Multi-antibiotics-resistance plasmid profile of enteric pathogens in pediatric patients from Nigeria

A total of 938 faecal samples of diarrheal stool of pediatric patients attending Madonna University Teaching Hospital (MUTH) from June 2003 to June 2004 were examined. 218 of eight differentbacterial strains namely Escherichia coli 90(41.3%), Shigella dysenteriae 38(17.4%), Pseudomonas aeruginosa 20(9.2%), Salmonella typhi 18(8.3%), Staphylococcus aureus 7(3.2%), Proteus mirabilis 5(2.3%), Enterococcus faecalis 25(11.5%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae 15(6.9%) were isolated. The susceptibility pattern of the isolates to the various antibiotics varied with Proteus mirabilis andKlebsiella pneumoniae 100% sensitive to peflacine and Enterococcus faecalis 100% sensitive to ciprofloxacin and augmentin. Most of the isolates were least sensitive to cotrimoxazole, ampicillin, erythromycin gentamicin, streptomycin and chloramphenicol. The resistance plasmids to the various isolates were very diverse and distributive among the isolates. They were also highly transferable with a high frequency range of 2x10-2 to 6x10-4. Some of the isolates had plasmids bands that ranged from 0.55kbp to 1.14kbp. This indicates that plasmids allow the movement of genetic materials,including antimicrobial resistance genes between bacterial species and strains

Cortical response to the natural speech envelope correlates with neuroimaging evidence of cognition in severe brain injury

Recent studies identify severely brain-injured patients with limited or no behavioral responses who successfully perform functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalogram (EEG) mental imagery tasks [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Such tasks are cognitively demanding [1]; accordingly, recent studies support that fMRI command following in brain-injured patients associates with preserved cerebral metabolism and preserved sleep-wake EEG [5, 6]. We investigated the use of an EEG response that tracks the natural speech envelope (NSE) of spoken language [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22] in healthy controls and brain-injured patients (vegetative state to emergence from minimally conscious state). As audition is typically preserved after brain injury, auditory paradigms may be preferred in searching for covert cognitive function [23, 24, 25]. NSE measures are obtained by cross-correlating EEG with the NSE. We compared NSE latencies and amplitudes with and without consideration of fMRI assessments. NSE latencies showed significant and progressive delay across diagnostic categories. Patients who could carry out fMRI-based mental imagery tasks showed no statistically significant difference in NSE latencies relative to healthy controls; this subgroup included patients without behavioral command following. The NSE may stratify patients with severe brain injuries and identify those patients demonstrating “cognitive motor dissociation” (CMD) [26] who show only covert evidence of command following utilizing neuroimaging or electrophysiological methods that demand high levels of cognitive function. Thus, the NSE is a passive measure that may provide a useful screening tool to improve detection of covert cognition with fMRI or other methods and improve stratification of patients with disorders of consciousness in research studies

Analyzing models of work addiction: single factor and bi-factor models of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale

Work addiction ('workaholism') has become an increasingly studied topic in the behavioral addictions literature and had led to the development of a number of instruments to assess it. One such instrument is the Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS - Andreassen et al. 2012 Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 53, 265-272). However, the BWAS has never been investigated in Eastern-European countries. The goal of the present study was to examine the factor structure, the reliability and cut-off scores of the BWAS in a comprehensive Hungarian sample. This study is a direct extension of the original validation of BWAS by providing results on the basis of representative data and the development of appropriate cut-off scores The study utilized an online questionnaire with a Hungarian representative sample including 500 respondents (F = 251; M age = 35.05 years) who completed the BWAS. A series of confirmatory factor analyses were carried out leading to a short, 7-item first-order factor structure and a longer 14-item seven-factor nested structure. Despite the good validity of the longer version, its reliability was not as high as it could have been. One-fifth (20.6 %) of the Hungarians who used the internet at least weekly were categorized as work addicts using the BWAS. It is recommended that researchers use the original seven items from the Norwegian scale in order to facilitate and stimulate cross-national research on addiction to work

Consistency between the Lorentz-Force Independence of the Resistive Transition in the High-T-C Superconductors and the Standard Theory of Flux-Flow

Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://journals.aps.org

Male germ cell-specific protein Trs4 binds to multiple proteins

Temperature-related sequence 4 (Trs4) has been identified as a testis-specific gene with expression sensitive to the abdominal temperature changes induced by artificial cryptorchidism. In murine testes, Trs4 mRNA was detected in round spermatids and its protein was localized mainly in the elongating spermatids as well as in the acrosomes and tails of mature spermatozoa. Using a yeast two-hybrid screening system, we identified Rshl-2, Gstmu1, and Ddc8 as putative binding partners of the Trs4 protein in mouse testes. Their interactions were confirmed by in vivo and in vitro binding assays. Further studies demonstrated that Ddc8, a newly identified gene with unknown functions, displayed a similar expression pattern with Trs4 in mouse testes. In particular, Trs4, Ddc8, and Rshl-2 proteins were co-localized to the tails of mature spermatozoa. These results suggested that Trs4 might be involved in diverse processes of spermiogenesis and/or fertilization through interactions with its multiple binding partners. © 2009 Elsevier Inc.postprin

Out-Of-Plane Transverse Resistivity in High-T-C Superconductors as a Signature of Flow of Rigid Vortex Lines

Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://journals.aps.org/When the transport current is applied parallel to the CuO2 layers, say, along the a axis, of a high-T-c superconductor, and the magnetic field B is in a direction which makes a polar angle theta with the c axis and an azimuthal angle phi with the ac plane, for the case of rigid flux lines, in addition to the usual longitudinal resistivity rho(perpendicular to), there should also exist an out-of-plane transverse resistivity rho(perpendicular to), which is of the same order of magnitude as rho(perpendicular to) and satisfies the relation rho(perpendicular to)/rho(parallel to) =tan theta cos phi in the high anisotropy limit and for theta being not very close to pi/2. For less rigid flux lines, reduction in rho(perpendicular to)rho(parallel to) from this prediction should be observed, and for a set of decoupled pancake vortices, rho(perpendicular to) should vanish entirely

Diffusion in hot subdwarf progenitors from the common envelope channel

© 2017 C. M. Byrne et al. Diffusion of elements in the atmosphere of a star can drastically affect its surface composition, sometimes leading to unusual mixtures. These chemically peculiar stars can be identified from the presence of unusual lines in their spectra. Some hot subdwarf stars show extraordinary abundances of elements such as lead, zirconium and strontium, while the abundance of helium ranges from practically zero to almost 100 percent across the hot subdwarf population. A sequence of extreme horizontal branch star models was generated by producing a number of post-common envelope objects from red giants. The evolution of these subdwarf progenitors was computed with the MESA stellar evolution code from immediately after envelope ejection right up to the ignition of helium in the core. Envelope abundances were calculated at the zero age horizontal branch for models both with and without the presence of diffusion. A small number of simulations also looked at the effects on radiative levitation of these abundances, to test how well diffusion physics is able to reproduce observational data

Quasiparticle resonant states induced by a unitary impurity in a d-wave superconductor

Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://journals.aps.org/The quasiparticle resonant states around a single nonmagnetic impurity with unitary scattering in a d-wave superconductor is studied by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations based on a t-J model. Both the spatial variation of the order parameter and the local density of states (LDOS) around the impurity have been investigated. We find that (i) a particle-hole symmetric system has a single symmetric zero-energy peak in the LDOS regardless of the size of the superconducting coherence length xi(0); (ii) for the particle-hole asymmetric case, an asymmetric splitting of the zero-energy peak is intrinsic to a system with a small value of k(F)xi(0)

Efficient Surveillance of Plasmodium knowlesi Genetic Subpopulations, Malaysian Borneo, 2000-2018.

Population genetic analysis revealed that Plasmodium knowlesi infections in Malaysian Borneo are caused by 2 divergent parasites associated with long-tailed (cluster 1) and pig-tailed (cluster 2) macaques. Because the transmission ecology is likely to differ for each macaque species, we developed a simple genotyping PCR to efficiently distinguish between and survey the 2 parasite subpopulations. This assay confirmed differences in the relative proportions in areas of Kapit division of Sarawak state, consistent with multilocus microsatellite analyses. Analyses of 1,204 human infections at Kapit Hospital showed that cluster 1 caused approximately two thirds of cases with no significant temporal changes from 2000 to 2018. We observed an apparent increase in overall numbers in the most recent 2 years studied, driven mainly by increased cluster 1 parasite infections. Continued monitoring of the frequency of different parasite subpopulations and correlation with environmental alterations are necessary to determine whether the epidemiology will change substantially