4 research outputs found
Temporal variability of green and blue water footprint worldwide
Water footprint assessment is becoming widely used in the scientific literature and it is proving useful in a number
of multidisciplinary contexts. Given this increasing popularity, measures of green and blue water footprint (or virtual
water content, VWC) require evaluations of uncertainty and variability to quantify the reliability of proposed
analyses. As of today, no studies are known to assess the temporal variability of crop VWC at the global scale; the
present contribution aims at filling this gap.
We use a global high-resolution distributed model to compute the VWC of staple crops (wheat and maize), basing
on the soil water balance, forced by hydroclimatic imputs, and on the total crop evapotranspiration in multiple
growing seasons. Crop actual yield is estimated using country-based yield data, adjusted to account for spatial variability,
allowing for the analysis of the different role played by climatic and management factors in the definition
of crop yield. The model is then run using hydroclimatic data, i.e. precipitation and potential evapotranspiration,
for the period 1961-2013 as taken from the CRU database (CRU TS v. 3.23) and using the corresponding countrybased
yield data from FAOSTAT. Results provide the time series of total evapotranspiration, actual yield and VWC,
with separation between green and blue VWC, and the overall volume of water used for crop production, both at
the cell scale (5x5 arc-min) and aggregated at the country scale. Preliminary results indicate that total (green+blue)
VWC is, in general, weekly dependent on hydroclimatic forcings if water for irrigation is unlimited, because irrigated
agriculture allows to compensate temporary water shortage. Conversely, most part of the VWC variability
is found to be determined by the temporal evolution of crop yield. At the country scale, the total water used by
countries for agricultural production has seen a limited change in time, but the marked increase in the water-use
efficiency expressed by VWC has determined an increase of production. Such increase has helped to meet the
increasing global food demand in the past 50 years
Microbiological features of acute bacterial conjunctivitis in a central Italian area
The study aims to identify bacteria causing conjunctivitis in a central Italian area and to analyze chemosusceptibility. From 2005 to 2006, 91 conjunctival swabs were collected from acute conjunctivitis cases and screened for common bacteria and fungi. Susceptibility tests were performed on isolates. Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae amounted to 86.2%. Overall, 100% of strains were susceptible to chloramphenicol and 96.6% to quinolones. Conversely, 20.7% of isolates were tetracycline-resistant and, even if all Gram negative isolates were susceptible to gentamicin, the most frequently isolated pneumococci are constitutively resistant. The study provides support for a rational choice of empiric therapy
Pharyngeal microbial signatures are predictive of the risk of fungal pneumonia in hematologic patients
The ability to predict invasive fungal infections (IFI) in patients with hematological malignancies is fundamental for successful therapy. Although gut dysbiosis is known to occur in hematological patients, whether airway dysbiosis also contributes to the risk of IFI has not been investigated. Nasal and oropharyngeal swabs were collected for functional microbiota characterization in 173 patients with hematological malignancies recruited in a multicenter, prospective, observational study and stratified according to the risk of developing IFI. A lower microbial richness and evenness were found in the pharyngeal microbiota of high-risk patients that were associated with a distinct taxonomic and metabolic profile. A murine model of IFI provided biologic plausibility for the finding that loss of protective anaerobes, such as Clostridiales and Bacteroidetes, along with an apparent restricted availability of tryptophan, is causally linked to the risk of IFI in hematologic patients and indicates avenues for antimicrobial stewardship and metabolic reequilibrium in IFI.This work was supported by FunMeta Project (ERC-2011-AdG 293714), MicroTher(ERC-2018-PoC-813099), and Gilead (IN-IT-131-4525-518872.9) to L.R. and the GrantAgency of the Czech Republic (GACR No 17-24592Y) and the Czech Ministry ofEducation, Youth and Sports (CETOCOEN PLUS CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000469;LM2015051 and CETOCOEN EXCELLENCE Teaming 2 project CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/18_046/0015975; and Horizon2020 project 857560) to Z.S