The strategies that peanut and nut-allergic consumers employ to remain safe when travelling abroad

Copyright @ 2012 Barnett et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: An understanding of the management strategies used by food allergic individuals is needed as a prerequisite to improving avoidance and enhancing quality of life. Travel abroad is a high risk time for severe and fatal food allergic reactions, but there is paucity of research concerning foreign travel. This study is the first to investigate the experiences of, and strategies used by peanut and tree nut allergic individuals when travelling abroad. Methods: Thirty-two adults with a clinical history of reaction to peanuts or tree nuts consistent with IgE-mediated allergy participated in a qualitative interview study. Results: Travel abroad was considered difficult with inherent risks for allergic individuals. Many participants recounted difficulties with airlines or restaurants. Inconsistency in managing allergen avoidance by airlines was a particular risk and a cause of frustration to participants. Individuals used a variety of strategies to remain safe including visiting familiar environments, limiting their activities, carrying allergy information cards in the host language, preparing their own food and staying close to medical facilities. Conclusions: Participants used a variety of allergen avoidance strategies, which were mostly extensions or modifications of the strategies that they use when eating at home or eating-out in the UK. The extended strategies reflected their recognition of enhanced risk during travel abroad. Their risk assessments and actions were generally well informed and appropriate. A need for airline policy regarding allergy to be declared and adhered to is needed, as is more research to quantify the true risks of airborne allergens in the cabin. Recommendations arising from our study are presented.This study is funded by the UK Food Standards Agency under project code T07058

Beyond labelling: What strategies do nut allergic individuals employ to make food choices? A qualitative study

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ 2013 Barnett et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Objective: Food labelling is an important tool that assists people with peanut and tree nut allergies to avoid allergens. Nonetheless, other strategies are also developed and used in food choice decision making. In this paper, we examined the strategies that nut allergic individuals deploy to make safe food choices in addition to a reliance on food labelling. Methods: Three qualitative methods: an accompanied shop, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and the product choice reasoning task – were used with 32 patients that had a clinical history of reactions to peanuts and/or tree nuts consistent with IgE-mediated food allergy. Thematic analysis was applied to the transcribed data. Results: Three main strategies were identified that informed the risk assessments and food choice practices of nut allergic individuals. These pertained to: (1) qualities of product such as the product category or the country of origin, (2) past experience of consuming a food product, and (3) sensory appreciation of risk. Risk reasoning and risk management behaviours were often contingent on the context and other physiological and socio-psychological needs which often competed with risk considerations. Conclusions: Understanding and taking into account the complexity of strategies and the influences of contextual factors will allow healthcare practitioners, allergy nutritionists, and caregivers to advise and educate patients more effectively in choosing foods safely. Governmental bodies and policy makers could also benefit from an understanding of these food choice strategies when risk management policies are designed and developed.United Kingdom Food Standards Agenc

A model of adaptive decision making from representation of information environment by quantum fields

We present the mathematical model of decision making (DM) of agents acting in a complex and uncertain environment (combining huge variety of economical, financial, behavioral, and geo-political factors). To describe interaction of agents with it, we apply the formalism of quantum field theory (QTF). Quantum fields are of the purely informational nature. The QFT-model can be treated as a far relative of the expected utility theory, where the role of utility is played by adaptivity to an environment (bath). However, this sort of utility-adaptivity cannot be represented simply as a numerical function. The operator representation in Hilbert space is used and adaptivity is described as in quantum dynamics. We are especially interested in stabilization of solutions for sufficiently large time. The outputs of this stabilization process, probabilities for possible choices, are treated in the framework of classical DM. To connect classical and quantum DM, we appeal to Quantum Bayesianism (QBism). We demonstrate the quantum-like interference effect in DM which is exhibited as a violation of the formula of total probability and hence the classical Bayesian inference scheme.Comment: in press in Philosophical Transactions

