We must not forget the most disadvantaged people facing the COVID-19 crisis

International audienceThe entire world is facing a new health threat, the novae coronavirus desease (COVID-19). Almost 1,930,000 cases were reported worldwide by 14 April, with total deaths of close to 120,000. Now more than half the planet's population is locked down at home. Europe is currently the epicenter of the pandemic. Many European countries have closed their borders and implemented measures such as physical distancing, lockdowns, and restrictions on individual's movements in an attempt to control the spread of the virus. Such drastic restrictive measures were effective in China and will probably also be in Europe. Two of the most afflicted European nations, Italy and France, adopted these measures several weeks ago. They have recently reported drops in admissions to intensive care units and COVID-19elinked death

Trabecular bone remodelling under pathological conditions based on biochemical and mechanical processes involved in BMU activity

International audienc

Le contrôle de la schistosome intestinale de l'île de la Martinique

En Martinique, l'existence de la schistosomose intestinale à Schistosoma mansoni est connue depuis le début du XXe siècle. Une étude générale de la répartition de la maladie réalisée en 1977 a montré une prévalence moyenne de l'infection de 12 % pour l'ensemble de l'île (coprologies et sérologies confondues). A la suite de cette enquête, un programme de lutte associant des actions d'éducation sanitaire, le dépistage et le traitement des porteurs de la parasitose et l'amélioration de l'assainissement, a été mis en place. Par ailleurs, un programme de contrôle biologique contre le mollusque hôte intermédiaire Biomphalaria glabrata utilisant un compétiteur, Melanoides tuberculata, a été développé dans les sites actifs de transmission. En parallèle à la réduction des populations de l'hôte intermédiaire et de son parasite, une importante diminution de la prévalence globale de la parasitose chez l'homme a été observée entre 1977 et 1996. Désormais, seuls quelques cas sont encore diagnostiqués, mais il s'agit uniquement d'adultes contaminés longtemps auparavant. Cette situation épidémiologique est tout à fait différente de celle qui est observée dans l'île sœur de la Guadeloupe où bien qu'un excellent contrôle des bassins versants de la Basse-Terre ait été réalisé, un important foyer situé en arrière mangrove de la Grande-Terre fonctionne toujours avec un hôte réservoir, le rat noir. En Martinique, plusieurs enquêtes réalisées dans des milieux similaires ont démontré que de tels foyers n'existent pas

The use of a multiplex real-time PCR assay for diagnosing acute respiratory viral infections in children attending an emergency unit

International audienc

Optimal investment with inside information and parameter uncertainty

An optimal investment problem is solved for an insider who has access to noisy information related to a future stock price, but who does not know the stock price drift. The drift is filtered from a combination of price observations and the privileged information, fusing a partial information scenario with enlargement of filtration techniques. We apply a variant of the Kalman–Bucy filter to infer a signal, given a combination of an observation process and some additional information. This converts the combined partial and inside information model to a full information model, and the associated investment problem for HARA utility is explicitly solved via duality methods. We consider the cases in which the agent has information on the terminal value of the Brownian motion driving the stock, and on the terminal stock price itself. Comparisons are drawn with the classical partial information case without insider knowledge. The parameter uncertainty results in stock price inside information being more valuable than Brownian information, and perfect knowledge of the future stock price leads to infinite additional utility. This is in contrast to the conventional case in which the stock drift is assumed known, in which perfect information of any kind leads to unbounded additional utility, since stock price information is then indistinguishable from Brownian information

Running in the FAMILY: understanding and predicting the intergenerational transmission of mental illness.

Over 50% of children with a parent with severe mental illness will develop mental illness by early adulthood. However, intergenerational transmission of risk for mental illness in one's children is insufficiently considered in clinical practice, nor is it sufficiently utilised into diagnostics and care for children of ill parents. This leads to delays in diagnosing young offspring and missed opportunities for protective actions and resilience strengthening. Prior twin, family, and adoption studies suggest that the aetiology of mental illness is governed by a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, potentially mediated by changes in epigenetic programming and brain development. However, how these factors ultimately materialise into mental disorders remains unclear. Here, we present the FAMILY consortium, an interdisciplinary, multimodal (e.g., (epi)genetics, neuroimaging, environment, behaviour), multilevel (e.g., individual-level, family-level), and multisite study funded by a European Union Horizon-Staying-Healthy-2021 grant. FAMILY focuses on understanding and prediction of intergenerational transmission of mental illness, using genetically informed causal inference, multimodal normative prediction, and animal modelling. Moreover, FAMILY applies methods from social sciences to map social and ethical consequences of risk prediction to prepare clinical practice for future implementation. FAMILY aims to deliver: (i) new discoveries clarifying the aetiology of mental illness and the process of resilience, thereby providing new targets for prevention and intervention studies; (ii) a risk prediction model within a normative modelling framework to predict who is at risk for developing mental illness; and (iii) insight into social and ethical issues related to risk prediction to inform clinical guidelines

Trabecular bone remodelling under pathological conditions based on biochemical and mechanical processes involved in BMU activity

International audienc