Healthcare Services Demand in Post-disaster Settings: The 2014 Earthquake in Ludian County, Yunnan Province, China

© 2016, The Author(s). Healthcare relief teams dispatched to rural areas often face difficulties due to limited initial and ongoing health information in the affected community. The present study investigated patterns of healthcare service demand for a rural displaced population in a post-disaster situation. Three weeks after the 2014 Ludian County earthquake, the Institute for Disaster Management and Reconstruction (IDMR) at Sichuan University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University organized a disaster nursing team to support the rural community in Longtoushan, at the epicenter of the earthquake. A cross-sectional, records-based study of 2484 records obtained from a temporary hospital in Longtoushan (for the period of 14 Septemberâ1 October 2014) was conducted. The daily number of records by patientsâ sociodemographic characteristics and medical diagnoses were plotted on a time series graph to explore the temporal change during the study period. Findings indicate that healthcare service demand from younger age groups was higher than that of the older adult group. Three major health problems were observed: respiratory disease, skin problems, and ear, eye, and throat (EET) problems. All of these very real health problems are chronic issues that require long-term care. They are not health issues directly related to the disaster emergency itself. Yet disaster relief nursing teams were selected on the basis of their ability to cope primarily with traumatic disaster-related injuries. The existing practice of teaming up disaster relief professions might not be optimal. To better understand the healthcare needs of a displaced population, short- and long-term planning is needed. Planning will allow disaster response professionals to better organize and deploy healthcare personnel to manage the above-listed problems in a post-disaster situation.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

PTEN is involved in modulation of vasculogenesis in early chick embryos

Summary PTEN is a tumor suppressor gene that is mutated and/or deleted in many types of tumor. This gene also plays a very distinct role in the early stages of embryonic development such as cell migration, proliferation and migration. Nevertheless, little is known of the function of PTEN in vasculogenesis during chick embryonic development. In this study, we used in situ hybridization to first demonstrate the expression pattern of PTEN during gastrulation. PTEN was found mainly expressed in the blood islands of area opaca, the neural tube and mesodermal structures. Overexpression of PTEN obstructed the epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) process in the primitive streak. EMT is the first prerequisite required for the emigration of hemangioblasts during vasculogenesis. When PTEN expression was silenced, we observed that it produced an adverse effect on mesodermal cell emigration to the extra-embryonic blood islands. In addition, we also demonstrated that even if the perturbed-PTEN cells did not affect the formation of blood islands, migrant mesodermal cells overexpressing wt PTEN-GFP had difficulties integrating into the blood islands. Instead, these cells were either localized on the periphery of the blood islands or induced to differentiate into endothelial cells if they managed to integrate into blood islands. Development of the intra-embryonic primary vascular plexus was also affected by overexpression of PTEN. We proposed that it was elevated PTEN lipid phosphatase activity that was responsible for the morphogenetic defects induced by PTEN overexpression. In this context, we did not find PTEN affecting VEGF signaling. In sum, our study has provided evidence that PTEN is involved in vasculogenesis during the early stages of chick embryo development

OMMA enables population-scale analysis of complex genomic features and phylogenomic relationships from nanochannel-based optical maps.

BackgroundOptical mapping is an emerging technology that complements sequencing-based methods in genome analysis. It is widely used in improving genome assemblies and detecting structural variations by providing information over much longer (up to 1 Mb) reads. Current standards in optical mapping analysis involve assembling optical maps into contigs and aligning them to a reference, which is limited to pairwise comparison and becomes bias-prone when analyzing multiple samples.FindingsWe present a new method, OMMA, that extends optical mapping to the study of complex genomic features by simultaneously interrogating optical maps across many samples in a reference-independent manner. OMMA captures and characterizes complex genomic features, e.g., multiple haplotypes, copy number variations, and subtelomeric structures when applied to 154 human samples across the 26 populations sequenced in the 1000 Genomes Project. For small genomes such as pathogenic bacteria, OMMA accurately reconstructs the phylogenomic relationships and identifies functional elements across 21 Acinetobacter baumannii strains.ConclusionsWith the increasing data throughput of optical mapping system, the use of this technology in comparative genome analysis across many samples will become feasible. OMMA is a timely solution that can address such computational need. The OMMA software is available at https://github.com/TF-Chan-Lab/OMTools

Anti-AIDS agents 79. Design, synthesis, molecular modeling and structure–activity relationships of novel dicamphanoyl-2′,2′-dimethyldihydropyranochromone (DCP) analogs as potent anti-HIV agents

In a continued study, 23 3′R,4′R-di-O-(−)-camphanoyl-2′,2′-dimethyldihydropyrano[2,3-f]chromone (DCP) derivatives (5–27) were synthesized, and screened for anti-HIV activity against both a non-drug-resistant NL4-3 strain and multiple reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitor-resistant (RTMDR-1) strain, using 2-EDCP (4) and 2-MDCP (35) as controls. New DCP analogs 5, 9, 14, and 22 exhibited potent anti-HIV activity against HIVNL4-3 with EC50 and therapeutic index (TI) values ranging from 0.036 μM to 0.14 μM and from 110 to 420, respectively. Compounds 5 and 9 also exhibited good activity against RTMDR-1 (EC50 0.049 and 0.054 μM; TI 310 and 200, respectively), and were two-fold more potent than the leads 4 and 35 (EC50 0.11 and 0.19 μM; TI 60 and 58, respectively). Evaluation of water solubility showed that 5 and 22 were 5–10 times more water soluble than 4. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling results were first performed on this compound type, and the models should aid in design of future anti-HIV DCP analogs and potential clinical drug candidates