Networking Hospital ePrescribing: A Systemic View of Digitalization of Medicines' Use in England.

Medicine management is at the core of hospital care and digitalization of prescribing and administration of medicines is often the focus of attention of health IT programs. This may be conveyed to the public in terms of the elimination of paper-based drug charts and increased readability of doctors' prescriptions. Based on analysis of documents about hospital medicines supply and use (including systems' implementation) in the UK, in this conceptual paper electronic prescribing and administration are repositioned as only one aspect of an important wider transformation in medicine management in hospital settings, involving, for example, procurement, dispensing, auditing, waste management, research and safety vigilance. Approaching digitalization from a systemic perspective has the potential to uncover the wider implications of this transformation for patients, the organization and the wider health care system

The role of the A C395 IFNGR1 mutation in determining susceptibility to intracellular infection in Malta

Background: The first human mycobacterial susceptibility gene was identified amongst four children on the island of Malta in 1995. All affected children were homozygous for a nonsense mutation at position 395 of the interferon gamma receptor 1 (IFNGR1) gene, and all but one died of overwhelming mycobacterial infection. The population of Malta has high rates of infection with intracellular pathogens; leishmania, brucellosis and tuberculosis are all endemic, while leprosy, which was previously endemic, has only recently been eradicated. We hypothesised that heterozygous carriers of the IFNGR1 gene mutation, while resistant to infection with poorly pathogenic organisms, may have increased susceptibility to infection with more virulent pathogens. Methodology and Result: Screening patients with a past history of intracellular infection and healthy newborns for the presence of the IFNGR1 A->C395 mutation, using sequence specific primer PCR, did not identify any carriers of the mutation. Conclusion: These results suggest that the IFNGR1 mutation is unlikely to be of public health significance on Malta.peer-reviewe

Dispersive wave runup on non-uniform shores

Historically the finite volume methods have been developed for the numerical integration of conservation laws. In this study we present some recent results on the application of such schemes to dispersive PDEs. Namely, we solve numerically a representative of Boussinesq type equations in view of important applications to the coastal hydrodynamics. Numerical results of the runup of a moderate wave onto a non-uniform beach are presented along with great lines of the employed numerical method (see D. Dutykh et al. (2011) for more details).Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 18 references. This preprint is submitted to FVCA6 conference proceedings. Other author papers can be downloaded at http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~dutykh

Focus Issue Editorial: Synthetic Biology.

This is a commentar

Swarming Proxima Centauri: Optical Communication Over Interstellar Distances

Interstellar communications are achievable with gram-scale spacecraft using swarm techniques introduced herein if an adequate energy source, clocks and a suitable communications protocol exist. The essence of our approach to the Breakthrough Starshot challenge is to launch a long string of 100s of gram-scale interstellar probes at 0.2c in a firing campaign up to a year long, maintain continuous contact with them (directly amongst each other and via Earth utilizing the launch laser), and gradually, during the 20-year cruise, dynamically coalesce the long string into a lens-shaped mesh network $\sim$100,000 km across centered on the target planet Proxima b at the time of fly-by. In-flight formation would be accomplished using the "time on target" technique of grossly modulating the initial launch velocity between the head and the tail of the string, and combined with continual fine control or "velocity on target" by adjusting the attitude of selected probes, exploiting the drag imparted by the ISM. Such a swarm could tolerate significant attrition, e.g., by collisions enroute with interstellar dust grains, thus mitigating the risk that comes with "putting all your eggs in one basket". It would also enable the observation of Proxima b at close range from a multiplicity of viewpoints. Swarm synchronization with state-of-the-art space-rated clocks would enable operational coherence if not actual phase coherence in the swarm optical communications. Betavoltaic technology, which should be commercialized and space-rated in the next decade, can provide an adequate primary energy storage for these swarms. The combination would thus enable data return rates orders of magnitude greater than possible from a single probe.Comment: Submission to the Breakthrough Starshot Challenge Communications Group Final Repor

A shared group of bacterial taxa in the duodenal microbiota of undernourished Pakistani children with environmental enteric dysfunction

Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is a subclinical syndrome of altered small intestinal function postulated to be an important contributor to childhood undernutrition. The role of small intestinal bacterial communities in the pathophysiology of EED is poorly defined due to a paucity of studies where there has been a direct collection of small intestinal samples from undernourished children. Sixty-three members of a Pakistani cohort identified as being acutely malnourished between 3 and 6 months of age and whose wasting (weight-for-lengt