Cohort analysis of programme data to estimate HIV incidence and uptake of HIV-related services among female sex workers in Zimbabwe, 2009-14.

BACKGROUND: HIV epidemiology and intervention uptake among female sex workers (FSW) in sub-Saharan Africa remain poorly understood. Data from outreach programmes are a neglected resource. METHODS: Analysis of data from FSW consultations with Zimbabwe's National Sex Work programme, 2009-14. At each visit, data were collected on socio-demographic characteristics, HIV testing history, HIV tests conducted by the programme and antiretroviral (ARV) history. Characteristics at first visit and longitudinal data on programme engagement, repeat HIV testing and HIV sero-conversion were analysed using a cohort approach. RESULTS: Data were available for 13360 women, 31389 visits, 14579 reported HIV tests, 2750 tests undertaken by the programme and 2387 reported ARV treatment initiations. At first visit, 72% of FSW had tested for HIV; 50% of these reported being HIV-positive. Among HIV-positive women, 41% reported being on ARV. 56% of FSW attended the programme only once. FSW who had not previously had an HIV positive test had been tested within the last 6 months 27% of the time during follow up. After testing HIV-positive, women started on ARV at a rate of 23 / 100 person years of follow-up. Among those with two or more HIV tests, the HIV sero-conversion rate was 9.8 / 100 person years of follow-up (95% confidence interval 7.1-15.9). CONCLUSIONS: Individual-level outreach programme data can be used to estimate HIV incidence and intervention uptake among FSW in Zimbabwe. Current data suggest very high HIV prevalence and incidence among this group and help identify areas for programme improvement. Further methodological validation is required.This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License 4.0 (CCBY-NC), where it is permissible to download, share, remix, transform, and buildup the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be used commercially.<br/

The HIV care cascade among female sex workers in Zimbabwe: results of a population-based survey from the Sisters Antiretroviral therapy Programme for Prevention of HIV, an Integrated Response (SAPPH-IRe) Trial.

: Female sex workers (FSW) in sub-Saharan Africa have a higher prevalence of HIV than other women of reproductive age. Social, legal, and structural barriers influence their access to care. Little is known about the HIV diagnosis and care cascade in most countries in Southern Africa. We aimed to describe the HIV diagnosis and care cascade among FSW in Zimbabwe. : We conducted cross-sectional respondent driven sampling (RDS) surveys of FSW in 14 sites across Zimbabwe as the baseline for a cluster-randomised controlled trial investigating a combination HIV prevention and care package. We administered a questionnaire, tested women for HIV and measured viral load. We report the mean, minimum, and maximum respondent-driven sampling-2 weighted site values. : The survey included 2722 women, approximately 200 per site. The mean HIV prevalence was 57.5% (42.8-79.2 site minimum and maximum). Of HIV-positive women, 64.0% (51.6-73.7) were aware of their status, 67.7% (53.4-84.1) of these reported taking antiretroviral therapy, and 77.8% (64.4-90.8) of these had a suppressed HIV viral load (&lt;1000 copies/mL). Among all HIV-positive women, 49.5% had a viral load &lt; 1000 copies/mL. : Although most HIV-positive women aware of their status are accessing antiretroviral therapy, 36.0% of HIV-positive women are unaware of their status and 29.3% of all FSW have an unsuppressed HIV viral load. Investigation and investment into models of testing, treatment, and care are necessary to reach UNAIDS targets for HIV elimination.<br/

The strength of co-authorship in gene name disambiguation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A biomedical entity mention in articles and other free texts is often ambiguous. For example, 13% of the gene names (aliases) might refer to more than one gene. The task of Gene Symbol Disambiguation (GSD) – a special case of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) – is to assign a unique gene identifier for all identified gene name aliases in biology-related articles. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning WSD techniques have been applied in the biomedical field with promising results. We examine here the utilisation potential of the fact – one of the special features of biological articles – that the authors of the documents are known through graph-based semi-supervised methods for the GSD task.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our key hypothesis is that a biologist refers to each particular gene by a fixed gene alias and this holds for the co-authors as well. To make use of the co-authorship information we decided to build the inverse co-author graph on MedLine abstracts. The nodes of the inverse co-author graph are articles and there is an edge between two nodes if and only if the two articles have a mutual author. We introduce here two methods using distances (based on the graph) of abstracts for the GSD task. We found that a disambiguation decision can be made in 85% of cases with an extremely high (99.5%) precision rate just by using information obtained from the inverse co-author graph. We incorporated the co-authorship information into two GSD systems in order to attain full coverage and in experiments our procedure achieved precision of 94.3%, 98.85%, 96.05% and 99.63% on the human, mouse, fly and yeast GSD evaluation sets, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Based on the promising results obtained so far we suggest that the co-authorship information and the circumstances of the articles' release (like the title of the journal, the year of publication) can be a crucial building block of any sophisticated similarity measure among biological articles and hence the methods introduced here should be useful for other biomedical natural language processing tasks (like organism or target disease detection) as well.</p

Implementation and Operational Research: Cohort Analysis of Program Data to Estimate HIV Incidence and Uptake of HIV-Related Services Among Female Sex Workers in Zimbabwe, 2009-2014

