Maternal and fetal outcome of malaria in pregnancy

Background: Malaria, an oldest recorded parasitic infection transmitted by mosquitoes, is one of the most devastating infectious diseases. Mangalore, government headquarters of Dakshin Kannada district in Karnataka, receives high rainfall and exhibits humid tropical environment, harboring high vector density and contributing to high incidences of malaria. The aim of the present study was to observe maternal and fetal outcome of malaria in pregnancy.Methods: This is an observational prospective study conducted from September 2014 to September 2015 at Lady Goschen Hospital, Mangalore which serves as tertiary level hospital. Study population included were pregnant women diagnosed to have malaria by rapid diagnostic test or microscopy as an outpatient or inpatient during the study period. Complications were noted in terms of maternal and foetal complications.Results: A total of 12600 pregnant women attended LGH during study period out of which 41 were positive for malaria which has a prevalence of 0.32%. Among the malaria cases, 23 cases were primigravidae and 18 were multi-gravidae. The commonest pathogen found was Plasmodium vivax accounting for 63.4%. Regarding complications maternal anaemia and thrombocytopenia accounted for 34.1% and 26.8% respectively. Pregnancy outcomes were 17% of spontaneous miscarriage, 21.8% preterm deliveries, 29.1% low birth weight babies and 2.4% perinatal deaths.Conclusions: Malaria adversely affects both pregnant female as well as fetus. It is therefore advised all patients with fever in pregnancy must have screening for malarial parasite and treated adequately by medicine and supportive care to improve the maternal and fetal outcome

Inactivation of Plasmodium falciparum in whole blood by riboflavin plus irradiation.

BACKGROUND: Malaria parasites are frequently transmitted by unscreened blood transfusions in Africa. Pathogen reduction methods in whole blood would thus greatly improve blood safety. We aimed to determine the efficacy of riboflavin plus irradiation for treatment of whole blood infected with Plasmodium falciparum. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Blood was inoculated with 10(4) or 10(5) parasites/mL and riboflavin treated with or without ultraviolet (UV) irradiation (40-160 J/mL red blood cells [mL(RBCs)]). Parasite genome integrity was assessed by quantitative amplification inhibition assays, and P. falciparum viability was monitored in vitro. RESULTS: Riboflavin alone did not affect parasite genome integrity or parasite viability. Application of UV after riboflavin treatment disrupted parasite genome integrity, reducing polymerase-dependent amplification by up to 2 logs (99%). At 80 J/mL(RBCs), riboflavin plus irradiation prevented recovery of viable parasites in vitro for 2 weeks, whereas untreated controls typically recovered to approximately 2% parasitemia after 4 days of in vitro culture. Exposure of blood to 160 J/mL(RBCs) was not associated with significant hemolysis. CONCLUSIONS: Riboflavin plus irradiation treatment of whole blood damages parasite genomes and drastically reduces P. falciparum viability in vitro. In the absence of suitable malaria screening assays, parasite inactivation should be investigated for prevention of transfusion-transmitted malaria in highly endemic areas

Isothermal Shock Wave in Magnetogasdynamics

The problem of propagation of a plane isothermal discontinuity (shock) wave in a homogeneous semi-infinite body of a perfect gas, in the presence of amagnetic field have been solved. It has been shown that under certain definiteconditions, the density p at the wave front may be arbitrarily high for a singlecompression pulse. A certain class of solutions of the present problem for a nonhomogeneous semi-infinite body have been derived. Such solutions are expected to be of great importance in compression problems of plasma

Domain-oriented edge-based alignment of protein interaction networks

Motivation: Recent advances in high-throughput experimental techniques have yielded a large amount of data on protein–protein interactions (PPIs). Since these interactions can be organized into networks, and since separate PPI networks can be constructed for different species, a natural research direction is the comparative analysis of such networks across species in order to detect conserved functional modules. This is the task of network alignment

Direct Statistical Constraints on the Natal Kick velocity of a Black Hole in an X-ray Quiet Binary

In recent years, a handful of ``dark" binaries have been discovered with a non-luminous compact object. Astrometry and radial velocity measurements of the bright companion allow us to measure the post-supernova orbital elements of such a binary. In this paper, we develop a statistical formalism to use such measurements to infer the pre-supernova orbital elements, and the natal kick imparted by the supernova (SN). We apply this formalism to the recent discovery of an X-ray quiet binary with a black hole, VFTS 243, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Assuming an isotropic, Maxwellian distribution on natal kicks and using broad agnostic mass priors, we find that kick velocity can be constrained to $V_k < 72$ km/s and the dispersion of the kick distribution to $\sigma_k < 68$ km/s at 90 % confidence. We find that a Blaauw kick cannot be ruled out and }that at least about $0.6 M_{\odot}$ was lost during the supernova with 90 % confidence. The pre-SN orbital separation is found to be robustly constrained to be around $0.3$ AU.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

The Enantioselective Construction of Tetracyclic Diterpene Skeletons with Friedel-Crafts Alkylation and Palladium-catalyzed Cycloalkenylation Reactions

Due to the profound extent to which natural products inspire medicinal chemists in drug discovery, there is demand for innovative syntheses of these often complex materials. This article describes the synthesis of tricarbocyclic natural product architectures through an extension of the enantioselective Birch-Cope sequence with intramolecular Friedel-Crafts alkylation reactions. Additionally, palladium-catalyzed enol silane cycloalkenylation of the tricarbocyclic structures afforded the challenging bicyclo[3.2.1]octane C/D ring system found in the gibberellins and the ent-kauranes, two natural products with diverse medicinal value. In the case of the ent-kaurane derivative, an unprecedented alkene rearrangement converted four alkene isomers to one final product

Pseudo-forces in quantum mechanics

Dynamical evolution is described as a parallel section on an infinite dimensional Hilbert bundle over the base manifold of all frames of reference. The parallel section is defined by an operator-valued connection whose components are the generators of the relativity group acting on the base manifold. In the case of Galilean transformations we show that the property that the curvature for the fundamental connection must be zero is just the Heisenberg equations of motion and the canonical commutation relation in geometric language. We then consider linear and circular accelerating frames and show that pseudo-forces must appear naturally in the Hamiltonian.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, revtex, new section added, to appear in PR