Prevalence and Characterization of Motile Salmonella in Commercial Layer Poultry Farms in Bangladesh

Salmonella is a globally widespread food-borne pathogen having major impact on public health. All motile serovars of Salmonella enterica of poultry origin are zoonotic, and contaminated meat and raw eggs are an important source to human infections. Information on the prevalence of Salmonella at farm/holding level, and the zoonotic serovars circulating in layer poultry in the South and South-East Asian countries including Bangladesh, where small-scale commercial farms are predominant, is limited. To investigate the prevalence of Salmonella at layer farm level, and to identify the prevalent serovars we conducted a cross-sectional survey by randomly selecting 500 commercial layer poultry farms in Bangladesh. Faecal samples from the selected farms were collected following standard procedure, and examined for the presence of Salmonella using conventional bacteriological procedures. Thirty isolates were randomly selected, from the ninety obtained from the survey, for serotyping and characterized further by plasmid profiling and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). Results of the survey showed that the prevalence of motile Salmonella at layer farm level was 18% (95% confidence interval 15–21%), and Salmonella Kentucky was identified to be the only serovar circulating in the study population. Plasmid analysis of the S. Kentucky and non-serotyped isolates revealed two distinct profiles with a variation of two different sizes (2.7 and 4.8 kb). PFGE of the 30 S. Kentucky and 30 non-serotyped isolates showed that all of them were clonally related because only one genotype and three subtypes were determined based on the variation in two or three bands. This is also the first report on the presence of any specific serovar of Salmonella enterica in poultry in Bangladesh

Five insights from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 provides a rules-based synthesis of the available evidence on levels and trends in health outcomes, a diverse set of risk factors, and health system responses. GBD 2019 covered 204 countries and territories, as well as first administrative level disaggregations for 22 countries, from 1990 to 2019. Because GBD is highly standardised and comprehensive, spanning both fatal and non-fatal outcomes, and uses a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of hierarchical disease and injury causes, the study provides a powerful basis for detailed and broad insights on global health trends and emerging challenges. GBD 2019 incorporates data from 281 586 sources and provides more than 3.5 billion estimates of health outcome and health system measures of interest for global, national, and subnational policy dialogue. All GBD estimates are publicly available and adhere to the Guidelines on Accurate and Transparent Health Estimate Reporting. From this vast amount of information, five key insights that are important for health, social, and economic development strategies have been distilled. These insights are subject to the many limitations outlined in each of the component GBD capstone papers.Peer reviewe

Ten years of Dryland Agricultural Research. AICRPDA, Biswanath chariali

Not AvailableThe Assam state has 28.1 lakh hectares of net cropped area accounting for nearly 35.1 % of the total geographical area. The state receives an average rainfall of 1968.1 mm with intermittent dry spells. Majority of area in Assam comes under rainfed area. The rainfed areas are endowed with wide range of constraints with respect to soil and crop management and socio economic issues. The All India Coordinated Research for Dryland Agriculture(AICRPDA) center which was initially established at Jorhat in 2005 was shifted to Biswanath Chariali during 2010. Since its inception, the center has generated significant amount of database and good number of technologies on rain water management, nutrient management, cropping system, energy management, resource characterization, evaluation of improved varieties, IFS and alternate land use systems etc. for increasing the productivity of dryland agriculture on sustainable basis. These technologies have been demonstrated in the farmers' field with their participation under the NICRA project, NICRA upscaling programmes, TSP programmes and success stories have been documented. This publication includes research result of AICRPDA for the past one decade. The information provided in this publication would help the researchers, farmers/stake holders, extension workers and all those involved in development of rainfed agriculture furthering the cause of dryland research and for upscaling the different dryland technologies for increasing the productivity. I appreciate the efforts of the team of Scientists of AICRPDA, Biswanath Chariali and Jorhat center and congratulate them for bringing out the publication entitled " Ten Years of Dryland Agricultural Research". I wish them all success in future research and development endeavor.Not Availabl

Determinants of quality, latency, and amount of Stack Overflow answers about recent Android APIs

Stack Overflow is a popular crowdsourced question and answer website for programming-related issues. It is an invaluable resource for software developers; on average, questions posted there get answered in minutes to an hour. Questions about well established topics, e.g., the coercion operator in C++, or the difference between canonical and class names in Java, get asked often in one form or another, and answered very quickly. On the other hand, questions on previously unseen or niche topics take a while to get a good answer. This is particularly the case with questions about current updates to or the introduction of new application programming interfaces (APIs). In a hyper-competitive online market, getting good answers to current programming questions sooner could increase the chances of an app getting released and used. So, can developers anyhow, e.g., hasten the speed to good answers to questions about new APIs? Here, we empirically study Stack Overflow questions pertaining to new Android APIs and their associated answers. We contrast the interest in these questions, their answer quality, and timeliness of their answers to questions about old APIs. We find that Stack Overflow answerers in general prioritize with respect to currentness: questions about new APIs do get more answers, but good quality answers take longer. We also find that incentives in terms of question bounties, if used appropriately, can significantly shorten the time and increase answer quality. Interestingly, no operationalization of bounty amount shows significance in our models. In practice, our findings confirm the value of bounties in enhancing expert participation. In addition, they show that the Stack Overflow style of crowdsourcing, for all its glory in providing answers about established programming knowledge, is less effective with new API questions