Contemporary challenges to iodine status and nutrition: the role of foods, dietary recommendations, fortification and supplementation

Iodine deficiency (ID) in women of childbearing age remains a global public health concern, mainly through its impact on fetal and infant neurodevelopment. While iodine status is improving globally, ID is still prevalent in pregnancy, when requirements increase. More than 120 countries have implemented salt iodisation and food fortification, strategies that have been partially successful. Supplementation during pregnancy is recommended in some countries and supported by the WHO when mandatory salt iodisation is not present. The UK is listed as one of the ten countries with the lowest iodine status globally, with approximately 60 % of pregnant women not meeting the WHO recommended intake. Without mandatory iodine fortification or recommendation for supplementation in pregnancy, the UK population depends on dietary sources of iodine. Both women and healthcare professionals have low knowledge and awareness of iodine, its sources or its role for health. Dairy and seafood products are the richest sources of iodine and their consumption is essential to support adequate iodine status. Increasing iodine through the diet might be possible if iodine-rich foods get repositioned in the diet, as they now contribute towards only about 13 % of the average energy intake of adult women. This review examines the use of iodine-rich foods in parallel with other public health strategies, to increase iodine intake and highlights the rare opportunity in the UK for randomised trials, due to the lack of mandatory fortification programmes

Legibility of electroluminescent instrument panels investigated

Legibility studies of several EL /electroluminescent/ displays correlate reading time and accuracy with number size, stroke/width ratio, indicia size, pointer width, contrast, ambient illumination, and color background and and contrast. Human factor criteria established on non-EL displays may not apply to EL displays

Iodine and pregnancy – a UK cross-sectional survey of dietary intake, knowledge and awareness

Iodine is a key component of the thyroid hormones, which are critical for healthy growth, development and metabolism. The UK population is now classified as mildly iodine-insufficient. Adequate levels of iodine during pregnancy are essential for fetal neurodevelopment, and mild iodine deficiency is linked to developmental impairments. In the absence of prophylaxis in the UK, awareness of nutritional recommendations during pregnancy would empower mothers to make the right dietary choices leading to adequate iodine intake. The present study aimed to: estimate mothers' dietary iodine intake in pregnancy (using a FFQ); assess awareness of the importance of iodine in pregnancy with an understanding of existing pregnancy dietary and lifestyle recommendations with relevance for iodine; examine the level of confidence in meeting adequate iodine intake. A cross-sectional survey was conducted and questionnaires were distributed between August 2011 and February 2012 on local (Glasgow) and national levels (online electronic questionnaire); 1026 women, UK-resident and pregnant or mother to a child aged up to 36 months participated in the study. While self-reported awareness about general nutritional recommendations during pregnancy was high (96 %), awareness of iodine-specific recommendations was very low (12 %), as well as the level of confidence of how to achieve adequate iodine intake (28 %). Median pregnancy iodine intake, without supplements, calculated from the FFQ, was 190 μg/d (interquartile range 144–256μg/d), which was lower than that of the WHO's recommended intake for pregnant women (250 μg/d). Current dietary recommendations in pregnancy, and their dissemination, are found not to equip women to meet the requirements for iodine intake

Sex distribution of offspring-parents obesity: Angel's hypothesis revisited

This study, which is based on two cross sectional surveys' data, aims to establish any effect of parental obesity sex distribution of offspring and to replicate the results that led to the hypothesis that obesity may be associated with sex-linked recessive lethal gene. A representative sample of 4,064 couples living in Renfrew/Paisley, Scotland was surveyed 1972-1976. A total of 2,338 offspring from 1,477 of the couples screened in 1972-1976, living in Paisley, were surveyed in 1996. In this study, males represented 47.7% among the total offspring of the couples screened in 1972-1976. In the first survey there was a higher male proportion of offspring (53%, p < 0.05) from parents who were both obese, yet this was not significant after adjustment for age of parents. Also, there were no other significant differences in sex distribution of offspring according to body mass index, age, or social class of parents. The conditions of the original 1949 study of Angel (1949) (which proposed a sex-linked lethal recessive gene) were simulated by selecting couples with at least one obese daughter. In this subset, (n = 409), obesity in fathers and mothers was associated with 26% of offspring being male compared with 19% of offspring from a non-obese father and obese mother. Finally we conclude that families with an obese father have a higher proportion of male offspring. These results do not support the long-established hypotheses of a sex-linked recessive lethal gene in the etiology of obesity

A "superstorm": When moral panic and new risk discourses converge in the media

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Health, Risk and Society, 15(6), 681-698, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13698575.2013.851180.There has been a proliferation of risk discourses in recent decades but studies of these have been polarised, drawing either on moral panic or new risk frameworks to analyse journalistic discourses. This article opens the theoretical possibility that the two may co-exist and converge in the same scare. I do this by bringing together more recent developments in moral panic thesis, with new risk theory and the concept of media logic. I then apply this theoretical approach to an empirical analysis of how and with what consequences moral panic and new risk type discourses converged in the editorials of four newspaper campaigns against GM food policy in Britain in the late 1990s. The article analyses 112 editorials published between January 1998 and December 2000, supplemented with news stories where these were needed for contextual clarity. This analysis shows that not only did this novel food generate intense media and public reactions; these developed in the absence of the type of concrete details journalists usually look for in risk stories. Media logic is important in understanding how journalists were able to engage and hence how a major scare could be constructed around convergent moral panic and new risk type discourses. The result was a media ‘superstorm’ of sustained coverage in which both types of discourse converged in highly emotive mutually reinforcing ways that resonated in a highly sensitised context. The consequence was acute anxiety, social volatility and the potential for the disruption of policy and social change

