Human African trypanosomiasis : current status and eradication efforts

Epidemics of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) in the 20th century led to millions of deaths. However, since the start of the twenty-first century, there is been a continued decline in the number of reported cases, due to increased investment and prioritisation of control efforts. Systematic screening of at-risk areas and widespread access to increasingly advanced diagnostics and treatments, along with much improved vector control, have all helped to make disease elimination achievable in the near future. Despite the progress, the danger of disease resurgence is well-known for HAT and continued surveillance and treatment availability is essential. Additionally, many uncertainties regarding HAT transmission remain and combine to make potential disease eradication a complete unknown

Climate change, society issues and sustainable agriculture

Despite its prediction 100 years ago by scientists studying CO2, man-made climate change has been officially recognised only in 2007 by the Nobel prize committee. Climate changes since the industrial revolution have already deeply impacted ecosystems. I report major impacts of climate change on waters, terrestrial ecosystems, agriculture, and economy in Europe. The lesson of the climate change story is that humans do not learn from scientists until it really hurts. Furthermore, all society issues cannot be solved anymore using the old, painkiller approach because all issues are now huge, linked, global and fast-developing. In that respect, actual society structures are probably outdated. Here, agronomists are the most advanced scientists to solve society issues because they master the study of complex systems, from the molecule to the global scale. Now more than ever agriculture is a central point to which all society issues are bound. Indeed, humans eat food

The church and religion in the Anglo Scottish border counties, 1534 to 1572

The 16th century Borders have been viewed traditionally as violent, feudal and catholic, but their feudalism is now questioned. The verdict on their religion seems often to be based either on general impressions or on lack of evidence. Recently the value of studying the social and political life of the English and Scottish Borders together has been recognised, and this approach is also viable for their religious life. The scattered evidence shows that in terms of material wealth and personnel the Border church was badly served, and that the changes of the Reformation often made the situation worse. Moreover it suffered from too close an association with the violent aspects of Border society. Popular religion in the area seems to have been more concerned with the magical aspect of the church's ceremonies than with orthodox Catholicism or Protestantism. At the same time there was a realisation of the problems, and there were educative and civilising influences at work. By the end of this period they were beginning to have some little effect, while at the same time the weakened traditional Catholicism was declining through lack of organised support. The 1569 revolt, which at first sight might suggest that the situation had changed little since 1536, in fact by its failure demonstrates the changes which had occurred. However the problems of the Border ' church went too deep to be solved easily, and the Borderers' independence in matters social, political, and religious would have to be overcome to achieve any great measure of success. Throughout this period both English and Scottish governments were by turn unable or unwilling to effect the necessary changes, and the inadequate church organisations were left to struggle on alone

History of public secondary education in Louisville.

The development of secondary education in Louisville is significant because this city (together with the City of Covington) took the lead in establishing high schools in Kentucky. Although the state legislature from early days encouraged county seminaries and private academies, it gave practically no attention to high schools until 1908. After the Civil War various cities established high schools. There were few county high schools until the last decade of the century (1890-1900). Fifty-nine Kentucky high schools were accredited by the State University in 1908, but there 1 were perhaps as many unaccredited (with two or three year curricula). The City of Louisville has not always been the flourishing Gateway To The South that it is today and neither has the secondary educational system of this city always been what it is today. There had to be a simple, unpretentious beginning. The writer feels that a brief historical introduction will serve the purpose of connecting the past with the present and of laying a foundation on which to base the thesis itself

Coherent Particle Transfer in an On-Demand Single-Electron Source

Coherent electron transfer from a localized state trapped in a quantum dot into a ballistic conductor, taking place in on-demand electron sources, in general may result in excitation of particle-hole pairs. We consider a simple model for these effects, involving a resonance level with time-dependent energy, and derive Floquet scattering matrix describing inelastic transitions of particles in the Fermi sea. We find that, as the resonance level is driven through the Fermi level, particle transfer may take place completely without particle-hole excitations for certain driving protocols. In particular, such noiseless transfer occurs when the level moves with constant rapidity, its energy changing linearly with time. A detection scheme for studying the coherence of particle transfer is proposed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Updated introduction, Fig. 1, and reference

The impact of contact tracing in clustered populations

The tracing of potentially infectious contacts has become an important part of the control strategy for many infectious diseases, from early cases of novel infections to endemic sexually transmitted infections. Here, we make use of mathematical models to consider the case of partner notification for sexually transmitted infection, however these models are sufficiently simple to allow more general conclusions to be drawn. We show that, when contact network structure is considered in addition to contact tracing, standard “mass action” models are generally inadequate. To consider the impact of mutual contacts (specifically clustering) we develop an improvement to existing pairwise network models, which we use to demonstrate that ceteris paribus, clustering improves the efficacy of contact tracing for a large region of parameter space. This result is sometimes reversed, however, for the case of highly effective contact tracing. We also develop stochastic simulations for comparison, using simple re-wiring methods that allow the generation of appropriate comparator networks. In this way we contribute to the general theory of network-based interventions against infectious disease

Enhanced vaccine control of epidemics in adaptive networks

We study vaccine control for disease spread on an adaptive network modeling disease avoidance behavior. Control is implemented by adding Poisson distributed vaccination of susceptibles. We show that vaccine control is much more effective in adaptive networks than in static networks due to an interaction between the adaptive network rewiring and the vaccine application. Disease extinction rates using vaccination are computed, and orders of magnitude less vaccine application is needed to drive the disease to extinction in an adaptive network than in a static one

Screening strategies for a sustainable endpoint for Gambiense sleeping sickness

Background. Gambiense human African trypanosomiasis (gHAT, sleeping sickness) is a vector-borne disease typically fatal without treatment. Intensified, mainly medical-based, interventions in endemic areas have reduced the occurrence of gHAT to historically low levels. However, persistent regions, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), remain a challenge to achieving the World Health Organization global elimination of transmission (EOT) target. Methods. Stochastic models of gHAT transmission fitted to DRC case data explored patterns of regional reporting and extinction. The time to EOT at a health zone scale (∼100,000 people) and how an absence of reported cases informs about EOT was quantified. Results. Regional epidemiology and level of active screening (AS) both influenced the predicted time to EOT. Different AS cessation criteria had similar expected infection dynamics and recrudescence of infection was unlikely. However, whether EOT has been achieved when AS ends, is critically dependent on the stopping criteria. Two or three consecutive years of no detected cases provided greater confidence of EOT compared to a single year (66-75% and 82-84% probability of EOT respectively compared to 31-51%). Conclusion. Multiple years of AS without case detections is a valuable measure to assess the likelihood that the EOT target has been met locally