Risk Factor Profile of Motorcycle Crash Victims in Rural Kenya

Background: Road traffic injuries involving motorcycles are increasing  especially in rural Kenya resulting in both human and economic loss. This study was done to identify the risk factors and the host characteristics associated with motorcycle injury victims in rural setting so as to instituteappropriate interventions for prevention of these incidents.Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study conducted at Kangundo District Hospital between 1st July and 31st December 2011.Results:167 crash victims (136 (81.4%) males, 31 (18.6%) females) were seen. Mean age was 29 years; most victims (94.2%) being aged 16-40  years. Cyclists comprised 61 (36.5%) while 79 (47.3%) were passengers. All cyclists were men; more women were passengers (p, 0.03), while  pedestrians were mostly children below 10 years. Most victims (74.3%) didnot wear helmets while 72.1% did not wear jackets with reflectors. Alcohol use was recorded in 22.8% of cyclists. About 71.9% of cyclists lacked valid driving licenses. Overloading was common, with 74.8% of the cyclists carrying two or more passengers.Conclusion: Poor driving skills, reluctance to use protective gear, alcohol use and overloading of passengers were the main risk factors observed.  Our observations call for more stringent regulations and aggressive road safety campaigns. Injury prevention and safety promotion campaigns should focus more on the risk factors for motorcycle accidents.Key Words: Motorcycles, Crash, Risk factors, Rura

Determination of Caffeine Content in Non-Alcoholic Beverages and Energy Drinks Using Hplc-Uv Method.

The purpose of this study was to determine the amount of caffeine in non-alcoholic energy drinks and prepared teas using reverse phase HPLC. Caffeine was extracted from 19 different types of non-alcoholic beverages and prepared teas sampled from supermarkets in Nairobi Central Business District, Kenya. These were analyzed alongside a caffeine standard of 99 % purity by use of HPLC-UV detector at the wavelength of 272nm, Supelco HS C18 column 25 cm x 4.6 cm x 5 μm, oven temperature of 40 oC, mobile phase 80:20 (v/v) of methanol: water and mobile phase flow rate of 1.5mL/min. For quantitation purposes, serial dilution of the caffeine standard gave correlation coefficient (r) of 0.9993 and the retention time of 2.11±0.03 minute. Percentage recovery of caffeine from the column ranged from 89.78 to 105.59%. Limits of detection and quantitation were found to be 0.279 and 0.931 μg/mL respectively. It was found that Burn®, XL energy drink® and Red Bull® had the highest amount of caffeine. It was however noted that though most of the non-alcoholic beverages had high caffeine content they had no label claim. Key Words: Reverse Phase High Performance Liquid chromatography (HPLC), Ultra violet visible (UV/VIS), caffeine, non-alcoholic beverage

A Fire Severity Mapping System for Real-Time Fire Management Applications and Long-Term Planning: The FIRESEV project

Accurate, consistent, and timely fire severity maps are needed in all phases of fire management including planning, managing, and rehabilitating wildfires. The problem is that fire severity maps are commonly developed from satellite imagery that is difficult to use for planning wildfire responses before a fire has actually happened and can’t be used for real-time wildfire management because of the timing of the imagery delivery. Moreover, imagery is difficult to use for controlled fires such as prescribed burning. This study, called FIRESEV (FIRE SEVerity Mapping Tools) created a comprehensive set of tools and protocols to deliver, create, and evaluate fire severity maps for all phases of fire management. The first tool is a Severe Fire Potential Map (SFPM) that quantifies the potential for fires to burn with high severity, should they occur, for any 30m x 30m piece of ground across the western United States. This map was developed using empirical models that related topographic, vegetation, and fire weather variables to burn severity as mapped using the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) digital products. This SFPM map is currently available on the Fire Research and Management Exchange System (FRAMES, http://www.frames.gov/firesev) web site and can be used to plan for future wildfires or for managing wildfires in real time, e.g. by including it as a layer in Wildland Fire Decision Support System or other GIS analysis. The next tool was the inclusion of a fire severity mapping algorithm in the Wildland Fire Assessment Tool (WFAT) developed by the National Interagency Fuels Technology Transfer (NIFTT) team. WFAT is used for fuel treatment planning to predict potential fire effects under prescribed fire weather conditions (http://www.frames.gov/partner-sites/niftt/tools/niftt-current-resources/). Now, fire severity can be mapped explicitly from fire effects simulation models (FOFEM, Consume) for real-time and planning wildfire applications. Next, the FIRESEV project showed how results from the WFAT simulated fire severity can be integrated with satellite imagery to improve fire severity mapping. And last, the FIRESEV project produced a suite of research studies, synthesis papers, and popular articles designed to improve the description, interpretation, and mapping of fire severity for wildland fire management: (1) a research study created a completely objective method of quantifying fire severity from fire effects to obtain nine unique classes of fire severity, (2) a research study comprehensively contrasted all current classifications of fire severity using Composite Burn Index (CBI) as measured on over 300 plots across the western United States to determine commonalities and differences, and (3) a synthesis paper was written discussing the problems involved in measuring, describing, and quantifying fire severity. This FIRESEV project yielded over 15 deliverables that we feel provides a comprehensive suite of products to create useful fire severity maps, along with current satellite imagery products, and also FIRESEV provides a thorough background on how to measure, interpret, and apply fire severity in fire management

