Immunogenicity and efficacy of the Hoshino strain of mumps (MMR Vaccine) in Iran

Background: Mumps is an infectious and common disease during childhood. The vaccination against some epidemic diseases like mumps has been introduced in national program. This report describes the immunogenicity and efficacy of Hoshino strain of mumps (included in MMR vaccine) in Iran during 2 years. Methods: Three hundred and thirty eight children aged 3-18 years from Shahr-e-Kord, Iran were enrolled. They were tested for mumps IgG using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The percent of susceptible mumps IgG negative children was 19.8% (67 subjects), among them, 36 received the MMR vaccination and successfully completed the study. Blood sample was collected by venipuncture at 3, 12, and 24 months after vaccination and serum samples were tested by ELISA for detection of mumps IgM and IgG. Results: The seroconversion rate was 86.1%, 77.7% and 75% at 3, 12, and 24 months after vaccination respectively. Conclusion: Although the early serocoversion rate was high, but later it declined to a level of 75% which is the same immunity as natural infection which means that the immunity after vaccination would not last for long period of time and there may be a need for introduction of the booster dose of vacc

Seat Belt Usage in Injured Car Occupants: Injury Patterns, Severity and Outcome After Two Main Car Accident Mechanisms in Kashan, Iran, 2012

Background: Road traffic accidents (RTAs) are the main public health problems in Iran. The seat belts, which are vehicle safety devices, are imperative to reduce the risk of severe injuries and mortality. Objectives: The aim of the study was to evaluate injury patterns, severity and outcome among belted and unbelted car occupants who were injured in car accidents. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional prospective study was performed on all car occupants injured in RTAs (n = 822) who were transported to hospital and hospitalized for more than 24 hours from March 2012 to March 2013. Demographic profile of the patients, including age, gender, position in the vehicle, the use of seat belts, type of car crashes, injured body regions, revised trauma score (RTS), Glasgow coma score (GCS), duration of hospital stay and mortality rate were analyzed by descriptive analysis, chi-square and independent t-test. P < 0.05 was considered significant. Results: A total of 560 patients used seat belts (68.1%). The unbelted occupants were younger (28 years vs. 38 years) and had more frequently sustained head, abdomen and multiple injuries (P = 0.01, P = 0.01 and P = 0.009, respectively). Also, these patients had significantly lower GCS and elongated hospitalization and higher death rate (P = 0.001, P = 0.001 and P = 0.05, respectively). Tendency of severe head trauma and low RTS and death were increased in unbelted occupants in car rollover accident mechanisms (P = 0.001, P = 0.01 and P = 0.008, respectively). Conclusions: During car crashes, especially car rollover, unbelted occupants are more likely to sustain multiple severe injuries and death. Law enforcement of the seat belt usage for all occupants (front and rear seat) is obligatory to reduce severe injuries sustained as a result of car accidents, especially in vehicles with low safety

Hot deformation behavior and flow stress modeling of Ti–6Al–4V alloy produced via electron beam melting additive manufacturing technology in single β-phase field

The hot working behaviour of additively manufactured Ti–6Al–4V pre-forms by Electron Beam Melting (EBM) has been studied at temperatures of 1000–1200 °C and strain rates of 0.001–1 s−1. As a reference, a wrought Ti–6Al–4V alloy was also analyzed as same as the EBM one. In order to investigate the hot working behaviour of these samples, all the data evaluations were carried out step by step, and the stepwise procedure was discussed. No localized strain as a consequence of shear band formation was found in the samples after the hot compression. The flow stress curves of all the samples showed peak stress at low strains, followed by a regime of flow softening with a near-steady-state flow at large strains. Interestingly, it is found that the initial microstructure and porosity content as well as the chemistry of material (e.g. oxygen content) as being possible contributors to the lower level of flow stress that could be beneficial from the industrial point of view. The flow softening mechanism(s) were discussed in detail using the microstructure of the specimens before and after the hot deformation. Dynamic Recrystalization (DRX) could also explain the gentle oscillation in the appearance of the flow softening curves of the EBM samples. Moreover, the hot working analysis indicated that the activation energy for hot deformation of as-built EBM Ti–6Al–4V alloy was calculated as ~193.25 kJ/mol, which was much lower than the wrought alloy (229.34 kJ/mol). These findings can shed lights on a new integration of metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) and thermomechanical processing. It is very interesting to highlight that through this new integration, it would be possible to reduce the forging steps and save more energy and materials with respect to the conventional routes

