Why growth equals power - and why it shouldn't : constructing visions of China

When discussing the success of China's transition from socialism, there is a tendency to focus on growth figures as an indication of performance. Whilst these figures are indeed impressive, we should not confuse growth with development and assume that the former necessarily automatically generates the latter. Much has been done to reduce poverty in China, but the task is not as complete as some observers would suggest; particularly in terms of access to health, education and welfare, and also in dealing with relative (rather than absolute) depravation and poverty. Visions of China have been constructed that exaggerate Chinese development and power in the global system partly to serve political interests, but partly due to the failure to consider the relationship between growth and development, partly due to the failure to disaggregate who gets what in China, and partly due to the persistence of inter-national conceptions of globalised production, trade, and financial flows

Immunocompromised Children with Severe Adenoviral Respiratory Infection

Purpose. To investigate the impact of severe respiratory adenoviral infection on morbidity and case fatality in immunocompromised children. Methods. Combined retrospective-prospective cohort study of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) in four children’s hospitals with severe adenoviral respiratory infection and an immunocompromised state between August 2009 and October 2013. We performed a secondary case control analysis, matching our cohort 1 : 1 by age and severity of illness score with immunocompetent patients also with severe respiratory adenoviral infection. Results. Nineteen immunocompromised patients were included in our analysis. Eleven patients (58%) did not survive to hospital discharge. Case fatality was associated with cause of immunocompromised state (p=0.015), multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (p=0.001), requirement of renal replacement therapy (p=0.01), ICU admission severity of illness score (p=0.011), and treatment with cidofovir (p=0.005). Immunocompromised patients were more likely than matched controls to have multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (p=0.01), require renal replacement therapy (p=0.02), and not survive to hospital discharge (p=0.004). One year after infection, 43% of immunocompromised survivors required chronic mechanical ventilator support. Conclusions. There is substantial case fatality as well as short- and long-term morbidity associated with severe adenoviral respiratory infection in immunocompromised children

Low-Level Radioactive Waste (LLW) Management at the Nevada Test Site (NTS)

In 1978, the Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office (DOE/NV), established a managed LLW disposal project at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Two, sites which were already accepting limited amounts of on-site generated waste for disposal and off-site generated Transuranic Waste for interim storage, were selected to house the disposal facilities. In those early days, these sites, located about 15 miles apart, afforded the DOE/NV the opportunity to use at least two technologies to manage its waste cost effectively. The Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Site (RWMS) uses engineered shallow-land burial cells to dispose packaged waste while the Area 3 RWMS uses subsidence craters formed from underground testing of nuclear weapons for the disposal of packaged and unpackaged bulk waste. The paper describes the technical attributes of both Area 5 and Area 3 facilities, the acceptance process, the disposal processes, and present and future capacities of both sites

A Novel Unsupervised Method to Identify Genes Important in the Anti-viral Response: Application to Interferon/Ribavirin in Hepatitis C Patients

Background: Treating hepatitis C with interferon/ribavirin results in a varied response in terms of decrease in viral titer and ultimate outcome. Marked responders have a sharp decline in viral titer within a few days of treatment initiation, whereas in other patients there is no effect on the virus (poor responders). Previous studies have shown that combination therapy modifies expression of hundreds of genes in vitro and in vivo. However, identifying which, if any, of these genes have a role in viral clearance remains challenging. Aims: The goal of this paper is to link viral levels with gene expression and thereby identify genes that may be responsible for early decrease in viral titer. Methods: Microarrays were performed on RNA isolated from PBMC of patients undergoing interferon/ribavirin therapy. Samples were collected at pre-treatment (day 0), and 1, 2, 7, 14 and 28 days after initiating treatment. A novel method was applied to identify genes that are linked to a decrease in viral titer during interferon/ribavirin treatment. The method uses the relationship between inter-patient gene expression based proximities and inter-patient viral titer based proximities to define the association between microarray gene expression measurements of each gene and viral-titer measurements. Results: We detected 36 unique genes whose expressions provide a clustering of patients that resembles viral titer based clustering of patients. These genes include IRF7, MX1, OASL and OAS2, viperin and many ISG's of unknown function. Conclusion: The genes identified by this method appear to play a major role in the reduction of hepatitis C virus during the early phase of treatment. The method has broad utility and can be used to analyze response to any group of factors influencing biological outcome such as antiviral drugs or anti-cancer agents where microarray data are available. © 2007 Brodsky et al

