Prioritizing public health responses in Nigerian drug control policy

Nigeria’s drug control policy, a throwback to colonial dangerous drugs control legislations, is remarkable for its reliance on severe sanctions to curb drug offences. The establishment of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) in 1990 took drug control in Nigeria to a crescendo. The agency amalgamates the functions of supply control and demand reduction in a highly-centralized bureaucracy. Although it has been successful in the seizure of drugs and arrest and punishment of offenders, its impact on drug use and related problems is negligible. the success is tainted by rampant corruption and the cost of law enforcement. The development of a comprehensive drug policy which prioritizes demand reduction through public health measures such as prevention and treatment is hampered by the bureaucracy of drug law enforcement, whose direction cannot be changed without altering the structure of the organization. The devolution of functions through the creation of a new agency on drug demand reduction is a step in the right direction.Keywords: drugs, policy, public health, law enforcement, Nigeri

L'ontologie du pouvoir politique postcolonial au Cameroun unanisme dialectique et divorce métaphysique (critique philosophique de l'histoire d'une monocratie

Ordonnée autour d'une seule et même entité thématique : celle d'élucider« l'ontologie du pouvoir politique», cette thèse est principalement axée sur une critique radicale de l'histoire politique du Cameroun. Critique constituée en un ensemble tripartite, qui se développe de la manière suivante : premièrement, un exposé de quelques jalons et présupposés philosophiques; il comprend trois chapitres : les repères ontologiques et anthropologiques, puis l'être vrai du pouvoir politique. Deuxièmement, une phénoménologie temporelle du pouvoir politique postcolonial élucidée par ses manifestations caractéristiques et étayée d'un bout à l'autre par un support visuel judicieux. On doit y noter deux volets principaux : la parturition du Cameroun : genèse du concept nominatif du «Kamerun», naissance et description du Cameroun en tant que tel; et la recherche phénoménologique du sens de l'État du Cameroun. Cette partie vise surtout à révéler ce qu'est l'ontologie de ce pouvoir. Troisièmement, enfin, l'ordre critique aux niveaux collectif et individuel. Il comprend, entre autres, l'élaboration d'une critique de l'essence et celle du fondement du pouvoir politique postcolonial. Une approche qui vise à ouvrir des perspectives politiques susceptibles d'améliorer la réalité existentielle du peuple camerounais

Dynamical ionization ignition of clusters in intense and short laser pulses

The electron dynamics of rare gas clusters in laser fields is investigated quantum mechanically by means of time-dependent density functional theory. The mechanism of early inner and outer ionization is revealed. The formation of an electron wave packet inside the cluster shortly after the first removal of a small amount of electron density is observed. By collisions with the cluster boundary the wave packet oscillation is driven into resonance with the laser field, hence leading to higher absorption of laser energy. Inner ionization is increased because the electric field of the bouncing electron wave packet adds up constructively to the laser field. The fastest electrons in the wave packet escape from the cluster as a whole so that outer ionization is increased as well.Comment: 8 pages, revtex4, PDF-file with high resolution figures is available from http://mitarbeiter.mbi-berlin.de/bauer/publist.html, publication no. 24. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Performance of Fuel Electronic Injection Engine Systems

Electronic Fuel Injection systems are very important components in today’s automotive industry. Its use on modern engines allows manufactures to develop new engine designs while increasing engine efficiency and lowering fuel consumption and exhaust gas emissions. EFI systems also increased engine reliability by providing a smooth start and run under most weather conditions. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of direct fuel injection in spark-ignition (SI) engines, the current technology to make possible its accomplishment, the characteristics of the engines using this system and a comparative experimental study between this system

The human platelet: strong transcriptome correlations among individuals associate weakly with the platelet proteome.

BACKGROUND: For the anucleate platelet it has been unclear how well platelet transcriptomes correlate among different donors or across different RNA profiling platforms, and what the transcriptomes\u27 relationship is with the platelet proteome. We profiled the platelet transcriptome of 10 healthy young males (5 white and 5 black) with no notable clinical history using RNA sequencing and by Affymetrix microarray. RESULTS: We found that the abundance of platelet mRNA transcripts was highly correlated across the 10 individuals, independently of race and of the employed technology. Our RNA-seq data showed that these high inter-individual correlations extend beyond mRNAs to several categories of non-coding RNAs. Pseudogenes represented a notable exception by exhibiting a difference in expression by race. Comparison of our mRNA signatures to a publicly available quantitative platelet proteome showed that most (87.5%) identified platelet proteins had a detectable corresponding mRNA. However, a high number of mRNAs that were present in the transcriptomes of all 10 individuals had no representation in the proteome. Spearman correlations of the relative abundances for those genes represented by both an mRNA and a protein showed a weak (~0.3) connection. Further analysis of the overlapping and non-overlapping platelet mRNAs and proteins identified gene groups corresponding to distinct cellular processes. CONCLUSIONS: The results of our analyses provide novel insights for platelet biology, show only a weak connection between the platelet transcriptome and proteome, and indicate that it is feasible to assemble a platelet mRNA-ome that can serve as a reference for future platelet transcriptomic studies of human health and disease. REVIEWED BY: This article was reviewed by Dr Mikhail Dozmorov (nominated by Dr Yuri Gusev), Dr Neil Smalheiser and Dr Eugene Koonin

The complex transcriptional landscape of the anucleate human platelet.

BACKGROUND: Human blood platelets are essential to maintaining normal hemostasis, and platelet dysfunction often causes bleeding or thrombosis. Estimates of genome-wide platelet RNA expression using microarrays have provided insights to the platelet transcriptome but were limited by the number of known transcripts. The goal of this effort was to deep-sequence RNA from leukocyte-depleted platelets to capture the complex profile of all expressed transcripts. RESULTS: From each of four healthy individuals we generated long RNA (≥40 nucleotides) profiles from total and ribosomal-RNA depleted RNA preparations, as well as short RNA (\u3c40 \u3enucleotides) profiles. Analysis of ~1 billion reads revealed that coding and non-coding platelet transcripts span a very wide dynamic range (≥16 PCR cycles beyond β-actin), a result we validated through qRT-PCR on many dozens of platelet messenger RNAs. Surprisingly, ribosomal-RNA depletion significantly and adversely affected estimates of the relative abundance of transcripts. Of the known protein-coding loci, ~9,500 are present in human platelets. We observed a strong correlation between mRNAs identified by RNA-seq and microarray for well-expressed mRNAs, but RNASeq identified many more transcripts of lower abundance and permitted discovery of novel transcripts. CONCLUSIONS: Our analyses revealed diverse classes of non-coding RNAs, including: pervasive antisense transcripts to protein-coding loci; numerous, previously unreported and abundant microRNAs; retrotransposons; and thousands of novel un-annotated long and short intronic transcripts, an intriguing finding considering the anucleate nature of platelets. The data are available through a local mirror of the UCSC genome browser and can be accessed at: http://cm.jefferson.edu/platelets_2012/

Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

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