CPA\u27s guide to medical, dental and other healthcare practices;

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Simulating Foodborne Pathogens in Poultry Production and Processing to Defend Against Intentional Contamination

There is a lack of data in recent history of food terrorism attacks, and as such, it is difficult to predict its impact. The food supply industry is one of the most vulnerable industries for terrorist threats while the poultry industry is one of the largest food industries in the United States. A small food terrorism attack against a single poultry processing center has the potential to affect a much larger human population than its immediate consumers. In this work, the spread of foodborne pathogens is simulated in a poultry production and processing system to defend against intentional contamination. An agent-based simulated environment that represents the farm, processing plant, homes, and restaurants is developed, which contains both poultry and human agents that move through the system and possibly infect each other. The simulation is run by varying several parameters that include probability of infection if exposed for both poultry and humans. The simulation predicts the number of infected poultry and humans over time

Formal water rights in rural Tanzania: Deepening the dichotomy?

Water rights / Water law / Water scarcity / Water use / Water users’ associations / Irrigation water / Cost recovery

Use of a hydrological model for environmental management of the Usangu Wetlands, Tanzania

Wetlands / Rivers / Ecology / Environmental effects / Remote sensing / Hydrology / Simulation models / Water budget / Irrigated sites / Land cover / Time series analysis / Tanzania / Usangu Wetlands / Great Ruaha River

Loops under Strategies ... Continued

While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops, where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system. However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain strategies. Therefore, our goal is to develop decision procedures which can determine whether a given loop is also a loop under the respective evaluation strategy. In earlier work, such procedures were presented for the strategies of innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive evaluation. In the current paper, we build upon this work and develop such decision procedures for important strategies like leftmost-innermost, leftmost-outermost, (max-)parallel-innermost, (max-)parallel-outermost, and forbidden patterns (which generalize innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive strategies). In this way, we obtain the first approach to disprove termination under these strategies automatically.Comment: In Proceedings IWS 2010, arXiv:1012.533

Loxosceles deserta Spider Venom Induces the Expression of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) in Keratinocytes

Evenomation by arachnids of the genus Loxosceles frequently results in disfiguring necrotic skin lesions. The cellular and molecular mechanisms which contribute to lesion development are incompletely defined but appear to involve participation of several pro-inflammatory mediators. We have recently observed that Loxosceles deserta venom induces the production of chemokines in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) and human pulmonary epithelial cells. In the present study we observed that Loxosceles deserta venom induces the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in human keratinocytes but little in smooth muscle cells and none in pulmonary epithelial cells. A potent endothelial cell-specific mitogen, VEGF induces angiogenesis and vascular permeability in vivo. RNase protection assay data indicate that VEGF mRNA concentrations in keratinocytes are significantly increased at 2 h following venom exposure. These data suggest that keratinocyte-derived VEGF may contribute to the vasodilation, edema and erythema which occur following Loxosceles evenomation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44528/1/10753_2004_Article_220727.pd

Homocysteine Augments Cytokine-Induced Chemokine Expression in Human Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells: Implications for Atherogenesis

Hyperhomocysteinemia is an independent risk factor for atherosclerosis and atherothrombosis. While in vitro studies have revealed a number of homocysteine-mediated alterations in the thromboregulatory properties of endothelial cells, comparatively little is known about homocysteine-modulated smooth muscle cell function. We observed that exposure of human aortic smooth muscle cells to pathophysiologically relevant concentrations of homocysteine results in concentration-dependent increases in cytokine-induced MCP-1 and IL-8 secretion. RNase protection assays revealed that both MCP-1 and IL-8 mRNA concentrations are increased in homocysteine-treated smooth muscle cells when compared to cells activated with cytokines alone. Homocysteine treatment also increased cytosolic-to-nuclear translocation of the p65 and p50 subunits of the Rel/NF-κB family of transcription factors but had no effect on AP-1 activation. Cumulatively, these data suggest that homocysteine may increase monocyte recruitment into developing atherosclerotic lesions by upregulating MCP-1 and IL-8 expression in vascular smooth muscle cells.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44529/1/10753_2004_Article_297162.pd

Identification of plastic constitutive parameters at large deformations from three dimensional displacement fields

The aim of this paper is to provide a general procedure to extract the constitutive parameters of a plasticity model starting from displacement measurements and using the Virtual Fields Method. This is a classical inverse problem which has been already investigated in the literature, however several new features are developed here. First of all the procedure applies to a general three-dimensional displacement field which leads to large plastic deformations, no assumptions are made such as plane stress or plane strain although only pressure-independent plasticity is considered. Moreover the equilibrium equation is written in terms of the deviatoric stress tensor that can be directly computed from the strain field without iterations. Thanks to this, the identification routine is much faster compared to other inverse methods such as finite element updating. The proposed method can be a valid tool to study complex phenomena which involve severe plastic deformation and where the state of stress is completely triaxial, e.g. strain localization or necking occurrence. The procedure has been validated using a three dimensional displacement field obtained from a simulated experiment. The main potentialities as well as a first sensitivity study on the influence of measurement errors are illustrated