Outcome of Patients Treated with Oral Sofosbuvir and Ribavirin: One Year Follow up Experience

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of sofosbuvir plus ribavirin therapy and prevalence of hepatitis C relapses.Methodology: A descriptive case series study was planned and executed for the evaluation efficacy, safety and relapsers of among HCV patients treated with sofosbuvir plus ribavirin. One hundred patients were enrolled after careful monitoring of inclusion criteria. PCR, LFTs, CP, RFTs, Serum albumin and ultrasound performed in all patients and they were given 400mg of sofosbuvir and 1000mg of Ribavarin. There was no dropout of haemoglobin and ALT was normalized in both groups.Results: 69% male and 31% females between January 2014 to March 2017. All patients were naive having genotype 3 and average age in males being 33.3 years whilst in females being 51.61 years. At one-month post treatment, 87.09% females and 78.265% males achieved RVR while ETR was 83.87% in females and 86.95% in males. Treatment related adverse effects were myalgias, insomnia and flu like symptoms which need symptomatic treatment. After 3 months of follow up, SVR was observed to be 90.32% in females and 88.405% in males. However, subsequent follow up of 1 patients revealed a relapse rate of 12.9% in females and 8.69% in males after achieving SVR.Conclusion: The combination of sofosbuvir and ribavarin is safe and effective treatment for genotype 3 (GT3) non cirrhotic patient

Insights into gastrointestinal virome : etiology and public exposure

Funding: The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this work through research group no. RG-1441-492.Recycled wastewater is widely used owing to the potential shortage of water resources for drinking purposes, recreational activities, and irrigation. However, gut microbiomes of both human beings and animals negatively affect this water quality. Wastewater contamination is continuously monitored, using fecal contamination indicators or microbial source tracking approaches, to oppose arising enteric infections. Viral gastroenteritis is considered a principal manifestation of waterborne pathogenic virome-mediated infections, which are mainly transmitted via the fecal-oral route. Furthermore, acquired enteric viromes are the common cause of infantile acute diarrhea. Moreover, public exposure to wastewater via wastewater discharge or treated wastewater reuse has led to a significant surge of public health concerns. In this review, we discussed the etiology of waterborne enteric viromes, notably gastrointestinal virus infections, and public exposure to municipal wastewater. Conclusively, the early human virome is affected mainly by birth mode, dietary behavior, and maternal health, and could provide a signature of disease incidence, however, more virome diversification is acquired in adulthood. A multi-phase treatment approach offered an effective means for the elimination of wastewater reuse mediated public risks. The insights highlighted in this paper offer essential information for defining probable etiologies and assessing risks related to exposure to discharged or reused wastewater.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The impact of board gender composition on loan covenant violations

Research Question/Issue We examine the role of board gender diversity in attenuating loan covenant violations. We also investigate whether the relationship is influenced by female independent directors. Finally, we examine the channels of this relationship. Research Findings/Insights Drawing on gender socialization and diversity theories, our findings show that firms with gender-diverse boards are less likely to violate loan covenants. We also find that boards with more female directors have a stronger impact on loan covenant violations than those with fewer female directors, consistent with critical mass theory. Our results also suggest that the negative relationship stems from female independent directors rather than from female executive directors. Our channel analyses indicate that the relationship is routed through covenant strictness, the financial performance of firms, and better corporate governance. Our further analysis demonstrates that the relationship is pronounced in female-dominated industries and financially distressed firms, as well as in firms whose directors have greater experience. Our results are robust across a series of sensitivity and endogeneity tests. Theoretical/Academic Implications We contribute to an emerging strand of literature that examines the link between board gender diversity and loan covenants. We fill a gap in this stream of literature by providing the first empirical evidence that female directors in the boardroom reduce loan covenant violations through their greater integrative bargaining skills during loan deals, improving firm financial performance, and ensuring good corporate governance. Our study also contributes to the growing literature on the differential effects on corporate policies of female directors (independent and executive) and critical mass. Practitioner/Policy Implications This finding offers significant policy implications for managers, investors, and policymakers. Given the growing frequency of loan covenant violations, the presence of a gender-diverse board should serve as a potent indicator to creditors who have a concern regarding loans. In addition, our study adds to the ongoing debate regarding the business case of board gender diversity

Mechanical, Thermal, and Electrical Properties of Graphene-Epoxy Nanocomposites—A Review

Monolithic epoxy, because of its brittleness, cannot prevent crack propagation and is vulnerable to fracture. However, it is well established that when reinforced—especially by nano-fillers, such as metallic oxides, clays, carbon nanotubes, and other carbonaceous materials—its ability to withstand crack propagation is propitiously improved. Among various nano-fillers, graphene has recently been employed as reinforcement in epoxy to enhance the fracture related properties of the produced epoxy–graphene nanocomposites. In this review, mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of graphene reinforced epoxy nanocomposites will be correlated with the topographical features, morphology, weight fraction, dispersion state, and surface functionalization of graphene. The factors in which contrasting results were reported in the literature are highlighted, such as the influence of graphene on the mechanical properties of epoxy nanocomposites. Furthermore, the challenges to achieving the desired performance of polymer nanocomposites are also suggested throughout the article

