Bacterial etiology and antibiotic susceptibility pattern of female patients with urinary tract infection referred to Imam Khomeini Hospital, Ahvaz, Iran, 2019

 Urinary tract infection (UTI) is one of the most frequent infections among women, and if untreated could lead to severe complications. The treatment of UTI is difficult due to the appearance of pathogens with increasing resistance to antimicrobial agents. This study thus aimed to determine the bacterial etiological pathogens of UTI and the antibiotic sensitivity pattern of the pathogens isolated. This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed from March to September 2019 on a total of 339 women referred to Imam Khomeini Teaching Hospital in Ahvaz, Iran. Mid-stream urine samples were collected from the patients and were cultured. The presence of significant bacteriuria was determined using the plate count method. The antimicrobial susceptibility test was done by the standard disk diffusion method. The most frequently isolated pathogens were Escherichia coli (54.8%), Klebsiella (18.2%), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (9.9%), Proteus (8%), and Acinetobacter (5.1%). E. coli, as the most common pathogen of UTIs, showed the most resistance to cephalosporins and the least resistance to imipenem. According to the findings, E. coli was the most common cause of UTI in our region. Considering the rate of UTI, and the importance of preventing its severe complications, a survey of regional resistance patterns and timely treatment can control the development of its resistant bacteria

Phenotypic and genotypic assay for detection of extended spectrum B-lactamases production by Klebsiella pnemoniae isolates in Emam Reza Hospital in Tabriz, Iran.

Objectives of this study were to investigate the prevalence of K. pneumoniae producing ESBLs, to evaluate the susceptibility of K. pneumoniae producing ESBLs towards non-beta-lactam antibiotics and to study the dominant ESBLs gene in Emam Reza hospital. K. pneumoniae producing ESBLs identified by phenotypic and genotypic methods. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) performed for detection of blaSHV, TEM and CTX-M. The findings showed that 43.69%, 13.59%, 7.77%, 11.65% and 23.3% were from UTI, ICUs, surgery ward, lesion infections and RTI, respectively. The results showed that 43.7% of isolates were ESBLs produces. The findings revealed that 26.7%, 6.7%, 20% and 0% of K.pneumoniae producing ESBLs were resistant to amikacin, ciprofloxacin, cotrimoxazol and imipenem, respectively. Thirty-nine blaSHV, seven blaTEM and seven blaCTX-M identified among K.pneumoniae producing ESBLs. The results reflected in cold month resistant to third generation cephalosporins were more than warm months. Generally, frequency of blaSHV was more than blaCTX-M and blaTEM

Family Planning Practice by Patterns of Marriage in the North of Iran

Background: The fertility experience in Iran suggests that the family planning programs had an effective role in the fertility reduction. This study aimed to specify patterns of marriage in Iran and especially in a northern city of Iran and to investigate the association between patterns of marriage and contraceptive use before first pregnancy and current contraceptive use. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, following the implementation of an expert panel in order to investigate marriage patterns, 880 women aged 15-49 yr old, were selected by multistage cluster sampling and completed the "reproductive practices" questionnaire in Babol City, northern Iran, in 2013. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS ver.16 and descriptive and analytical parameters. Results: There are three patterns of marriage in the northern part of Iran: Traditional, Mixed and Modern marriage and between different patterns there is no statistically significant difference in the contraceptive use. Conclusion: According to the lack of significant relationship between patterns of marriage and the contraceptives use, which is one of the proximate determinants of fertility, the policy makers should pay attention to other determinants of fertility in order to manage the problems and implications of population decline in the country

Investigating Castillo-Grone's Mimetic Difference Operators in Development of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Models Implemented on GPGPUs

Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-161).This research investigates the performance of Castillo-Grone's Mimetic (CGM) difference operators in 2D and 3D fully curvilinear grids. A software package is provided that assists the user in generating Laplacian operator in fully curvilinear grids using higher order CGM operators. Furthermore, a stability analysis is performed using von Neumann's analysis to understand the behavior of these operators in solving\ud advection equation. A shallow water equation solver is provided that harnesses the power of the general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) and some timing are provided

A high performance GPU implementation of Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) based on CUDA-C

This paper introduces a new implementation of the Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) algorithm harnessing the many cores available on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This new implementation uses Compute Unified Device Architecture C (CUDA-C) programming model and is designed to be executed on a system equipped with NVIDIA®'s graphic cards. The output of the new implementation is compared to a MATLAB code that has already been fully tested in the Water Cycle Multimission Observation Strategy (WACMOS) project. The code is timed against both MATLAB and a purely high-performance C implementation of the same algorithm. The code has been tested on several different NVIDIA® cards, with different compute capabilities. The authors have decided to provide the entire source code to the scientific community free of charge; hence, at the end, the instruction on how to obtain the code is also presente

Parents’ concerns regarding the growth characteristics of their adolescents: a qualitative inquiry in Iran

In recent times, parents have become increasingly concerned, both subjectively and objectively, about their adolescents' body height/weight growth. Parent-adolescent interactions about this issue and the potential socio-psychological consequences of such interactions should be considered as an important influencing factor on the future of adolescents' sexual and reproductive health. To achieve a greater understanding of such concerns, it is necessary to further elucidate parents' experiences on this topic, so as to expand the existing literature. This study aimed to explain the perceptions of parents' concerns regarding their adolescents' growth characteristics in the socio-cultural context of Iran as a transitional society. This paper is part of a larger qualitative study designed using the Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology (CGTM). We conducted open-ended intensive interviews with eleven parents individually and recruited them through purposeful and theoretical sampling from a teaching hospital, community, and a primary school in Tehran with theoretical sampling variation in terms of teenagers' age, sex, and birth order, place of residence, parents' occupation and education, and the self-reported socio-economic status. Using the analytical procedures of the CGTM, we performed analyses. In the findings, the concept of 'living with constant sense of uncertainty' emerged from the subcategories including 'feeling existing and potential concern about expected minimum and maximum bio-positions of growth,' 'feeling potential concern about biological health consequences,' 'feeling potential concern about the emergence of early/late maturity signs,' 'feeling potential concern about adolescent's emotional threat,' 'feeling concerned about future employment, education, marriage, and fertility,' and 'feeling potential concern about the society's view'. These findings suggest that parents are living with a constant sense of uncertainty about their teens' growth characteristics throughout the transition from adolescence. All stakeholders including parents, health-care practitioners and policymakers, and anthropologists/sociologists should be focus on such concerns, in order to manage them and their possible socio-psychological burdens