Mediterranean spotted fever: clinical and laboratory characteristics of 415 Sicilian children

BACKGROUND: Mediterranean spotted fever (MSF) is an acute febrile, zoonotic disease caused by Rickettsia conorii and transmitted to humans by the brown dogtick Rhipicephalus sanguineus. Nearly four hundred cases are reported every year (mainly from June to September) on the Italian island of Sicily. The aim of the study was to analyze the clinical and laboratory characteristics of patients with MSF and the efficacy of the drugs administered. METHODS: Our study was carried out on 415 children with MSF, during the period January 1997 – December 2004, at the "G. Di Cristina" Children's hospital in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. On admission patients' clinical history, physical and laboratory examination and indirect immunofluorescence antibody test (IFAT) for Rickettsia conorii were performed. Diagnosis was considered confirmed if the patients had an MSF diagnostic score greater than or equal to 25 according to the Raoult's scoring system. All patients were treated with chloramphenicol or with macrolides (clarithromycin or azithromycin). RESULTS: Fever, rash and tache noire were present in 386 (93%), 392 (94.5%) and 263 (63.4%) cases respectively. Eighteen (4.6%) children showed atypical exanthema. Chloramphenicol and newer macrolides all appeared to be effective and safe therapies. CONCLUSION: Clinical features of 415 children with MSF were similar to those reported by other authors except for a lower incidence of headache, arthralgia and myalgia and a higher frequency of epato-splenomegaly. Concerning therapy, clarithromycin can be considered a valid alternative therapy to tetracyclines or chloramphenicol especially for children aged < eight years

DR. H. S. GEAR

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A new infrared spectral component of the quasar 3C273

Following the dramatic infrared to millimetre-wavelength flare seen in the quasar 3C273 during 19831, we have continued to monitor its overall continuum emission. Recent measurements show that the 10-µm to 3-mm emission has decayed to a level well below any seen previously2,3, while the 1–4-µm emission has remained relatively constant. This behaviour has revealed the presence of an apparently non-variable component which dominates the near-infrared emission in 3C273 and includes the small ‘bump’ at ~3.5 µm in the power-law continuum previously noted by Neugebauer et al. 3. The origin of this component is probably not thermal re-radiation by dust grains but may be due to free–free emission from very dense, broad-line clouds4

JINGLE, a JCMT legacy survey of dust and gas for galaxy evolution studies: II. SCUBA-2 850 μm data reduction and dust flux density catalogues

We present the SCUBA-2 850μm component of JINGLE, the new JCMT large survey for dust and gas in nearby galaxies, which with 193 galaxies is the largest targeted survey of nearby galaxies at 850 μm. We provide details of our SCUBA-2 data reduction pipeline, optimized for slightly extended sources, and including a calibration model adjusted to match conventions used in other far-infrared (FIR) data. We measure total integrated fluxes for the entire JINGLE sample in 10 infrared/submillimetre bands, including all WISE, Herschel-PACS, Herschel-SPIRE, and SCUBA-2 850 μm maps, statistically accounting for the contamination by CO(J = 3–2) in the 850 μm band. Of our initial sample of 193 galaxies, 191 are detected at 250 μm with a ≥5σ significance. In the SCUBA-2 850 μm band we detect 126 galaxies with ≥3σ significance. The distribution of the JINGLE galaxies in FIR/sub-millimetre colour–colour plots reveals that the sample is not well fit by single modified-blackbody models that assume a single dust-emissivity index (β). Instead, our new 850 μm data suggest either that a large fraction of our objects require β &lt; 1.5, or that a model allowing for an excess of sub-mm emission (e.g. a broken dust emissivity law, or a very cold dust component ≲10 K) is required. We provide relations to convert FIR colours to dust temperature and β for JINGLE-like galaxies. For JINGLE the FIR colours correlate more strongly with star-formation rate surface-density rather than the stellar surface-density, suggesting heating of dust is greater due to younger rather than older stellar-populations, consistent with the low proportion of early-type galaxies in the sample