A resistant case of Kawasaki Disease

Kawasaki disease (KD) is an acute febrile illness of childhood of unknown origin which may cause coronary arteritis and death. The Maltese incidence has been calculated at 3.2/100,000 population 4 years of age, similar to that reported in European communities and far lower than that reported in Asian countries. The use of steroids in this condition remains contentious. We report a resistant case of KD who required two doses of pulsed steroids in addition to standard treatment with aspirin and immunoglobulin.peer-reviewe

Does a simple educational exercise influence practice in acute tonsillitis in children?

Aim: To assess the concordance of treatment of children attending with tonsillitis in Paediatric Accident and Emergency with established guidelines, and subsequent review of the management of this condition after a simple educational exercise. Methods: An audit on children with tonsillitis was carried out amongst doctors working in the Paediatric Accident and Emergency Department during a three month period in 2009. Eleven doctors completed an anonymous questionnaire requesting details on presentation, symptoms, investigations and treatment of children presenting with acute tonsillitis. The results obtained from this questionnaire were compared to NICE guidelines and modified Centor (McIsaac) criteria, and fed back to the participating doctors together with copies of these guidelines via a simple, structured educational exercise. Three months later, a second identical questionnaire was again completed by the same cohort of doctors. Results: The first questionnaire showed that there was a tendency towards unnecessary prescription of antibiotics and investigations in children with acute tonsillitis, when compared to recommendations in the guidelines. Following educational feedback, the second questionnaire showed a reduction in antibiotic prescriptions by 9% (p=0.5) and investigations by 37% (p=0.1). Compliance with guidelines had improved significantly with regard to non-prescribing of antibiotics with a fever of 1cm and presence of underlying disease although these changes were not statistically significant. Conclusion: Although doctors were initially only partly compliant with established guidelines for children with acute tonsillitis, compliance improved significantly after a simple educational exercise.peer-reviewe

Professor Charles McBurney

Dedication to the life of Charles McBurney

Coherent coupling between surface plasmons and excitons in semiconductor nanocrystals

We present an experimental demonstration of strong coupling between a surface plasmon propagating on a planar silver substrate, and the lowest excited state of CdSe nanocrystals. Variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements demonstrated the formation of plasmon-exciton mixed states, characterized by a Rabi splitting of $\sim$ 82 meV at room temperature. Such a coherent interaction has the potential for the development of plasmonic non-linear devices, and furthermore, this system is akin to those studied in cavity quantum electrodynamics, thus offering the possibility to study the regime of strong light-matter coupling in semiconductor nanocrystals at easily accessible experimental conditions.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Spectral diffusion of single semiconductor nanocrystals: the influence of the dielectric environment

We have explored the influence of different matrices on the emission line shape of individual homogeneously coated CdSe/CdS/ZnS nanocrystals. The results obtained corroborate previous observations of a correlation between blinking events and spectral diffusion but in addition we have found that the extent of spectral diffusion is almost independent of the dielectric environment of the NC. Additionally, we report the observation of a correlation between the line width and emission energy which is not expected to occur in the spherical - symmetric NCs employed in this work. The implications of these results are discussed.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Hot Carrier extraction with plasmonic broadband absorbers

Hot charge carrier extraction from metallic nanostructures is a very promising approach for applications in photo-catalysis, photovoltaics and photodetection. One limitation is that many metallic nanostructures support a single plasmon resonance thus restricting the light-to-charge-carrier activity to a spectral band. Here we demonstrate that a monolayer of plasmonic nanoparticles can be assembled on a multi-stack layered configuration to achieve broad-band, near-unit light absorption, which is spatially localised on the nanoparticle layer. We show that this enhanced light absorbance leads to $\sim$ 40-fold increases in the photon-to-electron conversion efficiency by the plasmonic nanostructures. We developed a model that successfully captures the essential physics of the plasmonic hot-electron charge generation and separation in these structures. This model also allowed us to establish that efficient hot carrier extraction is limited to spectral regions where the photons possessing energies higher than the Schottky junctions and the localised light absorption of the metal nanoparticles overlap.Comment: submitte