Highway Safety Research, Development, and Technology Transfer

Late in 1987, the Federal Highway Administration assembled a seven-member panel which, guided by a primary contractor, Harrison Boyd & Associates, was charged with the task of developing a recommended five-year research, development, and technology transfer program for highway safety starting in the 1990s. As a part of the task, each panel member prepared an individual position paper to stimulate and focus panel discussions and, ultimately, to provide the basis for a consensus paper. This represents one such individual paper. Although it is believed that significant safety gains can be achieved in the 1990s and beyond simply by more extensive implementation of known and proven crash countermeasures, this position paper focuses on research activity, the generation or extension of information related to the enhancement of road safety. Quantum improvement in road safety as a result of highly focused new research appears unlikely. Accordingly, in the quest to achieve significant additional gains, the recommended approach tackles the road safety problem on a broad front, examining a wide variety of factors contributing to travel hazard and building incrementally on existing knowledge. Furthermore, emphasis has been placed on activities likely to yield results that, if implemented, could be expected to generate short-term gains, perhaps within a period as short as five or fewer years. Certainly no claim can ever be made that a specific research program will generate knowledge adequate to sustain high levels of travel safety over long periods of time. The recommended five-year research program is simply an immediate, short-term phase of a continuing process that seeks to retain or enhance a high level of personal safety in face of endless changes in human activity patterns and the highway systems built to accommodate them

Improved single-swab sample preparation for recovering bacterial and phage DNA from human skin and wound microbiomes.

BackgroundCharacterization of the skin and wound microbiome is of high biomedical interest, but is hampered by the low biomass of typical samples. While sample preparation from other microbiomes (e.g., gut) has been the subject of extensive optimization, procedures for skin and wound microbiomes have received relatively little attention. Here we describe an improved method for obtaining both phage and microbial DNA from a single skin or wound swab, characterize the yield of DNA in model samples, and demonstrate the utility of this approach with samples collected from a wound clinic.ResultsWe find a substantial improvement when processing wound samples in particular; while only one-quarter of wound samples processed by a traditional method yielded sufficient DNA for downstream analysis, all samples processed using the improved method yielded sufficient DNA. Moreover, for both skin and wound samples, community analysis and viral reads obtained through deep sequencing of clinical swab samples showed significant improvement with the use of the improved method.ConclusionUse of this method may increase the efficiency and data quality of microbiome studies from low-biomass samples

Estimation of Equivalent Axleloads: Computer Program Documentation

The estimation of equivalent axleloads (EAL) requires the correlation of several data bases. Described herein are three computer programs which summarize truckweight data and classification data, and combine the two data bases to estimate EAL\u27s for each site where classification counts are available in a given year. The programs also present the data in two matrices to characterize the effects that geographic area, federal-aid classification, coal-haul volume and total volume have on each of the traffic parameters necessary to compute EAL\u27s

Microbial predictors of healing and short-term effect of debridement on the microbiome of chronic wounds.

Chronic wounds represent a large and growing disease burden. Infection and biofilm formation are two of the leading impediments of wound healing, suggesting an important role for the microbiome of these wounds. Debridement is a common and effective treatment for chronic wounds. We analyzed the bacterial content of the wound surface from 20 outpatients with chronic wounds before and immediately after debridement, as well as healthy skin. Given the large variation observed among different wounds, we introduce a Bayesian statistical method that models patient-to-patient variability and identify several genera that were significantly enriched in wounds vs. healthy skin. We found no difference between the microbiome of the original wound surface and that exposed by a single episode of sharp debridement, suggesting that this debridement did not directly alter the wound microbiome. However, we found that aerobes and especially facultative anaerobes were significantly associated with wounds that did not heal within 6 months. The facultative anaerobic genus Enterobacter was significantly associated with lack of healing. The results suggest that an abundance of facultative anaerobes is a negative prognostic factor in the chronic wound microbiome, possibly due to the increased robustness of such communities to different metabolic environments

A review of the Schizobasis group of Drimia Jacq. (Hyacinthaceae: Urgineoideae), and the new species D. sigmoidea from Western Cape, South Africa

AbstractWe review the Schizobasis Baker group of Drimia Jacq. in southern Africa. We adopt a broad circumscription of D. intricata (Baker) J.C.Manning & Goldblatt as occurring widely through the summer-rainfall parts of southern and tropical Africa, and describe a second species, D. sigmoidea J.C.Manning & J.Deacon, for populations from the Worcester–Robertson Karoo in winter-rainfall Western Cape. It is distinguished from D. intricata by its distinctive, deflexed pedicels that are sharply sigmoid in fruit, and conspicuous anther connective appendage. Both species are fully described and illustrated, with a map of their distribution in southern Africa