Sante de la reproduction et avortement a Antananarivo (Madagascar) resultats d’une recherche originale

A Madagascar, l’interruption volontaire de grossesse est totalement interdite. Toutefois, de nombreuses femmes y ont recours, tout particulièrement dans la capitale, Antananarivo. Ces avortements clandestins sont pratiqués par des matrones mais aussi par des médecins libéraux. Cet article présente les résultats d’une enquête menée auprès de 193 femmes interrogées en 2005 alors qu’elles viennent consulter un médecin pour demander un avortement. Cette première enquête a été complétée par des données qualitatives recueillies auprès d’étudiantes ayant déjà eu recours à l’avortement. L’analyse des données montrent que toutes les catégories de femmes semblent concernées par l’avortement mais plus particulièrement les plus jeunes, célibataires et en cours de scolarisation. Ces dernières cherchent à reculer le moment de la première naissance afin de terminer leurs études, de trouver un premier emploi et de se marier. Or ces jeunes filles ont un accès très limité à la contraception et leurs choix contraceptifs dépendent encore fortement de la volonté de leur partenaire sexuel (Afr. J. Reprod. Health 2010; 14[3]: 223-232).Key words: Madagascar, Reproductive Health, Abortion, Young People

Cybersecurity: mapping the ethical terrain

This edited collection examines the ethical trade-offs involved in cybersecurity: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and between the types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. Foreword Governments and society are increasingly reliant on cyber systems. Yet the more reliant we are upon cyber systems, the more vulnerable we are to serious harm should these systems be attacked or used in an attack. This problem of reliance and vulnerability is driving a concern with securing cyberspace. For example, a ‘cybersecurity’ team now forms part of the US Secret Service. Its job is to respond to cyber-attacks in specific environments such as elevators in a building that hosts politically vulnerable individuals, for example, state representatives. Cybersecurity aims to protect cyberinfrastructure from cyber-attacks; the concerning aspect of the threat from cyber-attack is the potential for serious harm that damage to cyber-infrastructure presents to resources and people. These types of threats to cybersecurity might simply target information and communication systems: a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a government website does not harm a website in any direct way, but prevents its normal use by stifling the ability of users to connect to the site. Alternatively, cyber-attacks might disrupt physical devices or resources, such as the Stuxnet virus, which caused the malfunction and destruction of Iranian nuclear centrifuges. Cyber-attacks might also enhance activities that are enabled through cyberspace, such as the use of online media by extremists to recruit members and promote radicalisation. Cyber-attacks are diverse: as a result, cybersecurity requires a comparable diversity of approaches. Cyber-attacks can have powerful impacts on people’s lives, and so—in liberal democratic societies at least—governments have a duty to ensure cybersecurity in order to protect the inhabitants within their own jurisdiction and, arguably, the people of other nations. But, as recent events following the revelations of Edward Snowden have demonstrated, there is a risk that the governmental pursuit of cybersecurity might overstep the mark and subvert fundamental privacy rights. Popular comment on these episodes advocates transparency of government processes, yet given that cybersecurity risks represent major challenges to national security, it is unlikely that simple transparency will suffice. Managing the risks of cybersecurity involves trade-offs: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. These trade-offs are often ethical trade-offs, involving questions of how we act, what values we should aim to promote, and what means of anticipating and responding to the risks are reasonably—and publicly—justifiable. This Occasional Paper (prepared for the National Security College) provides a brief conceptual analysis of cybersecurity, demonstrates the relevance of ethics to cybersecurity and outlines various ways in which to approach ethical decision-making when responding to cyber-attacks

Some recent progress on quark pairings in dense quark and nuclear matter

We give a brief overview on some recent progress in quark pairings in dense quark/nuclear matter mostly developed in the past five years. We focus on following aspects in particular: the BCS-BEC crossover in the CSC phase, the baryon formation and dissociation in dense quark/nuclear matter, the Ginzburg-Landau theory for three-flavor dense matter with $U_{A}$(1) anomaly, and the collective and Nambu-Goldstone modes for the spin-one CSC.Comment: RevTex 4, 25 pages, 9 figures, presented for the KITPC (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China) program "AdS/CFT and Novel Approaches to Hadron and Heavy Ion Physics' in Oct. 11- Dec. 3, 201

Thermodynamics of the 3-flavor NJL model : chiral symmetry breaking and color superconductivity

Employing an extended three flavor version of the NJL model we discuss in detail the phase diagram of quark matter. The presence of quark as well as of diquark condensates gives raise to a rich structure of the phase diagram. We study in detail the chiral phase transition and the color superconductivity as well as color flavor locking as a function of the temperature and chemical potentials of the system.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

Massive quark propagator and competition between chiral and diquark condensate

The Green-function approach has been extended to the moderate baryon density region in the framework of an extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model, and the thermodynamic potential with both chiral and diquark condensates has been evaluated by using the massive quark propagator. The phase structure along the chemical potential direction has been investigated and the strong competition between the chiral and diquark condensate has been analyzed by investigating the influence of the diquark condensate on the sharp Fermi surface. The influence of the diquark condensate on the quark properties has been investigated, even though the quarks in the color breaking phase are very different from that in the chiral breaking phase, the difference between quarks in different colors is very small.Comment: Revtex, 34 pages, 7 figures, section V revised, accepted by PR

