A method of assessing the quality of pharmaceutical market and industry reports as a source to study access to medicines

This repository item contains a single issue of the Health and Development Discussion Papers, an informal working paper series that began publishing in 2002 by the Boston University Center for Global Health and Development. It is intended to help the Center and individual authors to disseminate work that is being prepared for journal publication or that is not appropriate for journal publication but might still have value to readers.Market and industry reports can be useful in studying access to medicines from a pharmaceutical market perspective. However, many market and industry reports lack some or much of the information required to conduct analyses to study access to medicines and are often not transparent in their data sources and research methodologies. The instrument developed in this study, titled the Pharmaceutical Market and Industry Report Assessment Tool (PIRAT), assesses the quality of pharmaceutical market and industry reports, specifically focusing on the needs of public health researchers, and includes criteria describing the content and quality of the market reports. The assessment tool generates an unweighted score indicating the relative strengths and weaknesses of reports

CMB Likelihood Functions for Beginners and Experts

Although the broad outlines of the appropriate pipeline for cosmological likelihood analysis with CMB data has been known for several years, only recently have we had to contend with the full, large-scale, computationally challenging problem involving both highly-correlated noise and extremely large datasets ($N > 1000$). In this talk we concentrate on the beginning and end of this process. First, we discuss estimating the noise covariance from the data itself in a rigorous and unbiased way; this is essentially an iterated minimum-variance mapmaking approach. We also discuss the unbiased determination of cosmological parameters from estimates of the power spectrum or experimental bandpowers.Comment: Long-delayed submission. In AIP Conference Proceedings "3K Cosmology" held in Rome, Oct 5-10, 1998, edited by Luciano Maiani, Francesco Melchiorri and Nicola Vittorio, 343-347, New York, American Institute of Physics 199

Dust in a Type Ia Supernova Progenitor: Spitzer Spectroscopy of Kepler's Supernova Remnant

Characterization of the relatively poorly-understood progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovae is of great importance in astrophysics, particularly given the important cosmological role that these supernovae play. Kepler's Supernova Remnant, the result of a Type Ia supernova, shows evidence for an interaction with a dense circumstellar medium (CSM), suggesting a single-degenerate progenitor system. We present 7.5-38 $\mu$m infrared (IR) spectra of the remnant, obtained with the {\it Spitzer Space Telescope}, dominated by emission from warm dust. Broad spectral features at 10 and 18 $\mu$m, consistent with various silicate particles, are seen throughout. These silicates were likely formed in the stellar outflow from the progenitor system during the AGB stage of evolution, and imply an oxygen-rich chemistry. In addition to silicate dust, a second component, possibly carbonaceous dust, is necessary to account for the short-wavelength IRS and IRAC data. This could imply a mixed chemistry in the atmosphere of the progenitor system. However, non-spherical metallic iron inclusions within silicate grains provide an alternative solution. Models of collisionally-heated dust emission from fast shocks ($>$ 1000 km s$^{-1}$) propagating into the CSM can reproduce the majority of the emission associated with non-radiative filaments, where dust temperatures are $\sim 80-100$ K, but fail to account for the highest temperatures detected, in excess of 150 K. We find that slower shocks (a few hundred km s$^{-1}$) into moderate density material ($n_{0} \sim 50-250$ cm$^{-3}$) are the only viable source of heating for this hottest dust. We confirm the finding of an overall density gradient, with densities in the north being an order of magnitude greater than those in the south.Comment: Accepted by ApJ. 11 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Produced using emulateapj forma

Heterogeneity and glycan masking of cell wall microstructures in the stems of Miscanthus x giganteus, and its parents M. sinensis and M. sacchariflorus

Plant cell walls, being repositories of fixed carbon, are important sources of biomass and renewable energy. Miscanthus species are fast growing grasses with a high biomass yield and they have been identified as potential bioenergy crops. Miscanthus x giganteus is the sterile hybrid between M. sinensis and M. sacchariflorus, with a faster and taller growth than its parents. In this study, the occurrence of cell wall polysaccharides in stems of Miscanthus species has been determined using fluorescence imaging with sets of cell wall directed monoclonal antibodies. Heteroxylan and mixed linkage-glucan (MLG) epitopes are abundant in stem cell walls of Miscanthus species, but their distributions are different in relation to the interfascicular parenchyma and these epitopes also display different developmental dynamics. Detection of pectic homogalacturonan (HG) epitopes was often restricted to intercellular spaces of parenchyma regions and, notably, the high methyl ester LM20 HG epitope was specifically abundant in the pith parenchyma cell walls of M. x giganteus. Some cell wall probes cannot access their target glycan epitopes because of masking by other polysaccharides. In the case of Miscanthus stems, masking of xyloglucan by heteroxylan and masking of pectic galactan by heteroxylan and MLG was detected in certain cell wall regions. Knowledge of tissue level heterogeneity of polysaccharide distributions and molecular architectures in Miscanthus cell wall structures will be important for both understanding growth mechanisms and also for the development of potential strategies for the efficient deconstruction of Miscanthus biomass

The First Reported Infrared Emission from the SN 1006 Remnant

We report results of infrared imaging and spectroscopic observations of the SN 1006 remnant, carried out with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The 24 micron image from MIPS clearly shows faint filamentary emission along the northwest rim of the remnant shell, nearly coincident with the Balmer filaments that delineate the present position of the expanding shock. The 24 micron emission traces the Balmer filaments almost perfectly, but lies a few arcsec within, indicating an origin in interstellar dust heated by the shock. Subsequent decline in the IR behind the shock is presumably due largely to grain destruction through sputtering. The emission drops far more rapidly than current models predict, however, even for a higher proportion of small grains than would be found closer to the Galactic plane. The rapid drop may result in part from a grain density that has always been lower -- a relic effect from an earlier epoch when the shock was encountering a lower density -- but higher grain destruction rates still seem to be required. Spectra from three positions along the NW filament from the IRS instrument all show only a featureless continuum, consistent with thermal emission from warm dust. The dust-to-gas mass ratio in the pre-shock interstellar medium is lower than that expected for the Galactic ISM -- as has also been observed in the analysis of IR emission from other SNRs but whose cause remains unclear. As with other SN Ia remnants, SN 1006 shows no evidence for dust grain formation in the supernova ejecta.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure