An outbreak of food poisoning among children attending an international sports event in Johannesburg

Objectives. To describe an outbreak of food poisoning at a major international sports event in Johannesburg and to determine the likely cause and source of the outbreak.Design. A descriptive, case-control study.Setting. An international sports event in Johannesburg.Methods. A questionnaire survey of involved children was used to conduct a case-control study. Microbiological and chemical analysis of the implicated food was undertaken. Site visits to the premises involved in food preparation were conducted.Results. A total of 578 children were involved. Of the 361 children who returned questionnaires, 134 were affected by an acute-onset emetic-type illness, while 53 children developed diarrhoea. Consumption of fruit juice was associated with acute illness, while diarrhoea was associated with the consumption of maize-meal porridge (pap) and chicken stew. Microbiological analysis revealed high bacterial loads in samples of the fruit juice and the presence of Shigella flexneri in the maize-meal porridge. Visits to the suppliers of the implicated foods revealed several deficiencies in terms of food hygiene precautions.Conclusion. The likely vehicles and causes of this outbreak are elucidated. Guidelines for monitoring the supply and distribution of food to future similar events should be established. Furthermore, hospitals should have protocols in place to deal with such outbreaks in a manner that facilitates epidemiological investigation

Multimodal population brain imaging in the UK Biobank prospective epidemiological study

Medical imaging has enormous potential for early disease prediction, but is impeded by the difficulty and expense of acquiring data sets before symptom onset. UK Biobank aims to address this problem directly by acquiring high-quality, consistently acquired imaging data from 100,000 predominantly healthy participants, with health outcomes being tracked over the coming decades. The brain imaging includes structural, diffusion and functional modalities. Along with body and cardiac imaging, genetics, lifestyle measures, biological phenotyping and health records, this imaging is expected to enable discovery of imaging markers of a broad range of diseases at their earliest stages, as well as provide unique insight into disease mechanisms. We describe UK Biobank brain imaging and present results derived from the first 5,000 participants' data release. Although this covers just 5% of the ultimate cohort, it has already yielded a rich range of associations between brain imaging and other measures collected by UK Biobank

Antibiotic research and development: business as usual?

This article contends that poor economic incentives are an important reason for the lack of new drugs and explains how the DRIVE-AB intends to change the landscape by harnessing the expertise, motivation and diversity of its partner

Abstracts from the 8th International Conference on cGMP Generators, Effectors and Therapeutic Implications

This work was supported by a restricted research grant of Bayer AG

An outbreak of food poisoning among children attending an international sports event in Johannesburg

Objectives. To describe an outbreak of food. poisoning at a major international sports event in Johannesburg and to determine the likely cause and source of the outbreak.Design. A descriptive, case-control study.Setting. An international sports event in Johannesburg.Methods. A questionnaire survey of involved children was used. to conduct a case-control study. Microbiological and chemical analysis of the implicated food was undertaken. Site visits to the premises involved in food preparation were conducted.Results. A total of 578 children were involved. Of the 361 children who returned questionnaires, 134 were affected by an acute-onset emetic-type illness, while 53 children developed diarrhoea. Consumption of fruit juice was associated with acute illness, while diarrhoea was associated with the consumption of maize-meal porridge (pap) and chicken stew. Microbiological analysis revealed high bacterial loads in samples of the fruit juice and the presence of Shigella flexneri in the maize-meal porridge. Visits to the suppliers of the implicated foods revealed several deficiencies in terms of food. hygiene precautions.Conclusion. The likely vehicles and causes of this outbreak are elucidated. Guidelines for monitoring the supply and distribution of food. to future similar events should be established. Furthermore, hospitals should have protocols in place to deal with such outbreaks in a manner that facilitafes epidemiological investigation

A novel standard to evaluate the impact of therapeutic agents on patient safety – The BURDEN OF THERAPY™©∗

Purpose: Currently, treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) during a clinical study are summarized over the entire study period. Objective: Develop and validate a novel methodology, BURDEN OF THERAPY©∗ (BOTh©∗), to quantify presence and severity of TEAEs on each day of study. Methods: BOTh utilizes patient-level safety data to derive a quantitative estimate for the burden of TEAEs that all or individual patients experience on each day of a clinical study. Burden estimate for each day is based on number and severity of TEAEs. A chart displays the total burden experienced by patients on each day throughout the study and statistical analyses may be performed with the area under curve. Methodology was applied to two validated and published clinical studies and statistically analyzed. Results: In a peripheral neuropathic pain study, the topical group had a greater incidence of TEAEs than the oral anticonvulsant group when evaluated using current methodology. Utilizing BOTh, TEAEs with the topical agent were of short duration and occurred for three days after application, whereas TEAEs with the oral agent increased during dose titration and persisted to study end. In an overactive bladder study there was a minimal difference in overall TEAEs between groups, but BOTh revealed a higher burden related to dry mouth in the antimuscarinic versus β3 adrenergic agonist group. Conclusions: BOTh is a highly sensitive method to evaluate the comparative burden experienced by patients during treatment, and can facilitate better informed treatment selection. We propose BOTh as the new standard for analyzing safety during clinical studies

Synthesis and characterisation of styrenen-butadiene graft copolymers

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