Frontiers of parasitology research in the People's Republic of China : infection, diagnosis, protection and surveillance

ABSTRACT: Control and eventual elimination of human parasitic diseases in the People's Republic of China (P.R. China) requires novel approaches, particularly in the areas of diagnostics, mathematical modelling, monitoring, evaluation, surveillance and public health response. A comprehensive effort, involving the collaboration of 188 scientists (<85% from P.R. China) from 48 different institutions and universities (80% from P.R. China), covers this collection of 29 articles published in Parasites & Vectors. The research mainly stems from a research project entitled 'Surveillance and diagnostic tools for major parasitic diseases in P.R. China' (grant no. 2008ZX10004-011) and highlights the frontiers of research in parasitology. The majority of articles in this thematic series deals with the most important parasitic diseases in P.R. China, emphasizing Schistosoma japonicum, Plasmodium vivax and Clonorchis sinensis plus some parasites of emerging importance such as Angiostrongylus cantonensis. Significant achievements have been made through the collaborative research programme in the following three fields: (i) development of control strategies for the national control programme; (ii) updating the surveillance data of parasitic infections both in human and animals; and (iii) improvement of existing, and development of novel, diagnostic tools to detect parasitic infections. The progress is considerable and warrants broad validation efforts. Combined with the development of improved tools for diagnosis and surveillance, integrated and multi-pronged control strategies now pave the way for elimination of parasitic diseases in P.R. China. Experiences and lessons learned can stimulate control and elimination efforts of parasitic diseases in other parts of the world

Maximizing Hadron Collider Sensitivity to Gauge-Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking Models

We consider typical hadron collider detector signals sensitive to delayed decays of the lightest neutralino to photon plus goldstino and demonstrate the potential for substantially increasing the portion of the general parameter space of a gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking model that can be probed at the Tevatron.Comment: 11 pages, full postscript file is available via anonymous ftp at ftp://ucdhep.ucdavis.edu/gunion/gmsb.ps; incorrect labels on figures correcte

Searching for radiative pumping lines of OH masers: II. The 53.3um absorption line towards 1612MHz OH maser sources

This paper analyzes the 53.3um line in the ISO LWS spectra towards a similar sample of OH/IR sources. We find 137 LWS spectra covering 53.3um and associated with 47 galactic OH/IR sources. Ten of these galactic OH/IR sources are found to show and another 5 ones tentatively show the 53.3um absorption while another 7 sources highly probably do not show this line. The source class is found to be correlated with the type of spectral profile: red supergiants (RSGs) and AGB stars tend to show strong blue-shifted filling emission in their 53.3um absorption line profiles while HII regions tend to show a weak red-shifted filling emission in the line profile. GC sources and megamasers do not show filling emission feature. It is argued that the filling emission might be the manifestation of an unresolved half emission half absorption profile of the 53.3um doublet. The 53.3 to 34.6um equivalent width (EW) ratio is close to unity for RSGs but much larger than unity for GC sources and megamasers while H II regions only show the 53.3um line. The pump rate defined as maser to IR photon flux ratio is approximately 5% for RSGs. The pump rates of GC sources are three order of magnitude smaller. Both the large 53.3 to 34.6um EW ratio and the small pump rate of the GC OH masers reflect that the two detected `pumping lines' in these sources are actually of interstellar origin. The pump rate of Arp 220 is 32%--much larger than that of RSGs, which indicates that the contribution of other pumping mechanisms to this megamaser is important.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, 4 table