Efficacy of Two Common Methods of Application of Residual Insecticide for Controlling the Asian Tiger Mosquito, Aedes albopictus (Skuse), in Urban Areas

After its first introduction in the 1980's the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus (Skuse), has spread throughout Southern Europe. Ae. albopictus is considered an epidemiologically important vector for the transmission of many viral pathogens such as the yellow fever virus, dengue fever and Chikungunya fever, as well as several filarial nematodes such as Dirofilaria immitis or D. repens. It is therefore crucial to develop measures to reduce the risks of disease transmission by controlling the vector populations. The aim of the study was to compare the efficacy of two application techniques (mist vs. stretcher sprayer) and two insecticides (Etox based on the nonester pyrethroid Etofenprox vs. Microsin based on the pyrethroid type II Cypermetrin) in controlling adult tiger mosquito populations in highly populated areas. To test the effect of the two treatments pre- and post-treatment human landing rate counts were conducted for two years. After one day from the treatment we observed a 100% population decrease in mosquito abundance with both application methods and both insecticides. However, seven and 14 days after the application the stretcher sprayer showed larger population reductions than the mist sprayer. No effect of insecticide type after one day and 14 days was found, while Etox caused slightly higher population reduction than Microsin after seven days. Emergency measures to locally reduce the vector populations should adopt adulticide treatments using stretcher sprayers. However, more research is still needed to evaluate the potential negative effects of adulticide applications on non-target organisms

Myrtucommulone from Myrtus communis exhibits potent anti-inflammatory effectiveness in vivo.

Myrtucommulone a nonprenylated acylphloroglucinol contained in the leaves of myrtle (Myrtus communis), has been reported to suppress the biosynthesis of eicosanoids by inhibition of 5-lipoxygenase and cyclooxygenase-1 in vitro and to inhibit the release of elastase and the formation of reactive oxygen species in activated polymorphonuclear leukocytes. Here, in view of the ability of MC to suppress typical proinflammatory cellular responses in vitro, we have investigated the effects of MC in in vivo models of inflammation. MC was administered to mice intraperitoneally, and paw edema and pleurisy were induced by the subplantar and intrapleural injection of carrageenan, respectively. MC (0.5, 1.5, and 4.5 mg/kg i.p.) reduced the development of mouse carrageenan-induced paw edema in a dose-dependent manner. Moreover, MC (4.5 mg/kg i.p. 30 min before and after carrageenan) exerted anti-inflammatory effects in the pleurisy model. In particular, 4 h after carrageenan injection in the pleurisy model, MC reduced: 1) the exudate volume and leukocyte numbers; 2) lung injury (histological analysis) and neutrophil infiltration (myeloperoxidase activity); 3) the lung intercellular adhesion molecule-1 and P-selectin immunohistochemical localization; 4) the cytokine levels (tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-1 β in the pleural exudate and their immunohistochemical localization in the lung; 5) the leukotriene B 4, but not prostaglandin E2, levels in the pleural exudates; and 6) lung peroxidation (thiobarbituric acid-reactant substance) and nitrotyrosine and poly (ADP-ribose) immunostaining. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that MC exerts potent anti-inflammatory effects in vivo and offer a novel therapeutic approach for the management of acute inflammation. Copyright © 2009 by The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics

Exploiting vulnerabilities of deep neural networks for privacy protection

Adversarial perturbations can be added to images to protect their content from unwanted inferences. These perturbations may, however, be ineffective against classifiers that were not seen during the generation of the perturbation, or against defenses based on re-quantization, median filtering or JPEG compression. To address these limitations, we present an adversarial attack that is specifically designed to protect visual content against unseen classifiers and known defenses. We craft perturbations using an iterative process that is based on the Fast Gradient Signed Method and that randomly selects a classifier and a defense, in each iteration. This randomization prevents an undesirable overfitting to a specific classifier or defense. We validate the proposed attack in both targeted and untargeted settings on the private classes of the Places365-Standard dataset. Using ResNet18, ResNet50, AlexNet and DenseNet161 as classifiers, the performance of the proposed attack exceeds that of eleven state-of-the-art attacks

Vaccinia virus immune evasion: mechanisms, virulence and immunogenicity

Virus infection of mammalian cells is sensed by pattern recognition receptors and leads to an innate immune response that restricts virus replication and induces adaptive immunity. In response, viruses have evolved many countermeasures that enable them to replicate and be transmitted to new hosts, despite the host innate immune response. Poxviruses, such as vaccinia virus (VACV), have large DNA genomes and encode many proteins that are dedicated to host immune evasion. Some of these proteins are secreted from the infected cell, where they bind and neutralize complement factors, interferons, cytokines and chemokines. Other VACV proteins function inside cells to inhibit apoptosis or signalling pathways that lead to the production of interferons and pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines. In this review, these VACV immunomodulatory proteins are described and the potential to create more immunogenic VACV strains by manipulation of the gene encoding these proteins is discussed

