La mucormycose nasosinusienne: Diagnostic et modalites therapeutiques

La mucormycose est une infection fongique rare qui touche essentiellement les sujets immunodéprimés et notamment diabétiques. La localisation de cette maladie est surtout nasosinusienne. Son pronostic reste mauvais malgré le développement des moyens de prise en charge. Nous rapportons deux cas de mucormycose nasosinusienne à travers lesquels nous discutons les aspects cliniques et radiologiques, ainsi que les moyens thérapeutiques de cette maladie. Il s’agit d’un homme et d’une femme âgés respectivement de 56 et 52 ans. Le premier était diabétique et la deuxième insuffisante rénale. L’évolution était lente dans le premier cas et très rapide dans le deuxième. Le diagnostic était dans les deux cas histologique. L’évolution était, dans le premier cas, favorable après traitement associant débridement chirurgical et amphotéricine B, et dans le second rapidement fatale. Conclusion : La mucormycose nasosinusienne est une affection grave dont le pronostic peut être mauvais malgré le traitement.Mots clés : Infection fongique, mucormycose rhinocérébrale, zygomycètes

Knowledge assessment and sharing on sustainable agriculture. Main lessons.

1 CD-ROM. Projeto DG-Research - Contract nº GOCE-CT-2004-505582

Knowledge assessment and sharing on sustainable agriculture. Main results, gaps in knowledge and challenges in the Latin American platform.

1 CD-ROM. Projeto DG-Research - Contract nº GOCE-CT-2004-505582

Under threes’ play with tablets

This paper outlines the findings from a study that examined the tablet and app use of children aged from birth to three. The aim of the study was to examine how far use of tablets and apps promoted play and creativity. A total of 954 UK parents of children aged from birth to three who had access to a tablet in the home completed an online survey that explored the children’s use of apps. Ethnographic case studies of four children aged from birth to three were undertaken in homes in order to explore in greater depth issues that emerged in the survey. The paper reports on the way in which the use of tablets promoted play and creativity across cognitive, physical social and cultural domains. The implications for policy and research are outlined

Under threes' play with tablets

This paper outlines the key findings of a study developed in collaboration between academics, teachers and children’s media companies. The project was co-produced in that all project partners contributed to the development of the project aims and objectives and were involved in data collection, analysis and dissemination. The aim of the study was to identify children's uses of and responses to apps in terms of their play and creativity. This paper focuses on the digital play with tablets of children aged from birth to three. Ofcom (2019:4) has reported that six in ten of three- and four-year-olds in the UK use any device to go online, with 49% using a tablet for this purpose. This is a large, and growing, market that deserves the attention of researchers (Kucirkova and Radesky, 2017). Given that technology is embedded in children’s lives, playing an important part in their ‘multimodal lifeworlds’ (Arnott and Yelland, 2020), it is timely to consider what value this use has in relation to play and creativity, as both are highly significant to children’s development (Broadhead, Howard and Wood, 2010)

Immune responses during COVID-19 infection

Over the past 16 years, three coronaviruses (CoVs), severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV) in 2002, Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) in 2012 and 2015, and SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, have been causing severe and fatal human epidemics. The unpredictability of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) poses a major burden on health care and economic systems across the world. This is caused by the paucity of in-depth knowledge of the risk factors for severe COVID-19, insufficient diagnostic tools for the detection of SARS-CoV-2, as well as the absence of specific and effective drug treatments. While protective humoral and cellular immune responses are usually mounted against these betacoronaviruses, immune responses to SARS-CoV2 sometimes derail towards inflammatory tissue damage, leading to rapid admissions to intensive care units. The lack of knowledge on mechanisms that tilt the balance between these two opposite outcomes poses major threats to many ongoing clinical trials dealing with immunostimulatory or immunoregulatory therapeutics. This review will discuss innate and cognate immune responses underlying protective or deleterious immune reactions against these pathogenic coronaviruses

Structure and dynamics of ring polymers: entanglement effects because of solution density and ring topology

The effects of entanglement in solutions and melts of unknotted ring polymers have been addressed by several theoretical and numerical studies. The system properties have been typically profiled as a function of ring contour length at fixed solution density. Here, we use a different approach to investigate numerically the equilibrium and kinetic properties of solutions of model ring polymers. Specifically, the ring contour length is maintained fixed, while the interplay of inter- and intra-chain entanglement is modulated by varying both solution density (from infinite dilution up to \approx 40 % volume occupancy) and ring topology (by considering unknotted and trefoil-knotted chains). The equilibrium metric properties of rings with either topology are found to be only weakly affected by the increase of solution density. Even at the highest density, the average ring size, shape anisotropy and length of the knotted region differ at most by 40% from those of isolated rings. Conversely, kinetics are strongly affected by the degree of inter-chain entanglement: for both unknots and trefoils the characteristic times of ring size relaxation, reorientation and diffusion change by one order of magnitude across the considered range of concentrations. Yet, significant topology-dependent differences in kinetics are observed only for very dilute solutions (much below the ring overlap threshold). For knotted rings, the slowest kinetic process is found to correspond to the diffusion of the knotted region along the ring backbone.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure

Addressing the ‘whys’ of UK children’s YouTube use: a purposes approach

Despite the widespread use of YouTube by children, there has been limited research undertaken on the “why” questions of their use. Past theoretical approaches have framed these questions in terms of broader individual needs and their relation to media use, though this work has mainly focused on adults and adolescents. This article presents relevant findings from a mixed methods study of children’s (aged 0–16) uses of social media in the United Kingdom to consider instead the “purposes” of children’s YouTube use, drawing on: (1) an online family survey; (2) family case studies; (3) child focus groups; and (4) child telephone interviews. “Purpose” is theorized in the article in relation to the ways children themselves make sense of and articulate the reasons they use YouTube or, in the case of parents and carers, for allowing, facilitating, or encouraging their children to use YouTube. Parents tended to frame the purposes of children’s YouTube use more instrumentally, focusing on perceived educational benefits and their own convenience needs. While sharing a focus on instrumental purposes, children sometimes emphasized broader dimensions of purpose, with an increased focus on humor, sensory, and hedonic dimensions. Children’s responses also emphasized the autotelic nature of play. The study foregrounded the extent to which the purposes of others (such as commercial entities) are served by children’s YouTube use. Seven child-centered, parent-centered, and “other” purposes for children’s YouTube use are discussed: cognitive, corporeal, cultural, collaborative, creative, commercial, and convenience