Pre-Hospital Trauma Care in Road Traffic Accidents in Kashan, Iran

Background: Iran has one of the highest rates of road traffic accidents (RTAs) worldwide. Pre-hospital trauma care can help minimize many instances of traffic-related mortality and morbidity. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the characteristics of pre-hospital care in patients who were injured in RTAs, admitted to hospital. The focus was mainly directed at evaluating pre-hospital trauma care provided in city streets and roads out of the city. Patients and Methods: This retrospective study was carried out on all trauma patients, transported by the emergency medical service (EMS) system, who were admitted to Kashan Shahid-Beheshti hospital during the period from March 2011 to March 2012. The patients’ demographic data, location of accident, damaged organs, mechanism of injury, injury severity, pre-hospital times (response, scene, transport), pre-hospital interventions and outcomes, were extracted from the data registry and analyzed through descriptive statistics using SPSS 18 software. Results: Findings of this study showed that, 75% of RTAs occurred on city streets (n = 1 251). Motor-car accidents were the most frequent mechanism of RTA on city streets (n = 525) (42%), while car rollover was the most frequent mechanism of RTA on roads out of the city (n = 155) (44.4%). The mean pre-hospital time intervals (min); response, scene, and transport for all patients were 6.6 ± 3.1, 10.7 ± 5 and 13 ± 9.8, respectively. The mean pre-hospital time intervals (response, scene, transport) in roads out of the city were higher than those in city streets. There was a significant difference (P = 0.04) in the mortality rates due to RTAs between city streets (n = 46) and roads out of the city (n = 32). Conclusions: In comparison with road traffic accidents on city streets, trauma patients in RTAs on roads out of the city have longer pre-hospital time intervals and more severe injuries; therefore this group needs more pre-hospital resuscitation interventions

Production of Endohedral Fullerenes by Ion Implantation

The empty interior cavity of fullerenes has long been touted for containment of radionuclides during in vivo transport, during radioimmunotherapy (RIT) and radioimaging for example. As the chemistry required to open a hole in fullerene is complex and exceedingly unlikely to occur in vivo, and conformational stability of the fullerene cage is absolute, atoms trapped within fullerenes can only be released during extremely energetic events. Encapsulating radionuclides in fullerenes could therefore potentially eliminate undesired toxicity resulting from leakage and catabolism of radionuclides administered with other techniques. At the start of this project however, methods for production of transition metal and p-electron metal endohedral fullerenes were completely unknown, and only one method for production of endohedral radiofullerenes was known. They therefore investigated three different methods for the production of therapeutically useful endohedral metallofullerenes: (1) implantation of ions using the high intensity ion beam at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Surface Modification and Characterization Research Center (SMAC) and fullerenes as the target; (2) implantation of ions using the recoil energy following alpha decay; and (3) implantation of ions using the recoil energy following neutron capture, using ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) as a thermal neutron source. While they were unable to obtain evidence of successful implantation using the ion beam at SMAC, recoil following alpha decay and neutron capture were both found to be economically viable methods for the production of therapeutically useful radiofullerenes. In this report, the procedures for preparing fullerenes containing the isotopes {sup 212}Pb, {sup 212}Bi, {sup 213}Bi, and {sup 177}Lu are described. None of these endohedral fullerenes had ever previously been prepared, and all of these radioisotopes are actively under investigation for RIT. Additionally, the chemistry for derivatizing the radiofullerenes for water-solubility and a method for removing exohedral radionuclides are reported. The methods and chemistry developed during this CRADA are the crucial first steps for the development of fullerenes as a method superior to existing technologies for in vivo transport of radionuclides

Sort vs. Hash Join Revisited for Near-Memory Execution

Data movement between memory and CPU is a well-known energy bottleneck for analytics. Near-Memory Processing (NMP) is a promising approach for eliminating this bottleneck by shifting the bulk of the computation toward memory arrays in emerging stacked DRAM chips. Recent work in this space has been limited to regular computations that can be localized to a single DRAM partition. This paper examines a Join workload, which is fundamental to analytics and is characterized by irregular memory access patterns. We consider several join algorithms and show that while near-data execution can improve both energy-efficiency and performance, effective NMP algorithms must consider locality, access granularity, and microarchitecture of the stacked memory devices

Reactor production and processing of radioisotopes for therapeutic applications in nuclear medicine

Nuclear reactors continue to play an important role in providing radioisotopes for nuclear medicine. Many reactor-produced radioisotopes are ``neutron rich`` and decay by beta-emission and are thus of interest for therapeutic applications. This talk discusses the production and processing of a variety of reactor-produced radioisotopes of current interest, including those produced by the single neutron capture process, double neutron capture and those available from beta-decay of reactorproduced radioisotopes. Generators prepared from reactorproduced radioisotopes are of particular interest since repeated elution inexpensively provides many patient doses. The development of the alumina-based W-188/Re-188 generator system is discussed in detail