Emerging Zoonotic Pathogens at the Human-Wildlife Interface in Protected Areas: Game in the Southeastern United States and Bushmeat in Northern Uganda

The emergence of zoonotic pathogens through contact with animal reservoirs is a well-documented phenomenon and growing concern for public health. Particularly in light of the ongoing Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the coronavirus pandemic, the need to understand mechanisms of contact and disease transmission at the human-wildlife interface and to understand which infectious agents may reside within wildlife reservoirs crucial. In this project, we investigated the potential introduction of zoonotic cestode Echinococcus canadensis to public lands in Tennessee subsequent to elk translocation effort and aimed to identify whether a transmission cycle was established in this area. We further aimed to elucidate drivers of zoonotic infections in the bushmeat trade in northern Uganda by assessing the phenomenon of ‘species deception’, evaluate social factors influencing participation in the bushmeat trade and risk for zoonosis exposure, and describe bacterial microbial diversity in market bushmeat in the area. We confirmed the presence of E. canadensis, with histological confirmation in 75% of elk included in our study and PCR confirmation in 50% of elk. Our findings in bushmeat in northern Uganda demonstrate nearly 30% mismatch between what bushmeat species are sold as in market and the true identity of these species based on PCR and Sanger sequencing. Surveys of hunters and cooks in communities adjacent to Murchison Falls National Park revealed that both hunters and cooks have the highest awareness of monkeypox and gastrointestinal illness as diseases that wildlife can carry. Self-reported injuries while cooking or butchering bushmeat were reported to be infrequent among both hunters and cooks. While cooks believed that hunters and dealers never described primate meat as another kind of animal, hunters reported usually doing this. Microbial diversity among wildlife samples was found to be high, regardless of tissue condition or wildlife species. Furthermore, 16s rRNA signatures of numerous Select Agent bacterial genera associated with significant human illness were detected in these samples. Microbial composition suggests that bushmeat microbiota is comprised of a combination of endogenous infections, environmental contamination, and spoilage associated bacteria. Regardless, the potential health consequences of unmitigated exposure to these microbes presents a clear risk to individual and global health. The findings of this project underscore the need for practical and culturally appropriate educational strategies to help hunters both in the United States and Uganda enact proper handling and butchering techniques to minimize contact with bodily tissues of wild animals

Glass Ceiling Commission - The Impact of the Glass Ceiling and Structural Change on Minorities and Women

Glass Ceiling ReportGlassCeilingBackground12StructuralChange.pdf: 9391 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

MODELLING-MEASUREMENT-IDENTIFICATION AND THEIR IMPORTANCE IN CONTROLLING WATER SUPPLY SYSTEMS

In case of the revision of a settlement's water distribution system, different models of the whole system must be developed. In course of modelling we certainly make some approximations, thus there are certain differences between model and reality. Consequently, it must be determined, to what degree the model conforms to reality. To prove the conformity of the model to reality, measurements and calculations of the hydraulic parameters must be done for some operation conditions, and the results must be compared. We have made measurements and identifications in Bratislava and in several regions of Hungary, one of them, the basic zone of Miskolc city is presented. On the basis of comparison of the calculated and measured values, the identification can be considered as completed (Fig. 4.), the values entirely conform to each other

Special Issue: Anti-Inflammatory Activity of Plant Polyphenols

Inflammation is considered the first physiological response of the human body to infection or injury, playing a critical role in both innate and adaptive immunity [...]

Counting edge-injective homomorphisms and matchings on restricted graph classes

We consider the $\#\mathsf{W}[1]$-hard problem of counting all matchings with exactly $k$ edges in a given input graph $G$; we prove that it remains $\#\mathsf{W}[1]$-hard on graphs $G$ that are line graphs or bipartite graphs with degree $2$ on one side. In our proofs, we use that $k$-matchings in line graphs can be equivalently viewed as edge-injective homomorphisms from the disjoint union of $k$ length-$2$ paths into (arbitrary) host graphs. Here, a homomorphism from $H$ to $G$ is edge-injective if it maps any two distinct edges of $H$ to distinct edges in $G$. We show that edge-injective homomorphisms from a pattern graph $H$ can be counted in polynomial time if $H$ has bounded vertex-cover number after removing isolated edges. For hereditary classes $\mathcal{H}$ of pattern graphs, we complement this result: If the graphs in $\mathcal{H}$ have unbounded vertex-cover number even after deleting isolated edges, then counting edge-injective homomorphisms with patterns from $\mathcal{H}$ is $\#\mathsf{W}[1]$-hard. Our proofs rely on an edge-colored variant of Holant problems and a delicate interpolation argument; both may be of independent interest.Comment: 35 pages, 9 figure

A structural approach to kernels for ILPs: Treewidth and Total Unimodularity

Kernelization is a theoretical formalization of efficient preprocessing for NP-hard problems. Empirically, preprocessing is highly successful in practice, for example in state-of-the-art ILP-solvers like CPLEX. Motivated by this, previous work studied the existence of kernelizations for ILP related problems, e.g., for testing feasibility of Ax <= b. In contrast to the observed success of CPLEX, however, the results were largely negative. Intuitively, practical instances have far more useful structure than the worst-case instances used to prove these lower bounds. In the present paper, we study the effect that subsystems with (Gaifman graph of) bounded treewidth or totally unimodularity have on the kernelizability of the ILP feasibility problem. We show that, on the positive side, if these subsystems have a small number of variables on which they interact with the remaining instance, then we can efficiently replace them by smaller subsystems of size polynomial in the domain without changing feasibility. Thus, if large parts of an instance consist of such subsystems, then this yields a substantial size reduction. We complement this by proving that relaxations to the considered structures, e.g., larger boundaries of the subsystems, allow worst-case lower bounds against kernelization. Thus, these relaxed structures can be used to build instance families that cannot be efficiently reduced, by any approach.Comment: Extended abstract in the Proceedings of the 23rd European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2015

Author Bios

Biographical Information for Teaching Teachers: Critical Social Justice in Teacher Education Program