Hematological Changes in Dogs with Visceral Leishmaniasis Are Associated with Increased IFN-γ and TNF Gene Expression Levels in the Bone Marrow

Visceral leishmaniasis is associated with a variety of hematological abnormalities. In this study, we correlated the hematological changes in the peripheral blood of dogs naturally infected with Leishmania infantum (L. infantum) with the distribution of cell lineages and cytokine gene expression patterns in the bone marrow. Samples from 63 naturally semidomiciled dogs living in an endemic area of visceral leishmaniasis were analyzed. L. infantum infection was detected in 50 dogs (79.3%). Among those, 18 (32%) had positive splenic cultures and showed more clinical signs. They also had lower red blood cell counts and leukocytosis with an increased number of neutrophils and monocytes in peripheral blood compared to dogs negative to this test. L. infantum DNA was detected in the bone marrow of 8/14 dogs with positive splenic culture. Dogs with L. infantum infection in the bone marrow presented with histiocytosis (p = 0.0046), fewer erythroid cell clusters (p = 0.0127) and increased gene expression levels of IFN-γ (p = 0.0015) and TNF (p = 0.0091). The data shown herein suggest that inflammatory and cytokine gene expression changes in bone marrow may contribute to the peripheral blood hematological changes observed in visceral leishmaniasis.V.A. was supported by a scholarship from CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico), FIOCRUZ and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISC-III).S

Fooling primality tests on smartcards

We analyse whether the smartcards of the JavaCard platform correctly validate primality of domain parameters. The work is inspired by the paper Prime and prejudice: primality testing under adversarial conditions, where the authors analysed many open-source libraries and constructed pseudoprimes fooling the primality testing functions. However, in the case of smartcards, often there is no way to invoke the primality test directly, so we trigger it by replacing (EC)DSA and (EC)DH prime domain parameters by adversarial composites. Such a replacement results in vulnerability to Pohlig-Hellman style attacks, leading to private key recovery. Out of nine smartcards (produced by five major manufacturers) we tested, all but one have no primality test in parameter validation. As the JavaCard platform provides no public primality testing API, the problem cannot be fixed by an extra parameter check, %an additional check before the parameters are passed to existing (EC)DSA and (EC)DH functions, making it difficult to mitigate in already deployed smartcards

On the shortness of vectors to be found by the Ideal-SVP quantum algorithm

The hardness of finding short vectors in ideals of cyclotomic number fields (hereafter, Ideal-SVP) can serve as a worst-case assumption for numerous efficient cryptosystems, via the average-case problems Ring-SIS and Ring-LWE. For a while, it could be assumed the Ideal-SVP problem was as hard a

A Subfield Lattice Attack on Overstretched NTRU Assumptions:Cryptanalysis of Some FHE and Graded Encoding Schemes

International audienc

Ethnic differences in Internal Medicine referrals and diagnosis in the Netherlands

As in other Western countries, the number of immigrants in the Netherlands is growing rapidly. In 1980 non-western immigrants constituted about 3% of the population, in 1990 it was 6% and currently it is more than 10%. Nearly half of the migrant population lives in the four major cities. In the municipality of Rotterdam 34% of the inhabitants are migrants. Health policy is based on the ideal that all inhabitants should have equal access to health care and this requires an efficient planning of health care resources, like staff and required time per patient. The aim of this study is to examine ethnic differences in the use of internal medicine outpatient care, specifically to examine ethnic differences in the reason for referral and diagnosis. Methods We conducted a study with an open cohort design. We registered the ethnicity, sex, age, referral reasons, diagnosis and living area of all ne