Novel Bone-Targeting Agent for Enhanced Delivery of Vancomycin to Bone

We examined the pharmacokinetic properties of vancomycin conjugated to a bone-targeting agent (BT) with high affinity for hydroxyapatite after systemic intravenous administration. The results confirm enhanced persistence of BT-vancomycin in plasma and enhanced accumulation in bone relative to vancomycin. This suggests that BT-vancomycin may be a potential carrier for the systemic targeted delivery of vancomycin in the treatment of bone infections, potentially reducing the reliance on surgical debridement to achieve the desired therapeutic outcome

Goal Commitment And Competition As Drivers For Group Productivity In Business Process Modeling

Many studies have looked at the factors that control the productivity of collaborative work. We claim that goal commitment and competition have a strong impact on group productivity in collaborative modelling. To substantiate this claim we first take a look at existing factor models to identify the factors that potentially mediate the effect on group productivity. We then investigate the relation between the factors with the help of controlled field experiments in five different organisations. We confirm the theoretical results with the help of structured equation modelling

Superconductivity in multi-phase Mg-B-O compounds

Structures of MgB2-based materials manufactured under pressure (up to 2 GPa) by different methods having high superconducting performance and connectivity are multiphase and contain different Mg-B-O compounds. Some oxygen can be incorporated into MgB2 and boron into MgO structures, MgBx (X=4-20) inclusions contain practically no oxygen. Regulating manufacturing temperature, pressure, introducing additions one can influence oxygen and boron distribution in the materials and thus, affect the formation, amount and sizes of Mg-B-O and MgBx inclusions and changing type of pinning, pinning force and so affect critical current density jc. The boron concentration increase in initial Mg and B mixture allows obtaining sample containing 88.5 wt% of MgB12 with Tc of 37.4 K (estimated magnetically)

Locally delivered antistaphylococcal lysin exebacase or CF-296 is active in methicillin-resistant <i>Staphylococcus aureus</i> implant-associated osteomyelitis

Introduction: Staphylococcus aureus is the most common cause of orthopedic infections and can be challenging to treat, especially in the presence of a foreign body. The antistaphylococcal lysins exebacase and CF-296 have rapid bactericidal activity, a low propensity for resistance development, and synergize with some antibiotics. Methods: Rabbit implant-associated osteomyelitis was induced by drilling into the medial tibia followed by locally delivering exebacase, CF-296, or lysin carrier. A titanium screw colonized with methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) IDRL-6169 was inserted. Intravenous daptomycin or saline was administered and continued daily for 4 d. On day 5, rabbits were euthanized, and the tibiae and implants were collected for culture. Results were reported as log10 colony forming units (cfu) per gram of bone or log10 cfu per implant, and comparisons among the six groups were performed using the Wilcoxon rank sum test. Results: Based on implant and bone cultures, all treatments resulted in significantly lower bacterial counts than those of controls (P≤0.0025). Exebacase alone or with daptomycin as well as CF-296 with daptomycin were more active than daptomycin alone (P≤0.0098) or CF-296 alone (P≤0.0154) based on implant cultures. CF-296 with daptomycin was more active than either CF-296 alone (P=0.0040) or daptomycin alone (P=0.0098) based on bone cultures. Conclusion: Local delivery of either exebacase or CF-296 offers a promising complement to conventional antibiotics in implant-associated infections.</p