The Cornella Health Interview Survey Follow-Up (CHIS.FU) Study: design, methods, and response rate

BACKGROUND: The aim of this report is to describe the main characteristics of the design, including response rates, of the Cornella Health Interview Survey Follow-up Study. METHODS: The original cohort consisted of 2,500 subjects (1,263 women and 1,237 men) interviewed as part of the 1994 Cornella Health Interview Study. A record linkage to update the address and vital status of the cohort members was carried out using, first a deterministic method, and secondly a probabilistic one, based on each subject's first name and surnames. Subsequently, we attempted to locate the cohort members to conduct the phone follow-up interviews. A pilot study was carried out to test the overall feasibility and to modify some procedures before the field work began. RESULTS: After record linkage, 2,468 (98.7%) subjects were successfully traced. Of these, 91 (3.6%) were deceased, 259 (10.3%) had moved to other towns, and 50 (2.0%) had neither renewed their last municipal census documents nor declared having moved. After using different strategies to track and to retain cohort members, we traced 92% of the CHIS participants. From them, 1,605 subjects answered the follow-up questionnaire. CONCLUSION: The computerized record linkage maximized the success of the follow-up that was carried out 7 years after the baseline interview. The pilot study was useful to increase the efficiency in tracing and interviewing the respondents

Tracing explosives in soil with transcriptional regulators of Pseudomonas putida evolved for responding to nitrotoluenes

Although different biological approaches for detection of anti‐personnel mines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO) have been entertained, none of them has been rigorously documented thus far in the scientific literature. The industrial 2,4,6 trinitrotoluene (TNT) habitually employed in the manufacturing of mines is at all times tainted with a small but significant proportion of the more volatile 2,4 dinitrotoluene (2,4 DNT) and other nitroaromatic compounds. By using mutation‐prone PCR and DNA sequence shuffling we have evolved in vitro and selected in vivo variants of the effector recognition domain of the toluene‐responsive XylR regulator of the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida that responds to mono‐, bi‐ and trinitro substituted toluenes. Re‐introduction of such variants in P. putida settled the transcriptional activity of the cognate promoters (Po and Pu) as a function of the presence of nitrotoluenes in the medium. When strains bearing transcriptional fusions to reporters with an optical output (luxAB, GFP) were spread on soil spotted with nitrotoluenes, the signal triggered by promoter activation allowed localization of the target compounds on the soil surface. Our data provide a proof of concept that non‐natural transcription factors evolved to respond to nitroaromatics can be engineered in soil bacteria and inoculated on a target site to pinpoint the presence of explosives. This approach thus opens new ways to tackle this gigantic humanitarian problem

Tobacco Control Scale website: a new tool for tobacco control advocates and researchers

Background The Tobacco Control Scale (TCS) was first published in 2006 to monitor the implementation of tobacco control policies at country-level in Europe and, since then, every three years a new report (2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016) has been published. Our objective was to develop a website to gather and structure the information included in the TCS reports, to provide friendly dynamic graphics for professionals and the public, as well as, to compile other documents and publications derived from the scale. Methods The original TCS reports were used to bring together all the information and tables included in order to be able to access to all the information from one site. The researchers systematically reviewed all published articles that include the TCS, as main dependent or independent variable and other materials (seminars, photos, etc.) related to the scale. The researchers also generated dynamic graphics for visitors to explore how their countries' scores fluctuate across years and compare with other European countries. The website has been adapted to mobile devices. Results The website (www.tobaccocontrolscale.org) was launched at the 7 th ECTOH in March 2017 in Portugal. It has had 1,556 visits (July 2017): 55.9% direct, 21% referral, 12.9% social (55.7% via Twitter) and 10.2% others; the 73% have been new and 27% returning visitors. By country, 19.7% visitors were from Germany, 8.4% from Switzerland, 8.4% from Spain and 8.2% from the UK. The 17.5% have accessed to the website using either a mobile phone or a tablet. Conclusions The website has been well received by the tobacco control community with almost 1,600 visits from all over the world; however, more diffusion has to be made to stimulate its use and reach a larger audience in the future that could probably extend the use of the scale for tobacco control purposes

Searches for Lepton flavor violation in the decays tau(+/-) -> e(+/-)gamma and tau(+/-) -> mu(+/-)gamma

Searches for lepton-flavor-violating decays of a tau lepton to a lighter mass lepton and a photon have been performed with the entire data set of (963 +/- 7) x 10(6) tau decays collected by the BABAR detector near the Y(4S), Y(3S) and Y(2S) resonances. The searches yield no evidence of signals and we set upper limits on the branching fractions of B(tau(+/-) -> e(+/-)gamma) mu(+/-)gamma) < 4.4 X 10(-8) at 90% confidence level

Search for B^{+}→ℓ^{+}ν_{ℓ} recoiling against B^{-}→D^{0}ℓ^{-}ν[over ¯]X

We present a search for the decay B+→ℓ+νℓ(ℓ=τ,μ, or e) in (458.9±5.1)×106 BB̅ pairs recorded with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II B-factory. We search for these B decays in a sample of B+B- events where one B-meson is reconstructed as B-→D0ℓ-ν̅ X. Using the method of Feldman and Cousins, we obtain B(B+→τ+ντ)=(1.7±0.8±0.2)×10-4, which excludes zero at 2.3σ. We interpret the central value in the context of the standard model and find the B meson decay constant to be fB2=(62±31)×103  MeV2. We find no evidence for B+→e+νe and B+→μ+νμ and set upper limits at the 90% C.L. B(B+→e+νe)<0.8×10-5 and B(B+→μ+νμ)<1.1×10-5