Nonlinear effects in 4D-Var

The ability of a data assimilation system to deal effectively with nonlinearities arising from the prognostic model or the relationship between the control variables and the available observations has received a lot of attention in theoretical studies based on very simplified test models. Less work has been done to quantify the importance of nonlinearities in operational, state-of-the-art global data assimilation systems. In this paper we analyse the nonlinear effects present in ECMWF 4D-Var and evaluate the ability of the incremental formulation to solve the nonlinear assimilation problem in a realistic NWP environment. We find that nonlinearities have increased over the years due to a combination of increased model resolution and the ever-growing importance of observations that are nonlinearly related to the state. Incremental 4D-Var is well suited for dealing with these nonlinear effects, but at the cost of increasing the number of outer loop relinearisations. We then discuss strategies for accommodating the increasing number of sequential outer loops in the tight schedules of operational global NWP.</p

MR diffusion changes in the perimeter of the lateral ventricles demonstrate periventricular injury in post-hemorrhagic hydrocephalus of prematurity

OBJECTIVES: Injury to the preterm lateral ventricular perimeter (LVP), which contains the neural stem cells responsible for brain development, may contribute to the neurological sequelae of intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) and post-hemorrhagic hydrocephalus of prematurity (PHH). This study utilizes diffusion MRI (dMRI) to characterize the microstructural effects of IVH/PHH on the LVP and segmented frontal-occipital horn perimeters (FOHP). STUDY DESIGN: Prospective study of 56 full-term infants, 72 very preterm infants without brain injury (VPT), 17 VPT infants with high-grade IVH without hydrocephalus (HG-IVH), and 13 VPT infants with PHH who underwent dMRI at term equivalent. LVP and FOHP dMRI measures and ventricular size-dMRI correlations were assessed. RESULTS: In the LVP, PHH had consistently lower FA and higher MD and RD than FT and VPT (p\u3c.050). However, while PHH FA was lower, and PHH RD was higher than their respective HG-IVH measures (p\u3c.050), the MD and AD values did not differ. In the FOHP, PHH infants had lower FA and higher RD than FT and VPT (p\u3c.010), and a lower FA than the HG-IVH group (p\u3c.001). While the magnitude of AD in both the LVP and FOHP were consistently less in the PHH group on pairwise comparisons to the other groups, the differences were not significant (p\u3e.050). Ventricular size correlated negatively with FA, and positively with MD and RD (p\u3c.001) in both the LVP and FOHP. In the PHH group, FA was lower in the FOHP than in the LVP, which was contrary to the observed findings in the healthy infants (p\u3c.001). Nevertheless, there were no regional differences in AD, MD, and RD in the PHH group. CONCLUSION: HG-IVH and PHH results in aberrant LVP/FOHP microstructure, with prominent abnormalities among the PHH group, most notably in the FOHP. Larger ventricular size was associated with greater magnitude of abnormality. LVP/FOHP dMRI measures may provide valuable biomarkers for future studies directed at improving the management and neurological outcomes of IVH/PHH

Continuous data assimilation for global numerical weather prediction

A new configuration of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) incremental 4D-Var data assimilation (DA) system is introduced which builds upon the quasi-continuous DA concept proposed in the mid-1990s. Rather than working with a fixed set of observations, the new 4D-Var configuration exploits the near-continuous stream of incoming observations by introducing recently arrived observations at each outer loop iteration of the assimilation. This allows the analysis to benefit from more recent observations. Additionally, by decoupling the start time of the DA calculations from the observational data cut-off time, real-time forecasting applications can benefit from more expensive analysis configurations that previously could not have been considered. In this work we present results of a systematic comparison of the performance of a Continuous DA system against that of two more traditional baseline 4D-Var configurations. We show that the quality of the analysis produced by the new, more continuous configuration is comparable to that of a conventional baseline that has access to all of the observations in each of the outer loops, which is a configuration not feasible in real-time operational numerical weather prediction. For real-time forecasting applications, the Continuous DA framework allows configurations which clearly outperform the best available affordable non-continuous configuration. Continuous DA became operational at ECMWF in June 2019 and led to significant 2 to 3% reductions in medium-range forecast root mean square errors, which is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hr of additional predictive skill.Peer reviewe

Monte Carlo simulation of the transmission of measles: Beyond the mass action principle

We present a Monte Carlo simulation of the transmission of measles within a population sample during its growing and equilibrium states by introducing two different vaccination schedules of one and two doses. We study the effects of the contact rate per unit time $\xi$ as well as the initial conditions on the persistence of the disease. We found a weak effect of the initial conditions while the disease persists when $\xi$ lies in the range 1/L-10/L ($L$ being the latent period). Further comparison with existing data, prediction of future epidemics and other estimations of the vaccination efficiency are provided. Finally, we compare our approach to the models using the mass action principle in the first and another epidemic region and found the incidence independent of the number of susceptibles after the epidemic peak while it strongly fluctuates in its growing region. This method can be easily applied to other human, animals and vegetable diseases and includes more complicated parameters.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Submitted to Phys.Rev.

Quantum statistical effects in nano-oscillator arrays

We have theoretically predicted the density of states(DOS), the low temperature specific heat, and Brillouin scattering spectra of a large, free standing array of coupled nano-oscillators. We have found significant gaps in the DOS of 2D elastic systems, and predict the average DOS to be nearly independent of frequency over a broad band f < 50GHz. At low temperatures, the measurements probe the quantum statistics obeyed by rigid body modes of the array and, thus, could be used to verify the quantization of the associated energy levels. These states, in turn, involve center-of mass motion of large numbers of atoms, N > 1.e14, and therefore such observations would extend the domain in which quantum mechanics has been experimentally tested. We have found the required measurement capability to carry out this investigation to be within reach of current technology.Comment: 1 tex file, 3 figures, 1 bbl fil