Disease Severity in Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection: Role of Viral and Host Factors

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is not only a major cause of severe lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) in infancy but is increasingly recognised as an important pathogen in later life. RSV infection is associated with a wide spectrum of disease ranging from asymptomatic infection to life-threatening bronchiolitis and pneumonia. Research has demonstrated that there exists a complex interplay between viral and host factors that determines the severity of disease following RSV infection. Several factors determine RSV virulence including the infective properties of individual strains and viral load (VL). Disease outcome from RSV infection is also impacted considerably by a variety of host factors with the host immune response increasingly recognised as pivotal. This chapter outlines our current understanding of these factors and provides an oversight of their relative importance

Using Survival Modeling for Turn-Time Predictions in Foodservice Settings

Within the competitive foodservice industry, the ability to accurately predict the length of the meal process known as turn-time is critical to the success of the firms in the industry. This is traditionally done through multiple least squares (linear regression) technique. However, linear regression lack the characteristics needed to accurately predict time durations, while survival models were designed for that purpose. This study utilized simulated data of a dine-in restaurant to test and compare the ability of linear regression to five survival models (proportional hazard models) to accurately predict the duration of turn-time. The results from the simulated trials show that while some of the survival models held marginal improvements, linear regression performed adequately for predicting duration of turn-time as compared to the survival models. For practitioners interested in the practical ease of the models, linear regression is recommended while practitioners interested in incremental improvements may opt for survival models

Improving accuracy and efficiency of mutual information for multi-modal retinal image registration using adaptive probability density estimation

Mutual information (MI) is a popular similarity measure for performing image registration between different modalities. MI makes a statistical comparison between two images by computing the entropy from the probability distribution of the data. Therefore, to obtain an accurate registration it is important to have an accurate estimation of the true underlying probability distribution. Within the statistics literature, many methods have been proposed for finding the 'optimal' probability density, with the aim of improving the estimation by means of optimal histogram bin size selection. This provokes the common question of how many bins should actually be used when constructing a histogram. There is no definitive answer to this. This question itself has received little attention in the MI literature, and yet this issue is critical to the effectiveness of the algorithm. The purpose of this paper is to highlight this fundamental element of the MI algorithm. We present a comprehensive study that introduces methods from statistics literature and incorporates these for image registration. We demonstrate this work for registration of multi-modal retinal images: colour fundus photographs and scanning laser ophthalmoscope images. The registration of these modalities offers significant enhancement to early glaucoma detection, however traditional registration techniques fail to perform sufficiently well. We find that adaptive probability density estimation heavily impacts on registration accuracy and runtime, improving over traditional binning techniques. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

The effect of competition on the control of invading plant pathogens

1. New invading pathogen strains must compete with endemic pathogen strains to emerge and spread. As disease control measures are often non-specific, i.e. they do not distinguish between strains, applying control not only affects the invading pathogen strain but the endemic as well. We hypothesise that the control of the invasive strain could be compromised due to the non-specific nature of the control. 2. A spatially-explicit model, describing the East African cassava mosaic virus-Uganda strain (EACMV-UG) outbreak, is used to evaluate methods of controlling both disease incidence and spread of invading pathogen strains in pathosystems with and without an endemic pathogen strain present. 3. We find that while many newly introduced or intensified control measures (such as resistant cultivars or roguing) decrease the expected incidence, they have the unintended consequence of increasing, or at least not reducing, the speed with which the invasive pathogen spreads geographically. We identify which controls cause this effect and methods in which these controls may be applied to prevent it. 4. We found that the spatial spread of the invading strain is chiefly governed by the incidence at the wave front. Control can therefore be applied, or intensified, once the wave front has passed without increasing the pathogen’s rate of spread. 5. When trade of planting material occurs, it is possible that the planting material is already infected. The only forms of control in this study that reduces the speed of geographic spread, regardless of the presence of an endemic strain, are those that reduce the amount of trade and the distance over which trade takes place. 6. Synthesis and applications. Imposing trade restrictions before the epidemic has reached a given area and increasing other control methods only once the wave front has passed is the most effective way of both slowing down spread and controlling incidence when the presence of an endemic strain is unknow

Cassava brown streak virus disease: Past, present and future.

