A qualitative study exploring awareness and attitudes towards tuberculosis in migrant populations in a Metropolitan District Council in the North of England

Background: The majority of tuberculosis (TB) cases in the UK occur among people born in high-burden countries (73%), and are concentrated in large urban centres. This study explores migrants' attitudes and beliefs towards TB in an English District where the incidence is higher than the UK average. Methods: Community engagement workers ran 26 focus groups using a standardized questionnaire. Purposeful sampling was used to obtain a cross-section of migrant communities. The summary reports were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Most groups did not see TB as a current issue in their community and associated it either with the past or with their country of birth. It appeared to be rarely discussed in their communities and generally not noted as being associated with stigma. Conclusions: This study revealed a change in social attitudes to TB in migrant groups to those reported in previous literature. Stigma had considerably less effect than expected. However, the evidence revealed that these high-risk groups made the erroneous assumption that, by moving to a low incidence country, they were no longer at risk of the disease. TB services need to respond by revising the information that they provide to take into account the risk perception of these populations

Entanglement can increase asymptotic rates of zero-error classical communication over classical channels

It is known that the number of different classical messages which can be communicated with a single use of a classical channel with zero probability of decoding error can sometimes be increased by using entanglement shared between sender and receiver. It has been an open question to determine whether entanglement can ever increase the zero-error communication rates achievable in the limit of many channel uses. In this paper we show, by explicit examples, that entanglement can indeed increase asymptotic zero-error capacity, even to the extent that it is equal to the normal capacity of the channel. Interestingly, our examples are based on the exceptional simple root systems E7 and E8.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figur

Fine-Scale Mapping of the 5q11.2 Breast Cancer Locus Reveals at Least Three Independent Risk Variants Regulating MAP3K1

Peer reviewe

Earlier snowmelt may lead to late season declines in plant productivity and carbon sequestration in Arctic tundra ecosystems

Arctic warming is affecting snow cover and soil hydrology, with consequences for carbon sequestration in tundra ecosystems. The scarcity of observations in the Arctic has limited our understanding of the impact of covarying environmental drivers on the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems. In this study, we address some of these uncertainties through a novel record of 119 site-years of summer data from eddy covariance towers representing dominant tundra vegetation types located on continuous permafrost in the Arctic. Here we found that earlier snowmelt was associated with more tundra net CO2 sequestration and higher gross primary productivity (GPP) only in June and July, but with lower net carbon sequestration and lower GPP in August. Although higher evapotranspiration (ET) can result in soil drying with the progression of the summer, we did not find significantly lower soil moisture with earlier snowmelt, nor evidence that water stress affected GPP in the late growing season. Our results suggest that the expected increased CO2 sequestration arising from Arctic warming and the associated increase in growing season length may not materialize if tundra ecosystems are not able to continue sequestering CO2 later in the season