Bacteriophage therapy against Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms: A review

Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR) Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the most important bacterial pathogens that causes infection with a high mortality rate due to resistance to different antibiotics. This bacterium prompts extensive tissue damage with varying factors of virulence, and its biofilm production causes chronic and antibiotic-resistant infections. Therefore, due to the non-applicability of antibiotics for the destruction of P. aeruginosa biofilm, alternative approaches have been considered by researchers, and phage therapy is one of these new therapeutic solutions. Bacteriophages can be used to eradicate P. aeruginosa biofilm by destroying the extracellular matrix, increasing the permeability of antibiotics into the inner layer of biofilm, and inhibiting its formation by stopping the quorum-sensing activity. Furthermore, the combined use of bacteriophages and other compounds with anti-biofilm properties such as nanoparticles, enzymes, and natural products can be of more interest because they invade the biofilm by various mechanisms and can be more effective than the one used alone. On the other hand, the use of bacteriophages for biofilm destruction has some limitations such as limited host range, high-density biofilm, sub-populate phage resistance in biofilm, and inhibition of phage infection via quorum sensing in biofilm. Therefore, in this review, we specifically discuss the use of phage therapy for inhibition of P. aeruginosa biofilm in clinical and in vitro studies to identify different aspects of this treatment for broader use. © 2020 The Author(s)

A step too far? Making health equity interventions in Namibia more sufficient

BACKGROUND: Equality of health status is the health equity goal being pursued in developed countries and advocated by development agencies such as WHO and The Rockefeller Foundation for developing countries also. Other concepts of fair distribution of health such as equity of access to medical care may not be sufficient to equalise health outcomes but, nevertheless, they may be more practical and effective in advancing health equity in developing countries. METHODS: A framework for relating health equity goals to development strategies allowing progressive redistribution of primary health care resources towards the more deprived communities is formulated. The framework is applied to the development of primary health care in post-independence Namibia. RESULTS: In Namibia health equity has been advanced through the progressive application of health equity goals of equal distribution of primary care resources per head, equality of access for equal met need and equality of utilisation for equal need. For practical and efficiency reasons it is unlikely that health equity would have been advanced further or more effectively by attempting to implement the goal of equality of health status. CONCLUSION: The goal of equality of health status may not be appropriate in many developing country situations. A stepwise approach based on progressive redistribution of medical services and resources may be more appropriate. This conclusion challenges the views of health economists who emphasise the need to select a single health equality goal and of development agencies which stress that equality of health status is the most important dimension of health equity

Women's right to health in Iran

In Iran, discrimination based on gender in enjoyment of the right to health is prohibited. Making health services physically and financially accessible to the entire population and removing social and cultural barriers of women's access to health services are main considerations of the health law sand policies of Iran. The health of Iranian women has improved considerably in recent years. But there are disparities in health status and access of women to health services around the country. Some groups of women, including the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the illegal immigrant, and those without an appropriate male guardian, and rural women have limited access to health services in Iran. To realize women's right to health, this country should immediately remove the disparities and use all the necessary means including legislative, administrative, budgetary, promotional,and judicial measures. National plans on women's empowerment and support should be interpreted in provincial pro-grams and action plans. Moreover, a monitoring system and certain benchmarks for tracing the progress of the plans should be established. Realizing other economic, social,and cultural rights including the rights to food, shelter, education, work, social security, and participation in society will improve the Iranian women's enjoyment of their right

An efficient algorithm for large-scale extended trust-region subproblems with non-intersecting linear constraints

In this paper, we study the extended trust-region subproblem in which the trust-region intersects the ball with m linear inequality constraints (m-eTRS). We assume that the linear constraints do not intersect inside the ball. We show that the optimal solution of m-eTRS can be found by solving one TRS, computing the local non-global minimizer of TRS if it exists and solving at most two TRSs with an additional linear equality constraint (1-eqTRS). Both TRS and (1-eqTRS) are polynomially and efficiently solvable, thus the new algorithm significantly improves over the SOCP/SDP relaxation of Burer and Yang [Math Program 149(1-2):253-264, 2015]. on two classes of test problems, the efficiency of the proposed approach is compared with the SOCP/SDP relaxation and branch and bound algorithm of Beck and Pan [J Global Optim 69(2):309-342, 2017]. 2021, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.Scopu