Preparing clinical-grade myeloid dendritic cells by electroporation-mediated transfection of in vitro amplified tumor-derived mRNA and safety testing in stage IV malignant melanoma

BACKGROUND: Dendritic cells (DCs) have been used as vaccines in clinical trials of immunotherapy of cancer and other diseases. Nonetheless, progress towards the use of DCs in the clinic has been slow due in part to the absence of standard methods for DC preparation and exposure to disease-associated antigens. Because different ex vivo exposure methods can affect DC phenotype and function differently, we studied whether electroporation-mediated transfection (electrotransfection) of myeloid DCs with in vitro expanded RNA isolated from tumor tissue might be feasible as a standard physical method in the preparation of clinical-grade DC vaccines. METHODS: We prepared immature DCs (IDCs) from CD14(+ )cells isolated from leukapheresis products and extracted total RNA from freshly resected melanoma tissue. We reversely transcribed the RNA while attaching a T7 promoter to the products that we subsequently amplified by PCR. We transcribed the amplified cDNA in vitro and introduced the expanded RNA into IDCs by electroporation followed by DC maturation and cryopreservation. Isolated and expanded mRNA was analyzed for the presence of melanoma-associated tumor antigens gp100, tyrosinase or MART1. To test product safety, we injected five million DCs subcutaneously at three-week intervals for up to four injections into six patients suffering from stage IV malignant melanoma. RESULTS: Three preparations contained all three transcripts, one isolate contained tyrosinase and gp100 and one contained none. Electrotransfection of DCs did not affect viability and phenotype of fresh mature DCs. However, post-thaw viability was lower (69 ± 12 percent) in comparison to non-electroporated cells (82 ± 12 percent; p = 0.001). No patient exhibited grade 3 or 4 toxicity upon DC injections. CONCLUSION: Standardized preparation of viable clinical-grade DCs transfected with tumor-derived and in vitro amplified mRNA is feasible and their administration is safe

Phase diagram of dense neutral three-flavor quark matter

We study the phase diagram of dense, locally neutral three-flavor quark matter as a function of the strange quark mass, the quark chemical potential, and the temperature, employing a general nine-parameter ansatz for the gap matrix. At zero temperature and small values of the strange quark mass, the ground state of matter corresponds to the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase. At some critical value of the strange quark mass, this is replaced by the recently proposed gapless CFL (gCFL) phase. We also find several other phases, for instance, a metallic CFL (mCFL) phase, a so-called uSC phase where all colors of up quarks are paired, as well as the standard two-flavor color-superconducting (2SC) phase and the gapless 2SC (g2SC) phase.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, references added; the version accepted for publication in Nucl. Phys.

Chiral symmetry breaking, color superconductivity and color neutral quark matter: a variational approach

We investigate the vacuum realignment for chiral symmetry breaking and color superconductivity at finite density in Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model in a variational method. The treatment allows us to investigate simultaneous formation of condensates in quark antiquark as well as in diquark channels. The methodology involves an explicit construction of a variational ground state and minimisation of the thermodynamic potential. Color and electric charge neutrality conditions are imposed through introduction of appropriate chemical potentials. Color and flavor dependent condensate functions are determined through minimisation of the thermodynamic potential. The equation of state is calculated. Simultaneous existence of a mass gap and superconducting gap is seen in a small window of quark chemical potential within the model when charge neutrality conditions are not imposed. Enforcing color and electric charge neutrality conditions gives rise to existence of gapless superconducting modes depending upon the magnitude of the gap and the difference of the chemical potentials of the condensing quarks.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures,to appear in Phys. Rev.

Orbital effects of a monochromatic plane gravitational wave with ultra-low frequency incident on a gravitationally bound two-body system

We analytically compute the long-term orbital variations of a test particle orbiting a central body acted upon by an incident monochromatic plane gravitational wave. We assume that the characteristic size of the perturbed two-body system is much smaller than the wavelength of the wave. Moreover, we also suppose that the wave's frequency is much smaller than the particle's orbital one. We make neither a priori assumptions about the direction of the wavevector nor on the orbital geometry of the planet. We find that, while the semi-major axis is left unaffected, the eccentricity, the inclination, the longitude of the ascending node, the longitude of pericenter and the mean anomaly undergo non-vanishing long-term changes. They are not secular trends because of the slow modulation introduced by the tidal matrix coefficients and by the orbital elements themselves. They could be useful to indepenedently constrain the ultra-low frequency waves which may have been indirectly detected in the BICEP2 experiment. Our calculation holds, in general, for any gravitationally bound two-body system whose characteristic frequency is much larger than the frequency of the external wave. It is also valid for a generic perturbation of tidal type with constant coefficients over timescales of the order of the orbital period of the perturbed particle.Comment: LaTex2e, 24 pages, no figures, no tables. Changes suggested by the referees include