Complement fixation with horsesickness viruses

Fixation of complement bas been obtained using antigens prepared from suckling mouse brains and antisera from hyperimmune guinea-pigs. With horsesickness viruses the complement fixation test is less type specific than the neutralization test and no antigenic differentiation between the seven heterotypic strains tested was possible. The value of the complement fixation test in the diagnosis of the disease is discussed.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 300dpi. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format

Immunological types of horsesickness virus and their significance in immunization

1. A brief review is given of the epizootiology of horse sickness, the antigenic plurality of the virus strains, and the history of the control of the disease by immunization. 2. It is often not possible to isolate virus directly in mice from cases of horse sickness in immunized horses. 3. The usefulness of the ferret, and possibly the dog, for the isolation of virus from such horses was demonstrated. 4. Immunological studies on 42 mouse-adapted horsesickness virus strains were conducted. 5. For these studies an intracerebral neutralization test in mice was used. Hyperimmune sera from rabbits were mainly used in the tests. 6. Cross-neutralization tests with rabbit antisera were carried out on the eight virus strains included in the present vaccine issued from Onderstepoort and 16 strains recently isolated from cases of horsesickness in immunized horses. 7. This series of tests showed that the virus strains could be grouped into seven immunological types. It was also evident that some immunized horses become infected with strains of the same immunological type as the vaccine strains. 8. Using type rabbit antisera a further series of neutralization tests was conducted on 18 other horsesickness virus strains. These tests showed that these strains also could be grouped within the same immunological types. 9. It was shown that four recently isolated strains belonging to the same immunological type were not represented in the present Onderstepoort vaccine. 10. A limited number of neutralization tests with ferret antisera supported the antigenic grouping as revealed by the tests with rabbit antisera. 11. A serological study of sera obtained from eight immunized horses reacting to horsesickness was made. 12. Viruses isolated from each of these horses were included in the cross-neutralization tests which showed that seven of these viruses are of the same immunological type as the vaccine strains. 13. High level antibody against all the vaccine strains was shown to be present in sera from seven horses. 14. It was concluded that these particular failures in immunity were not due to inadequate immunization but were apparently the result of slight antigenic differences between the infecting virus and the vaccine strains. 15. The significance of the antigenic grouping based on the mouse neutralization test to immunity in equidae is discussed. 16. It is believed that this antigenic grouping has a definite relationship to immunity in these animals.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 300dpi. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format

Illness caused by Sindbis and West Nile viruses in South Africa

No Abstract

Une enquete des Faunes de Moustiques et de Culicoides dans deux localites de la region du Karoo en Afrique du Sud avec certaines observations Ecologiques

The mosquito and Culicoides faunas were surveyed at Bethulie and Luckhoff in the arid Karoo region, southern Orange Free State, to determine which species occurred, their relative prevalence and the effects of rainfall. The feeding preferences of these insects were also investigated by means of baited catches. Twenty-three mosquito species and 16 Culicoides species were collected. The commonest mosquito species, with their feeding preferences, if known, were as follows: Culex (Culex) univittatus Theo and Culex (Culex) pipiens Linnaeus, which are strongly ornithophilic and poorly anthropophilic; Culex (Culex) theileriTheo, which feeds on sheep and man avidly but is only moderately ornithophilic; Aedes (Neomelaniconion) luridus McIntosh, Aedes (Neomelaniconion) lineatopennis (Ludlow), Aedes (Ochlerotatus) caballus (Theo) and Aedes (Ochlerotatus) juppi McIntosh, all of which feed on sheep and man readily and which can aestivate as eggs for up to 20 months but only appear in numbers after rain; Anopheles (Cellia) listeri De Meillon, Anopheles (Cellia) squamosus Theo, Culex (Culex) quinquefasciatus Say and Culiseta (Allotheobaldia) longiareolata (Macquart). By far the commonest Culicoides at both localities was Culicoides pycnostictus Ingram & Macfie, which is strongly ornithophilic and also feeds on sheep. The following 5 species were also prevalent: Culicoides similis Carter,Ingram & Macfie, Culicoides spec. nov. 1., Culicoides schultzei (Enderlein), Culicoides ondersteportensis Fiedler and Culicoides nivosus De Meillon. The last species is strongly ornithophilic.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 300dpi. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format

Isolation in mice and embryonated hen's eggs of a virus associated with vaginitis of cattle

From infected material obtained from various herds virus has been isolated in several instances in developing hen's eggs, and in one instance also in mice. The strain which could be propagated in both mice and eggs was taken 25 generations by intracerebral passage in mice. In early passages day-old mice were used but later passage was continued in adult mice. In these, mortality occurred regularly after three to four days. Gradocol membrane filtration indicated that the particle diameter was Jess than 100 mµ. In developing hen's eggs this strain was propagated for twelve generations by chorio-allantoic membrane passage. Definite lesions on the membrane were observed and occasional embryos died. Subsequent passages were made by the injection of infected embryo material into the yolk sac. In this way the virus was readily maintained a further ten generations, at which stage it regularly killed all embryos. Cows and heifers infected with material from both the mouse and egg propagated lines of this strain showed definite, though mild, symptoms of vaginitis. The possibility of various forms of vaginitis occurring in bovines as well as the relation of this virus to these conditions is discussed.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 300dpi. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format