Cassava has been an important success story in Africa's developing agriculture over the past decade. The crop's inherei'lt capacity to cope with marginal growing conditions and unpredictable rainfall, coupled with determined efforts of a number of countries to move away from over-reliance on maize, have helped establish it as the continent's number one crop in terms of total fresh production. The hope provided by these gains is now threatened, however, by the devastating impact of the virus diseases, cassava mosaic and cassava brown streak. Both have been known for many years, but seem to be becoming increasingly damaging, and pose an ever greater threat to the livelihoods of the millions of Africans who depend on cassava as a food staple. Substantial effort has been directed towards understanding and managing cassava mosaic. By contrast, cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), which has a more limited distribution, and causes most severe damage in the coastal lowlands of Eastern and Southern Africa, has received little attention. In order to address this deficiency, an international workshop was convened at Mombasa, Kenya. This meeting brought together a diverse range of cassava stakeholders with the twin aims of reviewing current research into cassava brown streak and developing a plan to guide future research for development initiatives. The IS papers presented in these proceedings provide a useful and informative summary of the history and current status of CBSD, recent research initiatives and management options for the worst affected countries - Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique. Outputs of the research and on-farm working group sessions are also included. lt is anticipated that this information will serve both as a useful technical resource as well as an essential planning tool for scientists, development workers and others with an interest in the management of CBSD and the development of cassava in Africa

Sea Beam Survey of an Active Strike-Slip Fault: The San Clemente Fault in the California Continental Borderland

The San Clemente fault, located in the California Continental Borderland, is an active, northwest trending, right-lateral, wrench fault. Sea Beam data are used to map the major tectonic landforms associated with active submarine faulting in detail unavailable using conventional echo-sounding or seismic reflection data. In the area between North San Clemente Basin and Fortymile Bank, the major late Cenozoic faults are delineated by alignments of numerous tectonic landforms, including scarps, linear trenches, benches, and sags. Character and spatial patterns of these landforms are consistent with dextral wrench faulting, although vertical offsets may be substantial locally. The main trace of the San Clemente fault cuts a straight path directly across the rugged topography of the region, evidence of a steeply dipping fault surface. Basins or sags located at each right step in the en echelon pattern of faults are manifestations of pull-apart basin development in a right-slip fault zone. Seismic reflection profiles show offset reflectors and a graben in late Quaternary turbidites of the Navy Fan, where the fault zone follows a more northerly trend. Modern tectonic activity along the San Clemente fault zone is demonstrated by numerous earthquakes with epicenters located along the fault\u27s trend. The average strike of the San Clemente fault is parallel to the predicted Pacific-North American relative plate motion vector at this location. Therefore we conclude that the San Clemente fault zone is a part of the broad Pacific-North American transform plate boundary and that the southern California region may be considered as a broad shear zone

International legislation on white slavery and anti-trafficking in the early 20th century

The chapter focuses on the emergence of international legislation against trafficking in the early twentieth century, focusing on the years between 1904 and 1949. The chapter will introduce key legal measures adopted during that time but focus on the enactment of the International Agreement for the Suppression of the “White Slave Traffic” 1904 and the International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic 1910. These measures, unlike modern anti-trafficking legal standards that recognize more comprehensive forms of exploitation, focused solely on recruitment for prostitution and the exploitation of prostitution. The chapter argues that the early-twentieth-century legal framework was mostly a result of civil society action in the field and that the framework enabled the control of immigration and emigration of young women. The chapter will further show how the terminology changed from “white slavery” to a more neutral “traffic” with the League of Nations. Despite this change, immigration control and nationalism continued to underline much of the rhetoric even after the League of Nations took over the legal framework in 1921

Two Cases of Excision of Ruptured Spleen.

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