The Demise of Multidrug-Resistant HIV-1: the National Time Trend in Portugal

OBJECTIVES: Despite a decreasing mortality and morbidity in treated HIV-1 patients, highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) can still fail due to the development of drug resistance. Especially, multidrug-resistant viruses pose a threat to efficient therapy. We studied the changing prevalence of multidrug resistance (MDR) over time in a cohort of HIV-1-infected patients in Portugal. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We used data of 8065 HIV-1-infected patients followed from July 2001 up to April 2012 in 22 hospitals located in Portugal. MDR at a specific date of sampling was defined as no more than one fully active drug (excluding integrase and entry inhibitors) at that time authorized by the Portuguese National Authority of Medicines and Health Products (INFARMED), as interpreted with the Rega algorithm version 8.0.2. A generalized linear mixed model was used to study the time trend of the prevalence of MDR. RESULTS: We observed a statistically significant decrease in the prevalence of MDR over the last decade, from 6.9% (95% CI: 5.7-8.4) in 2001-03, 6.0% (95% CI: 4.9-7.2) in 2003-05, 3.7% (95% CI: 2.8-4.8) in 2005-07 and 1.6% (95% CI: 1.1-2.2) in 2007-09 down to 0.6% (95% CI: 0.3-0.9) in 2009-12 [OR=0.80 (95% CI: 0.75-0.86); P<0.001]. In July 2011 the last new case of MDR was seen. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of multidrug-resistant HIV-1 is decreasing over time in Portugal, reflecting the increasing efficiency of HAART and the availability of new drugs. Therefore, in designing a new drug, safety and practical aspects, e.g. less toxicity and ease of use, may need more attention than focusing mainly on efficacy against resistant strains.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Safe Parallelism: Compiler Analysis Techniques for Ada and OpenMP

There is a growing need to support parallel computation in Ada to cope with the performance requirements of the most advanced functionalities of safety-critical systems. In that regard, the use of parallel programming models is paramount to exploit the benefits of parallelism. Recent works motivate the use of OpenMP for being a de facto standard in high-performance computing for programming shared memory architectures. These works address two important aspects towards the introduction of OpenMP in Ada: the compatibility of the OpenMP syntax with the Ada language, and the interoperability of the OpenMP and the Ada runtimes, demonstrating that OpenMP complements and supports the structured parallelism approach of the tasklet model. This paper addresses a third fundamental aspect: functional safety from a compiler perspective. Particularly, it focuses on race conditions and considers the fine-grain and unstructured capabilities of OpenMP. Hereof, this paper presents a new compiler analysis technique that: (1) identifies potential race conditions in parallel Ada programs based on OpenMP or Ada tasks or both, and (2) provides solutions for the detected races.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract TIN2015-65316-P, and by the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the CISTER Research Unit (CEC/04234).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Prevalence and changes in chronic diseases among South Korean farmers: 1998 to 2005

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Epidemiologic studies have suggested a unique pattern of disease among farmers in Western countries, but limited information is available about the magnitude of disease prevalence and their changes over time in Asian farmers. The aim of this study was to compare the prevalence and changes in chronic diseases among farmers with those of other occupational groups in South Korea.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using data from three consecutive cross-sectional national surveys: the Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1998 (n = 39,060), 2001 (n = 37,769), and 2005 (n = 34,145), we calculated age and gender-standardized prevalence of chronic diseases by the direct method and compared the prevalence changes from 1998 to 2005.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Female farmers had significantly higher chronic disease prevalence than other occupational groups in all three surveys. Arthritis was the most prevalent chronic disease among farmers for both men and women. Compared with other populations, farmers demonstrated a higher prevalence of arthritis and intervertebral disc disorders. Farmers showed higher prevalence changes for intervertebral disc disorders than other occupational workers.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings support that South Korean farmers have a distinct pattern of diseases prevalence from other populations. More detailed studies investigating the risk of musculoskeletal diseases and intensive intervention efforts to reduce the prevalence these diseases, particularly among female farmers, are required.</p