An online digital archive of magnetograms from 1846 to 1987

The magnetic measurements from current UK observatories, together with those from their historical predecessors, provide some of the longest running continuous sets of geophysical observations in the world. A campaign to capture high quality digital images of >300,000 analogue magnetograms (front and back) was completed in 2013, with every single image now available to search, view and download from the on-line archive at www.bgs.ac.uk/data/magnetograms. In parallel with the capture of the magnetograms, the related published yearbooks were scanned and are available online as PDF documents at www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/data_service/data/yearbooks/yearbooks.html. This work has helped to ensure that these valuable long-term data sets are not lost, irrespective of what may happen in the future to the original photographic paper records. The additional benefit of immediate worldwide access to the data contained within these historic documents has also been established. In this paper we present the BGS OpenGeoscience service, which the magnetogram image archive forms part of. We also show some results of on-going work to acquire digital data from the images and the yearbooks. We discuss past and potential future use of the data for scientific research, such as space weather studies of the magnetograms during the period of the Carrington storm and studies into the homogeneity of long term geomagnetic activity indices that are used in space climate research

Energetics of the Einstein-Rosen spacetime

A study covering some aspects of the Einstein--Rosen metric is presented. The electric and magnetic parts of the Weyl tensor are calculated. It is shown that there are no purely magnetic E--R spacetimes, and also that a purely electric E--R spacetime is necessarily static. The geodesics equations are found and circular ones are analyzed in detail. The super--Poynting and the ``Lagrangian'' Poynting vectors are calculated and their expressions are found for two specific examples. It is shown that for a pulse--type solution, both expressions describe an inward radially directed flow of energy, far behind the wave front. The physical significance of such an effect is discussed.Comment: 19 pages Latex.References added and updated.To appear in Int.J.Theor.Phy

The spiritual organization: critical reflections on the instrumentality of workplace spirituality

Authors' draft of article. Final version published by Routledge in Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14766086.aspThis paper offers a theoretical contribution to the current debate on workplace spirituality by: (a) providing a selective critical review of scholarship, research and corporate practices which treat workplace spirituality in performative terms, that is, as a resource or means to be manipulated instrumentally and appropriated for economic ends; (b) extending Ezioni’s analysis of complex organizations and proposing a new category, the ‘spiritual organization’, and; (c) positing three alternative positions with respect to workplace spirituality that follow from the preceding critique. The spiritual organization can be taken to represent the development of a trajectory of social technologies that have sought, incrementally, to control the bodies, minds, emotions and souls of employees. Alternatively, it might be employed to conceptualize the way in which employees use the workplace as a site for pursuing their own spiritualities (a reverse instrumentalism). Finally, we consider the possible incommensurability of ‘work organization’ and ‘spirituality’ discourses

Identification of common genetic risk variants for autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable and heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental phenotypes diagnosed in more than 1% of children. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ASD susceptibility, but to date no individual variants have been robustly associated with ASD. With a marked sample-size increase from a unique Danish population resource, we report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 18,381 individuals with ASD and 27,969 controls that identified five genome-wide-significant loci. Leveraging GWAS results from three phenotypes with significantly overlapping genetic architectures (schizophrenia, major depression, and educational attainment), we identified seven additional loci shared with other traits at equally strict significance levels. Dissecting the polygenic architecture, we found both quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes. These results highlight biological insights, particularly relating to neuronal function and corticogenesis, and establish that GWAS performed at scale will be much more productive in the near term in ASD.Peer reviewe

Genome-wide association study identifies 30 Loci Associated with Bipolar Disorder

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) founding member and Bipolar disorder working group co-chair Pamela Sklar. We thank the participants who donated their time, experiences and DNA to this research, and to the clinical and scientific teams that worked with them. We are deeply indebted to the investigators who comprise the PGC. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of any funding or regulatory body. Analyses were carried out on the NL Genetic Cluster Computer (http://www.geneticcluster.org ) hosted by SURFsara, and the Mount Sinai high performance computing cluster (http://hpc.mssm.edu).Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable psychiatric disorder. We performed a genome-wide association study including 20,352 cases and 31,358 controls of European descent, with follow-up analysis of 822 variants with P<1x10-4 in an additional 9,412 cases and 137,760 controls. Eight of the 19 variants that were genome-wide significant (GWS, p < 5x10-8) in the discovery GWAS were not GWS in the combined analysis, consistent with small effect sizes and limited power but also with genetic heterogeneity. In the combined analysis 30 loci were GWS including 20 novel loci. The significant loci contain genes encoding ion channels, neurotransmitter transporters and synaptic components. Pathway analysis revealed nine significantly enriched gene-sets including regulation of insulin secretion and endocannabinoid signaling. BDI is strongly genetically correlated with schizophrenia, driven by psychosis, whereas BDII is more strongly correlated with major depressive disorder. These findings address key clinical questions and provide potential new biological mechanisms for BD.This work was funded in part by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, Stanley Medical Research Institute, University of Michigan, Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Fund L.L.C., Marriot Foundation and the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine, the NIMH Intramural Research Program; Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the UK Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, NIHR, NRS, MRC, Wellcome Trust; European Research Council; German Ministry for Education and Research, German Research Foundation IZKF of Münster, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, ImmunoSensation, the Dr. Lisa-Oehler Foundation, University of Bonn; the Swiss National Science Foundation; French Foundation FondaMental and ANR; Spanish Ministerio de Economía, CIBERSAM, Industria y Competitividad, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Generalitat de Catalunya, EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme; BBMRI-NL; South-East Norway Regional Health Authority and Mrs. Throne-Holst; Swedish Research Council, Stockholm County Council, Söderström Foundation; Lundbeck Foundation, Aarhus University; Australia NHMRC, NSW Ministry of Health, Janette M O'Neil and Betty C Lynch