Sustained nonoxidative glucose utilization and depletion of glycogen in reperfused canine myocardium

AbstractIschemically injured reperfused myocardium is characterized by increased 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose uptake as demonstrated by positron emission tomography. To elucidate the metabolic fate of exogenous glucose entering reperfused myocardium, D-[6-14C] glucose and L-[U-13C] lactate were used to determine glucose uptake, glucose oxidation and the contribution of exogenous glucose to lactate production. The pathologic model under investigation consisted of a 3 h balloon occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery followed by 24 h of reperfusion in canine myocardium. The extent and severity of myocardial injury after the ischemia and reperfusion were assessed by histochemical evaluation (triphenyltetrazolium chloride and periodic acid-Schiff stains). Thirteen intervention and four control dogs were studied.The glucose uptake in the occluded/reperfused area was significantly enhanced compared with that in control dogs (0.40 ± 0.14 versus 0.15 ± 0.10 μmol/ml, respectively). In addition, a significantly greater portion of the glucose extracted immediately entered glycolysis in the intervention group (75%) than in the control dogs (33%). The activity of the nonoxidative glycolytic pathway was markedly increased in the ischemically injured reperfused area, as evidenced by the four times greater lactate release in this area compared with the control value. The dual carbon-labeled isotopes showed that 57% of the exogenous glucose entering glycolysis was being converted to lactate. Exogenous glucose contributed to >90% of the observed lactate production. This finding was confirmed by the histochemical finding of sustained glycogen depletion in the occlusion/reperfusion area. The average area of glycogen depletion (37%) significantly exceeded the average area of necrosis (17%).These data demonstrate enhanced and sustained activity of the nonoxidative glycolytic pathway after a prolonged occlusion with reperfusion in canine myocardium. Because glycogen stores remain depleted, exogenous glucose becomes an important myocardial substrate under these pathologic conditions

Identification of intracellular bacteria from multiple single-cell RNA-seq platforms using CSI-Microbes

The study of the tumor microbiome has been garnering increased attention. We developed a computational pipeline (CSI-Microbes) for identifying microbial reads from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data and for analyzing differential abundance of taxa. Using a series of controlled experiments and analyses, we performed the first systematic evaluation of the efficacy of recovering microbial unique molecular identifiers by multiple scRNA-seq technologies, which identified the newer 10x chemistries (3' v3 and 5') as the best suited approach. We analyzed patient esophageal and colorectal carcinomas and found that reads from distinct genera tend to co-occur in the same host cells, testifying to possible intracellular polymicrobial interactions. Microbial reads are disproportionately abundant within myeloid cells that up-regulate proinflammatory cytokines like IL1Β and CXCL8, while infected tumor cells up-regulate antigen processing and presentation pathways. These results show that myeloid cells with bacteria engulfed are a major source of bacterial RNA within the tumor microenvironment (TME) and may inflame the TME and influence immunotherapy response

Combining comparative genomics with de novo motif discovery to identify human transcription factor DNA-binding motifs

BACKGROUND: As more and more genomes are sequenced, comparative genomics approaches provide a methodology for identifying conserved regulatory elements that may be involved in gene regulations. RESULTS: We developed a novel method to combine comparative genomics with de novo motif discovery to identify human transcription factor binding motifs that are overrepresented and conserved in the upstream regions of a set of co-regulated genes. The method is validated by analyzing a well-characterized muscle specific gene set, and the results showed that our approach performed better than the existing programs in terms of sensitivity and prediction rate. CONCLUSION: The newly developed method can be used to extract regulatory signals in co-regulated genes, which can be derived from the microarray clustering analysis