Assessment of crisis readiness to move a patient from the airport with suspected Ebola

The aim of this article is to verify the readiness of patient transport from the airport with symptoms for Ebola disease by the rescue services of the Integrated Rescue System of the Czech Republic. Detection of possible risks and causes of risks during patient transport. In one part of the article, the part is devoted to the current legislation regulating the cooperation of IRS, economic measures for crisis situations, functions of state material reserves management, material security of selected IRS components and the work of BIOHAZARD TEAM. The main part of the article describes the course of the extraordinary event. There is a chapter devoted to the analysis and evaluation of risks during transport. It also deals with the issues of transport, risks and problems that may be encountered by the intervening members of the IRS units. In conclusion, the proposed measures to help minimize risks in the transport of infected patient

The Threat of Exclusion and Relational Contracting

Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside options. This threat of exclusion is unrealistic in many environments, and especially in credit and investment contexts. We examine experimentally the emergence and time structure of relational contracts when the threat of exclusion is weakened. We focus on bilateral credit relationships in which strategic default is possible. We compare a weak exclusion treatment in which defaulting borrowers can reinvest borrowed funds, to a strong exclusion treatment in which defaulting borrowers must liquidate borrowed funds. We find that under weak exclusion more relationships break down in early periods and credit relationships are more likely to “start small”

Formation of Supermassive Black Holes by Direct Collapse in Pregalactic Halos

We describe a mechanism by which supermassive black holes can form directly in the nuclei of protogalaxies, without the need for seed black holes left over from early star formation. Self-gravitating gas in dark matter halos can lose angular momentum rapidly via runaway, global dynamical instabilities, the so-called "bars within bars" mechanism. This leads to the rapid buildup of a dense, self-gravitating core supported by gas pressure - surrounded by a radiation pressure-dominated envelope - which gradually contracts and is compressed further by subsequent infall. These conditions lead to such high temperatures in the central region that the gas cools catastrophically by thermal neutrino emission, leading to the formation and rapid growth of a central black hole. We estimate the initial mass and growth rate of the black hole for typical conditions in metal-free halos with T_vir ~ 10^4 K, which are the most likely to be susceptible to runaway infall. The initial black hole should have a mass of <~20 solar masses, but in principle could grow at a super-Eddington rate until it reaches ~ 10^4-10^6 solar masses. Rapid growth may be limited by feedback from the accretion process and/or disruption of the mass supply by star formation or halo mergers. Even if super-Eddington growth stops at \~10^3-10^4 solar masses, this process would give black holes ample time to attain quasar-size masses by a redshift of 6, and could also provide the seeds for all supermassive black holes seen in the present universe.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in press. Minor revision

UNDULY ENHANCED RESPONSE TO TOLVAPTAN IN A WOMAN SHOWING SYNDROME OF INAPPROPRIATE ANTIDIURETIC HORMONE SECRETION: AN INVESTIGATION OF POSSIBLE CAUSES

Objective: To investigate possible causes of an excessive response to tolvaptan in a woman with syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion (SIADH). Methods: A 32-year-old woman was admitted to our cardiologic unit 3 months after delivery for hypertension and severe hyponatremia (120 mEq/L). Two hyponatremic episodes had already been documented in her medical history. SIADH was diagnosed and treatment with tolvaptan, an arginine vasopressin (AVP) antagonist, was instituted. After the first 15-mg dose, excessive polyuria (1 L/ hour) and a rapid increase in serum sodium (13 mEq/L in 8 hours) occurred, so that therapy was stopped and restarted 2 days later at a reduced dose (5 mg). This level was effective and well tolerated. To explore the possible pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic mechanisms underlying the patient\u2019s hyperresponsiveness, the following tests were carried out: (1) in vivo phenotyping of CYP3A4 activity, the cytochrome responsible for tolvaptan metabolism, with two probe drugs (omeprazole and dextromethorphan); and (2) search for mutations in genes involved in AVP signaling (AVP, V2R, AQP2, OXT)

Efficient MPC with a Mixed Adversary

Over the past 20 years, the efficiency of secure multi-party protocols has been greatly improved. While the seminal protocols from the late 80’s require a communication of Ω(n⁶) field elements per multiplication among n parties, recent protocols offer linear communication complexity. This means that each party needs to communicate a constant number of field elements per multiplication, independent of n. However, these efficient protocols only offer active security, which implies that at most t<n/3 (perfect security), respectively t<n/2 (statistical or computational security) parties may be corrupted. Higher corruption thresholds (i.e., t≥ n/2) can only be achieved with degraded security (unfair abort), where one single corrupted party can prevent honest parties from learning their outputs. The aforementioned upper bounds (t<n/3 and t<n/2) have been circumvented by considering mixed adversaries (Fitzi et al., Crypto' 98), i.e., adversaries that corrupt, at the same time, some parties actively, some parties passively, and some parties in the fail-stop manner. It is possible, for example, to achieve perfect security even if 2/3 of the parties are faulty (three quarters of which may abort in the middle of the protocol, and a quarter may even arbitrarily misbehave). This setting is much better suited to many applications, where the crash of a party is more likely than a coordinated active attack. Surprisingly, since the presentation of the feasibility result for the mixed setting, no progress has been made in terms of efficiency: the state-of-the-art protocol still requires a communication of Ω(n⁶) field elements per multiplication. In this paper, we present a perfectly-secure MPC protocol for the mixed setting with essentially the same efficiency as the best MPC protocols for the active-only setting. For the first time, this allows to tolerate faulty majorities, while still providing optimal efficiency. As a special case, this also results in the first fully-secure MPC protocol secure against any number of crashing parties, with optimal (i.e., linear in n) communication. We provide simulation-based proofs of our construction.ISSN:1868-896