BACKGROUND: HIV epidemiology and intervention uptake among female sex workers (FSW) in sub-Saharan Africa remain poorly understood. Data from outreach programs are a neglected resource. METHODS: Analysis of data from FSW consultations with Zimbabwe's National Sex Work program, 2009–2014. At each visit, data were collected on sociodemographic characteristics, HIV testing history, HIV tests conducted by the program and antiretroviral (ARV) history. Characteristics at first visit and longitudinal data on program engagement, repeat HIV testing, and HIV seroconversion were analyzed using a cohort approach. RESULTS: Data were available for 13,360 women, 31,389 visits, 14,579 reported HIV tests, 2750 tests undertaken by the program, and 2387 reported ARV treatment initiations. At first visit, 72% of FSW had tested for HIV; 50% of these reported being HIV positive. Among HIV-positive women, 41% reported being on ARV. 56% of FSW attended the program only once. FSW who had not previously had an HIV-positive test had been tested within the last 6 months 27% of the time during follow-up. After testing HIV positive, women started on ARV at a rate of 23/100 person years of follow-up. Among those with 2 or more HIV tests, the HIV seroconversion rate was 9.8/100 person years of follow-up (95% confidence interval: 7.1 to 15.9). CONCLUSIONS: Individual-level outreach program data can be used to estimate HIV incidence and intervention uptake among FSW in Zimbabwe. Current data suggest very high HIV prevalence and incidence among this group and help identify areas for program improvement. Further methodological validation is required

Coxiella burnetii Phagocytosis Is Regulated by GTPases of the Rho Family and the RhoA Effectors mDia1 and ROCK

The GTPases belonging to the Rho family control the actin cytoskeleton rearrangements needed for particle internalization during phagocytosis. ROCK and mDia1 are downstream effectors of RhoA, a GTPase involved in that process. Coxiella burnetii, the etiologic agent of Q fever, is internalized by the host´s cells in an actin-dependent manner. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanism involved in this process has been poorly characterized. This work analyzes the role of different GTPases of the Rho family and some downstream effectors in the internalization of C. burnetii by phagocytic and non-phagocytic cells. The internalization of C. burnetii into HeLa and RAW cells was significantly inhibited when the cells were treated with Clostridium difficile Toxin B which irreversibly inactivates members of the Rho family. In addition, the internalization was reduced in HeLa cells that overexpressed the dominant negative mutants of RhoA, Rac1 or Cdc42 or that were knocked down for the Rho GTPases. The pharmacological inhibition or the knocking down of ROCK diminished bacterium internalization. Moreover, C. burnetii was less efficiently internalized in HeLa cells overexpressing mDia1-N1, a dominant negative mutant of mDia1, while the overexpression of the constitutively active mutant mDia1-ΔN3 increased bacteria uptake. Interestingly, when HeLa and RAW cells were infected, RhoA, Rac1 and mDia1 were recruited to membrane cell fractions. Our results suggest that the GTPases of the Rho family play an important role in C. burnetii phagocytosis in both HeLa and RAW cells. Additionally, we present evidence that ROCK and mDia1, which are downstream effectors of RhoA, are involved in that processFil: Salinas Ojeda, Romina Paola. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Ortiz Flores, Rodolfo Matias. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Distel, Jesús Sebastián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Aguilera, Milton Osmar. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Colombo, Maria Isabel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Beron, Walter. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Cienicas Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; Argentin

Clusters of galaxies : observational properties of the diffuse radio emission

Clusters of galaxies, as the largest virialized systems in the Universe, are ideal laboratories to study the formation and evolution of cosmic structures...(abridged)... Most of the detailed knowledge of galaxy clusters has been obtained in recent years from the study of ICM through X-ray Astronomy. At the same time, radio observations have proved that the ICM is mixed with non-thermal components, i.e. highly relativistic particles and large-scale magnetic fields, detected through their synchrotron emission. The knowledge of the properties of these non-thermal ICM components has increased significantly, owing to sensitive radio images and to the development of theoretical models. Diffuse synchrotron radio emission in the central and peripheral cluster regions has been found in many clusters. Moreover large-scale magnetic fields appear to be present in all galaxy clusters, as derived from Rotation Measure (RM) studies. Non-thermal components are linked to the cluster X-ray properties, and to the cluster evolutionary stage, and are crucial for a comprehensive physical description of the intracluster medium. They play an important role in the cluster formation and evolution. We review here the observational properties of diffuse non-thermal sources detected in galaxy clusters: halos, relics and mini-halos. We discuss their classification and properties. We report published results up to date and obtain and discuss statistical properties. We present the properties of large-scale magnetic fields in clusters and in even larger structures: filaments connecting galaxy clusters. We summarize the current models of the origin of these cluster components, and outline the improvements that are expected in this area from future developments thanks to the new generation of radio telescopes.Comment: Accepted for the publication in The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review. 58 pages, 26 figure

Radiation-Induced c-Jun Activation Depends on MEK1-ERK1/2 Signaling Pathway in Microglial Cells