Management of intractable bladder neck strictures following radical prostatectomy using the Memokath®045 stent

The incidence of vesicourethral anastomotic stenosis (VUAS) post radical prostatectomy varies from 1 to 26%. Current treatment can be challenging and includes a variety of different procedures. These range from endoscopic dilations to bladder neck reconstruction to urinary diversion. We investigated a 2-stage endoscopic treatment, using the thermo-expandable Memokath®045 bladder neck stent to manage patients with VUAS post radical prostatectomy. We retrospectively reviewed 30 patients, between 2013 and 2017, who underwent a Memokath®045 stent insertion following failed primary treatment (dilation and clean intermittent catheterisation) for VUAS. The mean interval time between prostatectomy and Memokath®045 stent insertion was 13 months. The mean follow-up time was 3.6 years with all patients having a minimum of 12-month follow-up. All patients had two previous attempts at endoscopic dilatation with or without incision and a trial of clean intermittent catheterisation. During stage 1, the anastomotic stricture is dilated/incised to diameter of 30 Fr, the stricture length is measured, and a catheter is left in situ. One to 2 weeks later, post haemostasis and healing, an appropriately sized Memokath®045 stent is inserted. The stent is then removed 1-year post-op. Our series of patients had a median age of 62 (54–72). Most patients (26) had a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) or salvage procedure. Results showed improvement in IPSS scores, IPSS quality of life scores, Qmax and PVR after the Memokath®045 stent was removed compared to pre-operation. With a minimum of 12 months post stent removal, 93% of patients were fully continent, whilst 7% of patients were socially continent. 2 (7%) patients had their stents removed and not replaced due to re-stricturing and stone formation. However, no urinary tract infections, stricture recurrence or urinary retention was observed in the rest of the cohort (93%). Overall, the Memokath®045 stent was successful in treating 93% of our patients with VUAS. Our series had minimal complications that were managed with conservative measures and in three patients’ re-operation was needed. In conclusion, the Memokath®045 stent is a minimally invasive technique with faster recovery time compared to other techniques such as bladder neck reconstruction or urinary diversion. Additionally, it provides superior patency results compared to other techniques such as bladder neck incision and injection of Mitomycin C. Therefore, this management option should be considered in the management of VUAS

Management of intractable bladder neck strictures following radical prostatectomy using the Memokath\uae045 stent

The incidence of vesicourethral anastomotic stenosis (VUAS) post radical prostatectomy varies from 1 to 26%. Current treatment can be challenging and includes a variety of different procedures. These range from endoscopic dilations to bladder neck reconstruction to urinary diversion. We investigated a 2-stage endoscopic treatment, using the thermo-expandable Memokath\uae045 bladder neck stent to manage patients with VUAS post radical prostatectomy. We retrospectively reviewed 30 patients, between 2013 and 2017, who underwent a Memokath\uae045 stent insertion following failed primary treatment (dilation and clean intermittent catheterisation) for VUAS. The mean interval time between prostatectomy and Memokath\uae045 stent insertion was 13\ua0months. The mean follow-up time was 3.6\ua0years with all patients having a minimum of 12-month follow-up. All patients had two previous attempts at endoscopic dilatation with or without incision and a trial of clean intermittent catheterisation. During stage 1, the anastomotic stricture is dilated/incised to diameter of 30\ua0Fr, the stricture length is measured, and a catheter is left in situ. One to 2\ua0weeks later, post haemostasis and healing, an appropriately sized Memokath\uae045 stent is inserted. The stent is then removed 1-year post-op. Our series of patients had a median age of 62 (54\u201372). Most patients (26) had a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) or salvage procedure. Results showed improvement in IPSS scores, IPSS quality of life scores, Qmax and PVR after the Memokath\uae045 stent was removed compared to pre-operation. With a minimum of 12\ua0months post stent removal, 93% of patients were fully continent, whilst 7% of patients were socially continent. 2 (7%) patients had their stents removed and not replaced due to re-stricturing and stone formation. However, no urinary tract infections, stricture recurrence or urinary retention was observed in the rest of the cohort (93%). Overall, the Memokath\uae045 stent was successful in treating 93% of our patients with VUAS. Our series had minimal complications that were managed with conservative measures and in three patients\u2019 re-operation was needed. In conclusion, the Memokath\uae045 stent is a minimally invasive technique with faster recovery time compared to other techniques such as bladder neck reconstruction or urinary diversion. Additionally, it provides superior patency results compared to other techniques such as bladder neck incision and injection of Mitomycin C. Therefore, this management option should be considered in the management of VUAS