FPGA Implementation of UFMC based baseband transmitter: case study for LTE 10MHz channelization

Universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC) is a low complexity promising waveform that provides quasi-orthogonal property among subcarriers. In addition, it can achieve much better out-of-band emission performance than orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. Authors have proposed a hardware platform to implement a UFMC transmitter in this paper. Highly reduced complexity schemes for IFFT, filtering, and spectrum shifting are realized on actual hardware. This helps to achieve overall architecture of the transmitter at the cost of minimal FPGA resource usage. Hence, the overall design uses only 1038 slice registers, 1154 slice LUTs, and 64 multipliers of Xilinx Virtex-7 XC7VX330t device. A throughput of 773.5 Msamples/sec at an operational frequency of 364 MHz is achieved. This throughput is adequate for processing 50 Physical Resource Blocks (PRB) of LTE 10 MHz channelization in required time. The presented architecture provides a latency of only 2% of one LTE 10MHz channelization symbol due to the implementation of pipelining at different levels. Although the presented hardware design in its current form meets LTE 10MHz channelization throughput requirements, further increase in throughput is possible due to the scalable nature of the architecture. To the best of our knowledge, this work is first ever FPGA solution for UFMC transmitter presented in the literature

Fog based Secure Framework for Personal Health Records Systems

The rapid development of personal health records (PHR) systems enables an individual to collect, create, store and share his PHR to authorized entities. Health care systems within the smart city environment require a patient to share his PRH data with a multitude of institutions' repositories located in the cloud. The cloud computing paradigm cannot meet such a massive transformative healthcare systems due to drawbacks including network latency, scalability and bandwidth. Fog computing relieves the burden of conventional cloud computing by availing intermediate fog nodes between the end users and the remote servers. Aiming at a massive demand of PHR data within a ubiquitous smart city, we propose a secure and fog assisted framework for PHR systems to address security, access control and privacy concerns. Built under a fog-based architecture, the proposed framework makes use of efficient key exchange protocol coupled with ciphertext attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) to guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control within the system respectively. We also make use of digital signature combined with CP-ABE to ensure the system authentication and users privacy. We provide the analysis of the proposed framework in terms of security and performance.Comment: 12 pages (CMC Journal, Tech Science Press

Use of morphological features of carbonaceous materials for improved mechanical properties of epoxy nanocomposites

The influence of reinforcement morphology on damage tolerance and fracture toughness of epoxy based nanocomposites has been studied. Two different forms of carbonaceous reinforcements were used: multi-layered graphene (MLG) and nanostructured graphite (NSG). The maximum increase in Young's modulus was observed from 609.6 MPa to 766 MPa (25.7% increase) in the case of 0.1 wt% NSG. The NSG showed a maximum increase in hardness up to 7.9% while MLG showed up to 18.3%. The MLG and NSG increased the storage modulus and Tg while loss modulus and tan δ decreased with MLG and NSG. SEM images of the fractured surfaces of tensile specimens showed that the fracture mode was significantly altered by MLG and NSG

Firm‐level energy and carbon performance: Does sustainable investment matter?

Pollution reduction is one of the important challenges confronting contemporary business and society. Firms are largely responsible for undertaking sustainable business practices and initiatives as they are major contributors to global pollution. This study empirically examines how sustainable investment influences firm energy and carbon performance. Using a sample of 23,501 firm-year observations from 2440 unique firms over the period of 2002 to 2018 in G-6 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), we demonstrate that sustainable investment leads to better energy and carbon performance without compromising financial return. Our findings are robust to alternative variables, sub-samples, and different estimation techniques. This study contributes to the global discussion on sustainability and a low-carbon economy

The degradation of mechanical properties in polymer nano-composites exposed to liquid media - a review

The advancement of polymer nano-composites has been motivated by the need for materials with a specific combination of mechanical properties beyond those achieved from only one material. Integration of reinforcement into polymers at nanoscale can provide a significant increase in numerous physical and mechanical properties of polymer nano-composites. However, in applications where contact with chemically reactive liquid media is unavoidable, the mechanical properties of polymer nano-composites suffer degradation and environmental stress cracking (ESC) which is a commonly observed phenomenon. Moderate and severe aggressive liquid can cause ESC while non aggressive liquid are also capable of lowering the mechanical properties of polymer nano-composites by acting as plasticizer. To date, only few studies are reported discussing the ability of nano-fillers to resist ESC in polymer nano-composites when exposed to chemically reactive liquid media. In this review, various factors responsible for ESC in polymer nano-composites and their remedies are studied