Radiation-induced normal brain injury is associated with acute and/or chronic inflammatory responses, and has been a major concern in radiotherapy. Recent studies suggest that microglial activation is a potential contributor to chronic inflammatory responses following irradiation; however, the molecular mechanism underlying the response of microglia to radiation is poorly understood. c-Jun, a component of AP-1 transcription factors, potentially regulates neural cell death and neuroinflammation. We observed a rapid increase in phosphorylation of N-terminal c-Jun (on serine 63 and 73) and MAPK kinases ERK1/2, but not JNKs, in irradiated murine microglial BV2 cells. Radiation-induced c-Jun phosphorylation is dependent on the canonical MEK-ERK signaling pathway and required for both ERK1 and ERK2 function. ERK1/2 directly interact with c-Jun in vitro and in cells; meanwhile, the JNK binding domain on c-Jun is not required for its interaction with ERK kinases. Radiation-induced reactive oxygen species (ROS) potentially contribute to c-Jun phosphorylation through activating the ERK pathway. Radiation stimulates c-Jun transcriptional activity and upregulates c-Jun-regulated proinflammatory genes, such as tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-1β, and cyclooxygenase-2. Pharmacologic blockade of the ERK signaling pathway interferes with c-Jun activity and inhibits radiation-stimulated expression of c-Jun target genes. Overall, our study reveals that the MEK-ERK1/2 signaling pathway, but not the JNK pathway, contributes to the c-Jun-dependent microglial inflammatory response following irradiation

Allotransplanted Neurons Used to Repair Peripheral Nerve Injury Do Not Elicit Overt Immunogenicity

A major problem hindering the development of autograft alternatives for repairing peripheral nerve injuries is immunogenicity. We have previously shown successful regeneration in transected rat sciatic nerves using conduits filled with allogeneic dorsal root ganglion (DRG) cells without any immunosuppression. In this study, we re-examined the immunogenicity of our DRG neuron implanted conduits as a potential strategy to overcome transplant rejection. A biodegradable NeuraGen® tube was infused with pure DRG neurons or Schwann cells cultured from a rat strain differing from the host rats and used to repair 8 mm gaps in the sciatic nerve. We observed enhanced regeneration with allogeneic cells compared to empty conduits 16 weeks post-surgery, but morphological analyses suggest recovery comparable to the healthy nerves was not achieved. The degree of regeneration was indistinguishable between DRG and Schwann cell allografts although immunogenicity assessments revealed substantially increased presence of Interferon gamma (IFN-γ) in Schwann cell allografts compared to the DRG allografts by two weeks post-surgery. Macrophage infiltration of the regenerated nerve graft in the DRG group 16 weeks post-surgery was below the level of the empty conduit (0.56 fold change from NG; p<0.05) while the Schwann cell group revealed significantly higher counts (1.29 fold change from NG; p<0.001). Major histocompatibility complex I (MHC I) molecules were present in significantly increased levels in the DRG and Schwann cell allograft groups compared to the hollow NG conduit and the Sham healthy nerve. Our results confirmed previous studies that have reported Schwann cells as being immunogenic, likely due to MHC I expression. Nerve gap injuries are difficult to repair; our data suggest that DRG neurons are superior medium to implant inside conduit tubes due to reduced immunogenicity and represent a potential treatment strategy that could be preferable to the current gold standard of autologous nerve transplant

Awareness and knowledge of HPV, cervical cancer, and vaccines in young women after first delivery in São Paulo, Brazil : a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: The success of HPV vaccination programs will require awareness regarding HPV associated diseases and the benefits of HPV vaccination for the general population. The aim of this study was to assess the level of awareness and knowledge of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, cervical cancer prevention, vaccines, and factors associated with HPV awareness among young women after birth of the first child. METHODS: This analysis is part of a cross-sectional study carried out at Hospital Maternidade Leonor Mendes de Barros, a large public maternity hospital in Sao Paulo. Primiparous women (15-24 years) who gave birth in that maternity hospital were included. A questionnaire that included questions concerning knowledge of HPV, cervical cancer, and vaccines was applied. To estimate the association of HPV awareness with selected factors, prevalence ratios (PR) were estimated using a generalized linear model (GLM). RESULTS: Three hundred and one primiparous women were included; 37% of them reported that they "had ever heard about HPV", but only 19% and 7%, respectively, knew that HPV is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and that it can cause cervical cancer. Seventy-four percent of interviewees mentioned the preventive character of vaccines and all participants affirmed that they would accept HPV vaccination after delivery. In the multivariate analysis, only increasing age (P for trend = 0.021) and previous STI (P < 0.001) were factors independently associated with HPV awareness ("had ever heard about HPV"). CONCLUSIONS: This survey indicated that knowledge about the association between HPV and cervical cancer among primiparous young women is low. Therefore, these young low-income primiparous women could benefit greatly from educational interventions to encourage primary and secondary cervical cancer prevention programs.This study was supported by a research grant from Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, World Health Organization (ref: V20-181-13). The authors are grateful to Dr M.T. Aguado for helpful discussions. We are also grateful to Dr Corintio Mariani Neto for the unconditional support provided during field work and to nurses from Hospital Maternidade Leonor Mendes de Barros