Real-time quality assessment of videos from body-worn cameras

Videos captured with body-worn cameras may be affected by distortions such as motion blur, overexposure and reduced contrast. Automated video quality assessment is therefore important prior to auto-tagging, event or object recognition, or automated editing. In this paper, we present M-BRISQUE, a spatial quality evaluator that combines, in real-time, the Michelson contrast with features from the Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial QUality Evaluator. To link the resulting quality score to human judgement, we train a Support Vector Regressor with Radial Basis Function kernel on the Computational and Subjective Image Quality database. We show an example of application of M-BRISQUE in automatic editing of multi-camera content using relative view quality, and validate its predictive performance with a subjective evaluation and two public datasets

Effect of PD98059, a selective MAPK3/MAPK1 inhibitor, on acute lung injury in mice.

The aim of the present study is to evaluate the contribution of mitogen-activated protein kinase 1–3 (MAPK3/MAPK1) in a model of acute lung inflammation in mice. Injection of carrageenan into the pleural cavity of mice elicited an acute inflammatory response characterized by: accumulation of fluid containing a large number of neutrophils (PMNs) in the pleural cavity, infiltration of PMNs in lung tissues and subsequent adhesion molecule expression (I-CAM and P-selectin), lipid peroxidation, and increased production of tumour necrosis factor-α, (TNF-α) and interleukin-1β (IL-1β). Furthermore, carrageenan induced lung apoptosis (Bax and Bcl-2 expression) as well as nitrotyrosine formation, NF-κB activation, and pJNK expression, as determined by immunohistochemical analysis of lung tissues and the degree of lung inflammation and tissue injury (histological score). Administration of PD98059, an inhibitor of MAPK3/MAPK1 (10 mg/kg) 1 h after carrageenan caused a reduction in all the parameters of inflammation measured. Thus, based on these findings we propose that inhibitors of the MAPK3/MAPK1 signaling pathways, such as PD98059, may be useful in the treatment of various inflammatory diseases

The processing of actions and-action words in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with prime conse- quences on the motor function and concomitant cognitive changes, most frequently in the domain of executive functions. Moreover, poorer performance with action-verbs versus object-nouns has been reported in ALS patients, raising the hypothesis that the motor dysfunction deteriorates the semantic representation of actions. Using action-verbs and manipulable-object nouns sharing semantic relationship with the same motor represen- tations, the verb-noun difference was assessed in a group of 21 ALS-patients with severely impaired motor behavior, and compared with a normal sample's performance. ALS-group performed better on nouns than verbs, both in production (action and object naming) and comprehension (word-picture matching). This observation implies that the interpretation of the verb-noun difference in ALS cannot be accounted by the relatedness of verbs to motor representations, but has to consider the role of other semantic and/or morpho- phonological dimensions that distinctively define the two grammatical classes. More- over, this difference in the ALS-group was not greater than the noun-verb difference in the normal sample. The mental representation of actions also involves an executive-control component to organize, in logical/temporal order, the individual motor events (or sub- goals) that form a purposeful action. We assessed this ability with action sequencing tasks, requiring participants to re-construct a purposeful action from the scrambled pre- sentation of its constitutive motor events, shown in the form of photographs or short sentences. In those tasks, ALS-group's performance was significantly poorer than controls'. Thus, the executive dysfunction manifested in the sequencing deficit ebut not the selec- tive verb deficite appears as a consistent feature of the cognitive profile associated with LS. We suggest that ALS can offer a valuable model to study the relationship between (frontal) motor centers and the executive-control machinery housed in the frontal brain, and the implications of executive dysfunctions in tasks such as action processing

Higher Fano manifolds

In this paper we address Fano manifolds with positive higher Chern characters. They are expected to enjoy stronger versions of several of the nice properties of Fano manifolds. For instance, they should be covered by higher dimensional rational varieties, and families of higher Fano manifolds over higher dimensional bases should admit meromorphic sections (modulo the Brauer obstruction). Aiming at finding new examples of higher Fano manifolds, we investigate positivity of higher Chern characters of rational homogeneous spaces. We determine which rational homogeneous spaces of Picard rank $1$ have positive second Chern character, and show that the only rational homogeneous spaces of Picard rank $1$ having positive second and third Chern characters are projective spaces and quadric hypersurfaces. We also classify Fano manifolds of large index having positive second and third Chern characters. We conclude by discussing conjectural characterizations of projective spaces and complete intersections in terms of these higher Fano conditions