Human and Canine Echinococcosis Infection in Informal, Unlicensed Abattoirs in Lima, Peru

Echinococcus granulosus infections are a major public health problem in livestock-raising regions around the world. The life cycle of this tapeworm is sustained between dogs (definitive host, canine echinococcosis), and herbivores (intermediary host, cystic hydatid disease). Humans may also develop cystic hydatid disease. Echinococcosis is endemic in rural areas of Peru; nevertheless, its presence or the extension of the problem in urban areas is basically unknown. Migration into Lima, an 8-million habitant's metropolis, creates peripheral areas where animals brought from endemic areas are slaughtered without veterinary supervision. We identified eight informal, unlicensed abattoirs in a peripheral district of Lima and performed a cross-sectional study in to assess the prevalence of canine echinococcosis, evaluated by coproELISA followed by PCR evaluation and arecoline purge. Eight of 22 dogs (36%) were positive to coproELISA, and four (18%) were confirmed to be infected with E. granulosus tapeworms either by PCR or direct observation (purge). Later evaluation of the human population living in these abattoirs using abdominal ultrasound, chest X-rays and serology, found 3 out of 32 (9.3%) subjects with echinococcal cysts in the liver (two viable, one calcified), one of whom had also lung involvement and a strongly positive antibody response. Autochthonous transmission of E. granulosus is present in Lima. Informal, unlicensed abattoirs may be sources of infection to neighbouring people in this urban environment

Body Pedagogics: Embodiment, Cognition and Cultural Transmission

This paper contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this process, existing research highlights the significance of body work, practical techniques, and the senses to these pedagogic processes. What has yet to be explicated adequately, however, is the embodied importance of cognition to this incorporation of culture. In what follows, I address this lacuna by building on John Dewey’s writings in proposing an approach to body pedagogics sympathetic to the prioritization of physical experience but that recognizes the distinctive properties and capacities of thought and reflexivity in these processes

Hardware software co-simulation of a digital EMI filter using Xilinx system generator

Mitigation of electromagnetic inference (EMI) is currently a challenge for scientists and designers in order to cope with electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) compliance in switching mode power supply (SMPS) and ensure the reliability of the whole system. Standard filtering techniques: passive and active ones present some insufficiency in terms of performance at high frequencies (HF) because analog components would no longer be controllable and this is mainly due to their parasitic elements. So developing EMI digital filters is very interesting, especially with the embedment of a machine control system on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. In this paper, we present a design of an active digital EMI filter (ADF) to be integrated in a drive train system of an electric vehicle (EV). Hardware design as well as FPGA implementation issues have been presented to prove the efficiency of the developed digital filtering structure

Porous silicon optical microcavity for chemical sensing application using tris-(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum (Alq

The present paper reports the study of a porous silicon based microcavity for a potential chemical sensing application using tris-(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum (Alq3) molecules. Porous silicon based planar microcavity was first designed and fabricated using the electrochemical etching technique. Photoluminescence emission of a single porous silicon layer after immersion in an Alq3 solution was first carried out in order to verify that the Alq3 molecules were bound to the porous surface. A wide green band centered at 519 nm, typical of a nano-structured Alq3 film, was observed. Reflectivity measurements of the porous silicon microcavity were then performed for different aluminum concentrations of the Alq3 solution. The microcavity device showed a good sensibility for the Alq3 molecules and an important shift of the microcavity photonic resonance was observed. This device might be considered for a potential aluminiun sensing application

North African Countries and Agricultural Trade Liberalization Under the Doha Round: Does a Top-Down Analysis Matters?

The countries of North Africa are characterized by a relatively high contribution of agriculture sector in their economies. At the same time, all the countries in the region are net agricultural importers. In this context, any potential agreement on agricultural trade liberalization under the Doha Round multilateral negotiations will raises world agricultural prices and could adversely affect the region. Although there are numerous studies on the impact of multilateral agricultural trade liberalization on North African countries, few studies have examined the impact of these global changes on the agricultural sector and on income distribution. Moreover, all the past studies use either global or country CGE models. This study attempts to address this gap in the literature. First, it combines the advantages of global and country models by linking the MIRAGE model to two countries dynamic CGE models built specially for this study. Second, we examine the distributional impact of agricultural trade liberalization in the two countries by integrating individually various household categories in both models. Our results show that drawing policy implications from global models for a specific country is completely misleading. In fact, while the results of the global model show that Tunisia will be winner and Morocco a loser from agricultural trade liberalization, the country models show a completely different picture. For both countries, results show that while the macroeconomic effects are relatively modest, all categories of households lose

Drug Disease Relation Extraction from Biomedical Literature Using NLP and Machine Learning

Extracting the relations between medical concepts is very valuable in the medical domain. Scientists need to extract relevant information and semantic relations between medical concepts, including protein and protein, gene and protein, drug and drug, and drug and disease. These relations can be extracted from biomedical literature available on various databases. This study examines the extraction of semantic relations that can occur between diseases and drugs. Findings will help specialists make good decisions when administering a medication to a patient and will allow them to continuously be up to date in their field. The objective of this work is to identify different features related to drugs and diseases from medical texts by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and UMLS ontology. The Support Vector Machine classifier uses these features to extract valuable semantic relationships among text entities. The contributing factor of this research is the combination of the strength of a suggested NLP technique, which takes advantage of UMLS ontology and enables the extraction of correct and adequate features (frequency features, lexical features, morphological features, syntactic features, and semantic features), and Support Vector Machines with polynomial kernel function. These features are manipulated to pinpoint the relations between drug and disease. The proposed approach was evaluated using a standard corpus extracted from MEDLINE. The finding considerably improves the performance and outperforms similar works, especially the f-score for the most important relation “cure,” which is equal to 98.19%. The accuracy percentage is better than those in all the existing works for all the relations

Physico-Chemical, antioxidant activities, textural, and sensory properties of yoghurt fortified with different states and rates of pomegranate seeds (Punica granatum L.)

This study examines the effects of incorporating fresh, frozen, osmodehydrated, and dried pomegranate seeds, at different concentrations (5, 10, and 20%) on the physicochemical, antioxidant, textural, and sensory properties of yoghurt. Antioxidant activity, pH, acidity, syneresis, and color of yoghurt were also evaluated during the storage (28 days) at 4°C. The principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to assess the correlations between different yoghurt formulation and their sensory attributes. Data showed that the addition of pomegranate seeds reduced pH and modified the chromatics coordinate (L*, a*, b*, C*, h°) and firmness of the yoghurt samples. In addition, acidity, °Brix, and syneresis increased compared to the control. Thanks to their high anthocyanin content, pomegranate seeds considerably improved the antioxidant activity essentially for yoghurt enriched with frozen seeds. In addition, the supplementation of 20% of frozen seeds into yoghurt was the most appreciated by panelists and improved the sensory properties in comparison to other formulation. According to PCA, taste and appearance were the main criteria for the overall acceptability of yoghurt. After 28 days of storage, the reddish color was reinforced; however, the antioxidant activity of yoghurts was reduced. Overall, it can be concluded that pomegranate seeds can be used as a natural ingredient to develop a novel yoghurt with high nutritional properties. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc