Case report: Severe mercuric sulphate poisoning treated with 2,3-dimercaptopropane-1-sulphonate and haemodiafiltration

INTRODUCTION: Inorganic mercury poisoning is uncommon, but when it occurs it can result in severe, life-threatening features and acute renal failure. Previous reports on the use of extracorporeal procedures such as haemodialysis and haemoperfusion have shown no significant removal of mercury. We report here the successful use of the chelating agent 2,3-dimercaptopropane-1-sulphonate (DMPS), together with continuous veno-venous haemodiafiltration (CVVHDF), in a patient with severe inorganic mercury poisoning. CASE REPORT: A 40-year-old man presented with haematemesis after ingestion of 1 g mercuric sulphate and rapidly deteriorated in the emergency department, requiring intubation and ventilation. His initial blood mercury was 15 580 μg/l. At 4.5 hours after ingestion he was started on DMPS. He rapidly developed acute renal failure and so he was started on CVVHDF for renal support and in an attempt to improve mercury clearance; CVVHDF was continued for 14 days. METHODS: Regular ultradialysate and pre- and post-filtrate blood samples were taken and in addition all ultradialysate generated was collected to determine its mercury content. RESULTS: The total amount of mercury in the ultrafiltrate was 127 mg (12.7% of the ingested dose). The sieving coefficient ranged from 0.13 at 30-hours to 0.02 at 210-hours after ingestion. He developed no neurological features and was discharged from hospital on day 50. Five months after discharge from hospital he remained asymptomatic, with normal creatinine clearance. DISCUSSION: We describe a patient with severe inorganic mercury poisoning in whom full recovery occurred with the early use of the chelating agent DMPS and CVVHDF. There was removal of a significant amount of mercury by CVVHDF. CONCLUSION: We feel that CVVHDF should be considered in patients with inorganic mercury poisoning, particularly those who develop acute renal failure, together with meticulous supportive care and adequate doses of chelation therapy with DMPS

An efficient high throughput metabotyping platform for screening of biomass willows

Future improvement of woody biomass crops such as willow and poplar relies on our ability to select for metabolic traits that sequester more atmospheric carbon into biomass, or into useful products to replace petrochemical streams. We describe the development of metabotyping screens for willow, using combined 1D 1H-NMR-MS. A protocol was developed to overcome 1D 1H-NMR spectral alignment problems caused by variable pH and peak broadening arising from high organic acid levels and metal cations. The outcome was a robust method to allow direct statistical comparison of profiles arising from source (leaf) and sink (stem) tissues allowing data to be normalised to a constant weight of the soluble metabolome. We also describe the analysis of two willow biomass varieties, demonstrating how fingerprints from 1D 1H-NMR-MS vary from the top to the bottom of the plant. Automated extraction of quantitative data of 56 primary and secondary metabolites from 1D 1H-NMR spectra was realised by the construction and application of a Salix metabolite spectral library using the Chenomx software suite. The optimised metabotyping screen in conjunction with automated quantitation will enable high-throughput screening of genetic collections. It also provides genotype and tissue specific data for future modelling of carbon flow in metabolic network

Nonlinear acousto-electric transport in a two-dimensional electron system

We study both theoretically and experimentally the nonlinear interaction between an intense surface acoustic wave and a two-dimensional electron plasma in semiconductor-piezocrystal hybrid structures. The experiments on hybrid systems exhibit strongly nonlinear acousto-electric effects. The plasma turns into moving electron stripes, the acousto-electric current reaches its maximum, and the sound absorption strongly decreases. To describe the nonlinear phenomena, we develop a coupled-amplitude method for a two-dimensional system in the strongly nonlinear regime of interaction. At low electron densities the absorption coefficient decreases with increasing sound intensity, whereas at high electron density the absorption coefficient is not a monotonous function of the sound intensity. High-harmonic generation coefficients as a function of the sound intensity have a nontrivial behavior. Theory and experiment are found to be in a good agreement.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

Enhancement of Noise-induced Escape through the Existence of a Chaotic Saddle

We study the noise-induced escape process in a prototype dissipative nonequilibrium system, the Ikeda map. In the presence of a chaotic saddle embedded in the basin of attraction of the metastable state, we find the novel phenomenon of a strong enhancement of noise-induced escape. This result is established by employing the theory of quasipotentials. Our finding is of general validity and should be experimentally observable.Comment: 4 page

The Critical Behaviour of the Spin-3/2 Blume-Capel Model in Two Dimensions

The phase diagram of the spin-3/2 Blume-Capel model in two dimensions is explored by conventional finite-size scaling, conformal invariance and Monte Carlo simulations. The model in its $\tau$-continuum Hamiltonian version is also considered and compared with others spin-3/2 quantum chains. Our results indicate that differently from the standard spin-1 Blume-Capel model there is no multicritical point along the order-disorder transition line. This is in qualitative agreement with mean field prediction but in disagreement with previous approximate renormalization group calculations. We also presented new results for the spin-1 Blume-Capel model.Comment: latex 18 pages, 4 figure

Recent Advances Concerning Certain Class of Geophysical Flows

This paper is devoted to reviewing several recent developments concerning certain class of geophysical models, including the primitive equations (PEs) of atmospheric and oceanic dynamics and a tropical atmosphere model. The PEs for large-scale oceanic and atmospheric dynamics are derived from the Navier-Stokes equations coupled to the heat convection by adopting the Boussinesq and hydrostatic approximations, while the tropical atmosphere model considered here is a nonlinear interaction system between the barotropic mode and the first baroclinic mode of the tropical atmosphere with moisture. We are mainly concerned with the global well-posedness of strong solutions to these systems, with full or partial viscosity, as well as certain singular perturbation small parameter limits related to these systems, including the small aspect ratio limit from the Navier-Stokes equations to the PEs, and a small relaxation-parameter in the tropical atmosphere model. These limits provide a rigorous justification to the hydrostatic balance in the PEs, and to the relaxation limit of the tropical atmosphere model, respectively. Some conditional uniqueness of weak solutions, and the global well-posedness of weak solutions with certain class of discontinuous initial data, to the PEs are also presented.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1507.0523