Fungi Associated with the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, Adelges tsugae, and Assessment of Entomopathogenic Isolates for Management

Fungi associated with the hemlock wooly adelgid, Adelges tsugae Annand (Hemiptera: Adelgidae), were collected throughout the eastern USA and southern China. Twenty fungal genera were identified, as were 79 entomopathogenic isolates, including: Lecanicillium lecanii (Zimmermann) (Hypocreales: Insertae sedis), Isaria farinosa (Holm: Fries.) (Cordycipitaceae), Beauveria bassiana (Balasamo) (Hyphomycetes), and Fusarium spp (Nectriaceae). The remaining fungal genera associated with insect cadavers were similar for both the USA and China collections, although the abundance of Acremonium (Hypocreaceae) was greater in China. The entomopathogenic isolates were assayed for efficacy against Myzus persicae (Sulzer) (Homoptera: Aphididae) and yielded mortality ranging from 3 to 92%. Ten isolates demonstrating the highest efficacy were further assessed for efficacy against field-collected A. tsugae under laboratory conditions. Overall, two B. bassiana, one L. lecanii, and a strain of Metarhizium anisopliae (Metchnikoff) (Hypocreales: Clavicipitaceae), demonstrated significantly higher efficacy against A. tsugae than the others. Isolates were further evaluated for conidial production, germination rate and colony growth at four temperatures representative of field conditions. All isolates were determined to be mesophiles with optimal temperature between 25–30° C. In general, conidial production increased with temperature, though two I. farinosa produced significantly more conidia at cooler temperatures. When efficacy values were compared with conidial production and temperature tolerances, Agricultural Research Service Collection of Entomopathogenic Fungi (ARSEF) 1080, 5170, and 5798 had characteristics comparable to the industrial B. bassiana strain GHA

Old and new cluster designs in emergency field surveys: in search of a one-fits-all solution

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Cluster surveys are frequently used to measure key nutrition and health indicators in humanitarian emergencies. The survey design of 30 clusters of 7 children (30 × 7) was initially proposed by the World Health Organization for measuring vaccination coverage, and later a design of 30 clusters of 30 children (30 × 30) was introduced to measure acute malnutrition in emergency settings. Recently, designs of 33 clusters of 6 children (33 × 6) and 67 clusters of 3 children (67 × 3) have been proposed as alternatives that enable measurement of several key indicators with sufficient precision, while offering substantial savings in time. This paper explores expected effects of using 67 × 3, 33 × 6, or 30 × 7 designs instead of a "standard" 30 × 30 design on precision and accuracy of estimates, and on time required to complete the survey.</p> <p>Analysis</p> <p>The 67 × 3, 33 × 6, and 30 × 7 designs are expected to be more statistically efficient for measuring outcomes having high design effects (e.g., vaccination coverage, vitamin A distribution coverage, or access to safe water sources), and less efficient for measuring outcomes with more within-cluster variability, such as global acute malnutrition or anemia. Because of small sample sizes, these designs may not provide sufficient levels of precision to measure crude mortality rates. Given the small number (3 to 7) of survey subjects per cluster, it may be hard to select representative samples of subjects within clusters.</p> <p>The smaller sample size in these designs will likely result in substantial time savings. The magnitude of the savings will depend on several factors, including the average travel time between clusters. The 67 × 3 design will provide the least time savings. The 33 × 6 and 30 × 7 designs perform similarly to each other, both in terms of statistical efficiency and in terms of time required to complete the survey.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Cluster designs discussed in this paper may offer substantial time and cost savings compared to the traditional 30 × 30 design, and may provide acceptable levels of precision when measuring outcomes that have high intracluster homogeneity. Further investigation is required to determine whether these designs can consistently provide accurate point estimates for key outcomes of interest. Organizations conducting cluster surveys in emergency settings need to build their technical capacity in survey design to be able to calculate context-specific sample sizes individually for each planned survey.</p

The impact of laxative use upon symptoms in patients with proven slow transit constipation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Constipation severity is often defined by symptoms including feelings of complete evacuation, straining, stool frequency and consistency. These descriptors are mostly obtained in the absence of laxative use. For many constipated patients laxative usage is ubiquitous and long standing. Our aim was to determine the impact of laxative use upon the stereotypic constipation descriptors.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Patients with confirmed slow transit constipation completed 3-week stool diaries, detailing stool frequency and form, straining, laxative use and pain and bloating scores. Each diary day was classified as being under laxative affect (laxative affected days) or not (laxative unaffected days). Unconditional logistic regression was used to assess the affects of laxatives on constipation symptoms.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Ninety four patients with scintigraphically confirmed slow transit constipation were enrolled in the study. These patients reported a stool frequency of 5.6 ± 4.3 bowel motions/week, only 21 patients reported <3 bowel motions/week. Similarly, 21 patients reported a predominant hard stool at defecation. The majority (90%) of patients reported regular straining. A regular feeling of complete evacuation was reported in just 7 patients. Daily pain and/or bloating were reported by 92% of patients. When compared with laxative unaffected days, on the laxative affected days patients had a higher stool frequency (OR 2.23; <it>P </it><0.001) and were more likely to report loose stools (OR 1.64; <it>P </it><0.009). Laxatives did not increase the number of bowel actions associated with a feeling of complete evacuation. Laxative use had no affect upon straining, pain or bloating scores</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The reporting of frequent and loose stools with abdominal pain and/or bloating is common in patients with slow transit constipation. While laxative use is a significant contributor to altering stool frequency and form, laxatives have no apparent affect on pain or bloating or upon a patients feeling of complete evacuation. These factors need to be taken into account when using constipation symptoms to define this population.</p

Evaluation of metabolic syndrome in adults of Talca city, Chile

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

The Impact of Rating Agency Reputation on Local Government Bond Yields

G12, G24, Split ratings, municipal bonds, rating agencies, reputation,