IGG-antibody seroprevalence of West Nile Virus among blood donors in Nairobi and Nakuru regional blood transfusion testing centers in Kenya

Background: West Nile Virus (WNV) is an arbovirus transmitted by infected mosquitoes which cause most of its incidence (CDC, 2015). It is transmitted by the culex mosquito which is prevalent in Kenya.Objective: To determine and compare the sero prevalence of WNV among blood donors in Nairobi and Nakuru Regional blood transfusion testing centers in Kenya.Study design: A cross-sectional studySetting: It was carried out in two Regional Blood Transfusion Centers (RBTCs) which are based in Nairobi and Nakuru. These two centers are associated with possible low and high prevalence respectively.Subject: A total of 180 blood samples were randomly selected over a period of one month. These blood samples were tested for WNV IgG using ELISA. Results: Majority of the donors were below 35 years of age and were predominantly male. WNV IgG prevalence was 15% in blood donors (95% CI 10-20.5%). Prevalence of cross infection of TTI and WNV was 8.3% (95% CI 4.4- 12.2%). The prevalence of WVN IgG was highest in the 19-35 years’ age group (16.5%) and females (21.6%) though the results were not statistically significant. There was no difference in the IgG positivity between the different centers.Conclusion: Infection with WNV should be of public health concern because about a fifth of those infected with WNV develop illness. About 10% of those who develop neurological symptoms succumb to the disease

A Comparison of Head Transducers and Transfer for a Limited Domain Translation Application

We compare the effectiveness of two related machine translation models applied to the same limited-domain task. One is a transfer model with monolingual head automata for analysis and generation; the other is a direct transduction model based on bilingual head transducers. We conclude that the head transducer model is more effective according to measures of accuracy, computational requirements, model size, and development effort. 1 Introduction In this paper we describe an experimental machine translation system based on head transducer models and compare it to a related transfer system, described in Alshawi 1996a, based on monolingual head automata. Head transducer models consist of collections of finite state machines that are associated with pairs of lexical items in a bilingual lexicon. The transfer system follows the familiar analysis-transfer-generation architecture (Isabelle and Macklovitch 1986), with mapping of dependency representations (Hudson 1984) in the transfer phase..

Semantic Relations Between Nominals

Table of Contents: Introduction / Relations between Nominals, Relations between Concepts / Extracting Semantic Relations with Supervision / Extracting Semantic Relations with Little or No Supervision / Conclusio