical stimulation, Dr Robin Jacob, Department of Agriculture, Western Australia 4. Pastures from space - An evaluation of adoption of by Australian woolgrowers, Russell Barnett, Australian Venture Consultants, Joanne Sneddon, University of Western Australia 5. Your clients can learn from ASHEEP\u27s example, Sandra Brown Department of Agriculture Western Australia 6. Lifetime Wool - Farmers attitudes affect their adoption of recommended ewe management, G. Rose Department of Agriculture Western Australia, C. Kabore, Kazresearch, Lower Templestowe Vic, J. Dart, Clear Horizons, Hastings Vic 7. Sustainable certification of Australian Merino, what will customers be looking for? Stuart Adams, i-merino / iZWool International Pty Lt

Negative Results of Fusing Code and Documentation for Learning to Accurately Identify Sensitive Source and Sink Methods An Application to the Android Framework for Data Leak Detection

Almost two-thirds of the population owns a mobile phone. Given that there is a profusion of mobile applications that manipulate all sorts of data, privacy-related concerns arise more and more. New regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provide rules for which developers must comply when their apps process sensitive and/or private data. Ensuring that no such data is leaked without the consent of the user is a primary objective in each GDPR compliance check. Researchers have proposed sophisticated approaches to track sensitive data within mobile apps, all of which rely on specific lists of sensitive source and sink methods. The data flow analysis results greatly depend on these lists' quality. Previous approaches either used incomplete hand-written lists and quickly became outdated or relied on machine learning. The latter, however, leads to numerous false positives, as we show. This paper introduces CoDoC that aims to revive the machine-learning approach to precisely identify the privacy-related source and sink API methods. In contrast to previous approaches, CoDoC uses deep learning techniques and combines the source code with the documentation of API methods. Firstly, we propose novel definitions that clarify the concepts of taint analysis, source, and sink methods. Secondly, based on these definitions, we build a new ground truth of Android methods representing sensitive source, sink, and neither methods that will be used to train our classifier. We evaluate CoDoC and show that, on our validation dataset, it achieves a precision, recall, and F1 score of 91%, outperforming the state-of-the-art SuSi. However, similarly to existing tools, we show that in the wild, i.e., with unseen data, CoDoC performs poorly and generates many false-positive results. Our findings suggest that machine-learning models for abstract concepts such as privacy fail in practice despite good lab results. To encourage future research, we release all our artifacts to the community

Novel Insights Into the Protective Role of Hemoglobin S and C Against Plasmodium falciparum Parasitemia.

Although hemoglobin S (HbS) and hemoglobin C (HbC) are well known to protect against severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria, conclusive evidence on their role against infection has not yet been obtained. Here we show, in 2 populations from Burkina Faso (2007-2008), that HbS is associated with a 70% reduction of harboring P. falciparum parasitemia at the heterozygous state (odds ratio [OR] for AS vs AA, 0.27; 95% confidence interval [CI], .11-.66; P = .004). There is no evidence of protection for HbC in the heterozygous state (OR for AC vs AA, 1.49; 95% CI, .69-3.21; P = .31), whereas protection even higher than that observed with AS is observed in the homozygous and double heterozygous states (OR for CC + SC vs AA, 0.04; 95% CI, .01-.29; P = .002). The abnormal display of parasite-adhesive molecules on the surface of HbS and HbC infected erythrocytes, disrupting the pathogenic process of sequestration, might displace the parasite from the deep to the peripheral circulation, promoting its elimination at the spleen level

Sheep Updates 2006 - part 3

This session covers six papers from different authors: GRAZING 1. Making better use of clover, Karen Venning and Andrew Thompson, Department of Primary Industries, Victoria 2. Grazing systems demonstration to optimise pasture utilisation and stocking rate, Mike Hyder, Sue-Ellen Shaw, Kelly Hill and Ron McTaggart, Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia. 3. Know your audience to increase their rate of practice change - Lifetime Wool as an example, Gus Rose, Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia, Carolyn Kabore, Kazresearch REPRODUCTION 4. Lifetime Wool - Ewe Management Guidlines, Mandy Curnow, Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia 5. Achieving the best reproductive performance from your hoggets, Kenyon PR, Morris ST, West DM, Perkins NR, Pinchbeck GL., Institute of Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences, Massey University, New Zealand. 6. Lifetime Wool: Twin futures, Dr Ralph Behrendt, Department of Primary Industries, Victori

Evaluating Representation Learning of Code Changes for Predicting Patch Correctness in Program Repair

A large body of the literature of automated program repair develops approaches where patches are generated to be validated against an oracle (e.g., a test suite). Because such an oracle can be imperfect, the generated patches, although validated by the oracle, may actually be incorrect. While the state of the art explore research directions that require dynamic information or rely on manually-crafted heuristics, we study the benefit of learning code representations to learn deep features that may encode the properties of patch correctness. Our work mainly investigates different representation learning approaches for code changes to derive embeddings that are amenable to similarity computations. We report on findings based on embeddings produced by pre-trained and re-trained neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of embeddings to empower learning algorithms in reasoning about patch correctness: a machine learning predictor with BERT transformer-based embeddings..

Magnitude and associated factors of latent tuberculosis infection due to Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex among high-risk groups in urban Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso

Objectives: To determine the prevalence and risk factors for latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) among three high-risk groups - household contacts of TB index cases, healthcare workers and slaughterhouse workers - in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Methods: Participants were recruited to this cross-sectional study from March to July 2020 after giving informed consent. Sociodemographic, clinical and biological data were collected using a structured questionnaire. The QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus test (QFT-Plus) and the tuberculin skin test (TST) were used for detection of LTBI. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to identify risk factors for LTBI. Results: The prevalence of LTBI among 101 participants (age range 15-68 years) was 67.33% [95% confidence interval (CI) 57.27-76.33] and 84.16% (95% CI 75.55-90.66) based on QFT-Plus and TST results, respectively. Compared with healthcare workers and household contacts of TB index cases, the prevalence of LTBI among slaughterhouse workers was significantly higher for both QTF-Plus (96.8%; P /=15 years of exposure (AOR 5.617, 95% CI 1.202-32.198), having an animal at home (AOR 2.735, 95% CI 1.102-6.789) and protozoal infection (AOR 2.591, 95% CI 1.034-6.491) were significantly associated with LTBI on the QFT-Plus assay. Conclusion: The prevalence of LTBI was high in all three groups, particularly slaughterhouse workers. The risk factors identified could form the basis of targeted intervention