SynGAP isoforms exert opposing effects on synaptic strength

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

High temperature AlInP X-ray spectrometers

Two custom-made Al0.52In0.48P p+-i-n+ mesa photodiodes with different diameters (217 µm ± 15 µm and 409 µm ± 28 µm) and i layer thicknesses of 6 µm have been electrically characterised over the temperature range 0 °C to 100 °C. Each photodiode was then investigated as a high-temperature-tolerant photon counting X-ray detector by connecting it to a custom-made low-noise charge-sensitive preamplifier and illuminating it with an 55Fe radioisotope X-ray source (Mn Kα = 5.9 keV; Mn Kβ = 6.49 keV). At 100 °C, the best energy resolutions (full width at half maximum at 5.9 keV) achieved using the 217 µm ± 15 µm diameter photodiode and the 409 µm ±28 µm diameter photodiode were 1.31 keV ± 0.04 keV and 1.64 keV ±0.08 keV, respectively. Noise analysis of the system is presented. The dielectric dissipation factor of Al0.52In0.48P was estimated as a function of temperature, up to 100 °C. The results show the performance of the thickest Al0.52In0.48P X-ray detectors so far reported at high temperature. The work has relevance for the development of novel space science instrumentation for use in hot space environments and extreme terrestrial applications

Using observational data to estimate an upper bound on the reduction in cancer mortality due to periodic screening

BACKGROUND: Because randomized cancer screening trials are very expensive, observational cancer screening studies can play an important role in the early phases of screening evaluation. Periodic screening evaluation (PSE) is a methodology for estimating the reduction in population cancer mortality from data on subjects who receive regularly scheduled screens. Although PSE does not require assumptions about natural history of cancer it requires other assumptions, particularly progressive detection – the assumption that once a cancer is detected by a screening test, it will always be detected by the screening test. METHODS: We formulate a simple version of PSE and show that it leads to an upper bound on screening efficacy if the progressive detection assumption does not hold (and any effect of birth cohort is minimal) To determine if the upper bound is reasonable, for three randomized screening trials, we compared PSE estimates based only on screened subjects with PSE estimates based on all subjects. RESULTS: In the three randomized screening trials, PSE estimates based on screened subjects gave fairly close results to PSE estimates based on all subjects. CONCLUSION: PSE has promise for obtaining an upper bound on the reduction in population cancer mortality rates based on observational screening data. If the upper bound estimate is found to be small and any birth cohort effects are likely minimal, then a definitive randomized trial would not be warranted

Fine-Scale Movements of the Broadnose Sevengill Shark and Its Main Prey, the Gummy Shark

Information on the fine-scale movement of predators and their prey is important to interpret foraging behaviours and activity patterns. An understanding of these behaviours will help determine predator-prey relationships and their effects on community dynamics. For instance understanding a predator's movement behaviour may alter pre determined expectations of prey behaviour, as almost any aspect of the prey's decisions from foraging to mating can be influenced by the risk of predation. Acoustic telemetry was used to study the fine-scale movement patterns of the Broadnose Sevengill shark Notorynchus cepedianus and its main prey, the Gummy shark Mustelus antarcticus, in a coastal bay of southeast Tasmania. Notorynchus cepedianus displayed distinct diel differences in activity patterns. During the day they stayed close to the substrate (sea floor) and were frequently inactive. At night, however, their swimming behaviour continually oscillated through the water column from the substrate to near surface. In contrast, M. antarcticus remained close to the substrate for the entire diel cycle, and showed similar movement patterns for day and night. For both species, the possibility that movement is related to foraging behaviour is discussed. For M. antarcticus, movement may possibly be linked to a diet of predominantly slow benthic prey. On several occasions, N. cepedianus carried out a sequence of burst speed events (increased rates of movement) that could be related to chasing prey. All burst speed events during the day were across the substrate, while at night these occurred in the water column. Overall, diel differences in water column use, along with the presence of oscillatory behaviour and burst speed events suggest that N. cepedianus are nocturnal foragers, but may opportunistically attack prey they happen to encounter during the day

Filariasis in Travelers Presenting to the GeoSentinel Surveillance Network

As international travel increases, there is rising exposure to many pathogens not traditionally encountered in the resource-rich countries of the world. The GeoSentinel Surveillance Network, a global network of medicine/travel clinics, was established in 1995 to detect morbidity trends among travelers. Filarial infections (parasitic worm infections that cause, among others, onchocerciasis [river blindness], lymphatic filariasis [e.g. elephantiasis, lymphedema, hydrocele] and loiasis [African eyeworm]) comprised 0.62% (n = 271) of the 43,722 medical conditions reported to the GeoSentinel Network between 1995 and 2004. Immigrants from filarial-endemic regions comprised the group most likely to have acquired a filarial infection; sub-Saharan Africa was the region of the world where the majority of filarial infections were acquired. Long-term travel (greater than 1 month) was more likely to be associated with acquisition of one of the filarial infections than shorter-term travel