Ochratoxins—Food Contaminants: Impact on Human Health

Ochratoxins are secondary metabolites of Aspergillus and Penicillium, that are hazardous to health through contamination of dietary foods. Ochratoxin A (OTA) remains the single most potent member of this group of mycotoxins. OTA has a long half-life in humans and is thus easily detected in serum. Dietary intake studies have confirmed link between endemic nephrotoxicity in humans to their daily household intake of OTA. OTA has been reported to contribute to endemic nephrotoxicity and carcinogenicity in humans and animals. OTA produces renal tumours, DNA adducts and chromosomal aberrations in kidneys. OTA may be embryotoxic, teratogenic, and immunotoxic only at doses higher than those causing nephrotoxicity. The incidence of endemic nephrotoxicity has been mostly reported in northeast Europe since the early fifties. Recent studies however have warned that OTA and other toxins, such as aristolochic acid, show very similar renal pathology. There is thus the need for thorough co-occurrence studies on toxin incidence

Implication du polymorphisme d’enzymes de métabolisation et/ou de réparation dans le suivi de travailleurs exposés au styrène, à des solvants, des pesticides ou à l’arsenic

Les cancérogènes environnementaux sont convertis, par des enzymes de métabolisation dits de phase I ou de fonctionnalisation) et des enzymes de phase II ou de conjugaison), en métabolites réactifs pouvant se fixer à l’ADN. La plupart de ces enzymes sont polymorphes : le polymorphisme1 génétique est la base de la susceptibilité individuelle. Il est défini comme une différence par rapport au gène de référence, observée chez au moins 1 % des individus. Pour des expositions équivalentes, deux individus de même poids, même âge, même sexe peuvent avoir des taux plasmatiques2 de toxiques ou de métabolites variant de 1 à 1000 s’expliquant par des capacités d’absorption, de métabolisation et d’élimination différentes régulées génétiquement. La réponse toxique d’un individu vis-à-vis d’un contaminant va dépendre de ses capacités à transporter la substance, à la métaboliser et à réparer les lésions initiales sur l’ADN. Les enzymes de réparation sont aussi polymorphes. L’identification de certains variants alléliques3 de gène comme marqueurs de susceptibilité4 peut constituer un outil précoce de diagnostic et de pronostic

Exposition à des moisissures dans le milieu hospitalier et dans des usines de production de biogaz-Intérêt des protections individuelles et collectives

Les champignons filamenteux se développent de manière ubiquitaire sur de nombreux substrats organiques. Les spores se retrouvent dans les poussières et sont souvent inhalables. De plus en plus de données scientifiques pointent l’inhalation de moisissures comme cause d’allergie respiratoire ou cutanée aussi bien dans l’environnement (maisons insalubres) que dans le milieu du travail, notamment dans les industries de compostage de matière organique ou de fabrication de bioéthanol. La contamination peut aussi avoir lieu via les systèmes d’air conditionné. Les spores par elles-mêmes engendrent des effets toxiques à l’origine d’allergie. De plus, elles produisent des toxines. Les risques de développement de moisissures dans l’air inspiré sont bien connus en milieu hospitalier et plus particulièrement chez les personnes immunodépressives. Néanmoins, la présence des ces éléments fongiques en milieu de travail est responsable de rhinites, toux et problèmes dermatologiques, chez les travailleurs non immunodéprimés. Notre note portera sur la contamination de l’air en milieu hospitalier et dans un laboratoire de mycologie ainsi que sur les risques liés à l’air conditionné. Le dernier article relatera les effets subis par les travailleurs lors du compostage et de la fabrication de bioéthanol

Katherine Adelaide Pfohl Collection - Accession 1414

The Katherine Adelaide Pfohl Papers consist of two photographs, thirty seven books, and approximately eighty slides. Katherine Pfohl (1908-2012) was a professor of Music Faculty at Winthrop College from 1946-1972. Most of the collection pertains to her career at Winthrop and would be useful to any researchers looking into the Music Program and Music majors at Winthrop College from the 1940s through the 1970s.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/2373/thumbnail.jp

Creating a Unified School Culture in a Rural School Serving Families in Multiple Communities

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) addresses the fractured culture of School X resulting from an influx of staff and students from neighbouring communities following rural school closures. The problem of practice (PoP) presented explores ways that a unified school identity can be developed in a receiving school with a student population coming from three separate communities. Through the utilization of both distributed and authentic leadership, the methods that principals of rural schools can use to address this problem are explored. The focus of the problem when viewed through the social capital theory is that all stakeholders of the school have not been given the opportunity to build trusting relationships with one another so that a cohesive identity can be established (Liou & Chang, 2008). Kotter’s (2012) Eight-Stage Change Process model is used to guide the change implementation plan, which recommends putting into practice a relationship-based program requiring participation from students, staff members, and family members to repair the fractured school culture. The implications of the change plan are that the development of trusting relationships between staff members and families of students in the school will provide opportunities for all stakeholders to realize a sense of belonging in the school, contributing to higher levels of social capital and a more cohesive school culture (Deal & Peterson, 2016). This will be of interest to leaders of rural schools serving families in multiple geographical communities, as well as schools receiving students and staff members from neighbouring communities following permanent school closures

Examining trends in snowmelt contribution to streamflow in the southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado

Includes bibliographical references.2016 Summer.Snowmelt contribution to streamflow in snow-dominated watersheds has largely been limited to using the Center of Volume method, which looks at the day at which a certain amount of flow has passed, typically 20%, 50%, and 80%, referred to as tQ20, tQ50, and tQ80, respectively. We developed a new method to measure streamflow timing in the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado for 39 gauging stations from 1976 to 2015. We first manually extracted start and end days from the annual hydrograph of a small, medium, and large watershed to use as "truth." We then looked at the cumulative annual hydrograph and then found average spring and late fall baseflow. Using these average baseflows, we plotted the cumulative baseflow against the cumulative hydrograph and determined that the start and end of snowmelt contribution, tstart and tend, occurred when the cumulative hydrograph departed from the cumulative baseflow by a given baseflow factor. Using NSE and RMSE values, we determined that 10x and 17.5 baseflow were able to best represent the manually extracted values. NSE values ranged from 0.59 to 0.6 and 0.53 to 0.69 for tstart and tend, respectively; RMSE values ranged from 5.42 to 7.7 and 6.32 to 8.00, for tstart and tend, respectively. In comparison, NSE values ranged from -4.73 to -25.35 and -5.87 to -13.25 for tQ20 and tQ80, respectively; RMSE values ranged from 29.33 to 43.19 and 33.01 to 34.94 for tQ20 and tQ80, respectively. This new automated method was able to better predict values of start and end than what has been commonly used in the literature. We identified other variables related to snowmelt timing to streamflow, including the percent of flow and volume at the estimated tstart and tend, as well as the total duration of contribution. We used the correlation coefficient to help explain the variance in the observed trends of the different snowmelt timing variables, using different physiographic characteristics (mean slope, mean elevation, mean solar radiation, latitude, and longitude) as well as trends in winter precipitation and summer NDVI. Most of these trends were not statistically significant, but mean slope was best able to explain the variance in trends for tend, Q100, Qend, Qduration, %Qtend, and tQ80 (p < 0.05)

Creating Fair Models of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Guidelines for the management of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) recommend the use of risk stratification models to identify patients most likely to benefit from cholesterol-lowering and other therapies. These models have differential performance across race and gender groups with inconsistent behavior across studies, potentially resulting in an inequitable distribution of beneficial therapy. In this work, we leverage adversarial learning and a large observational cohort extracted from electronic health records (EHRs) to develop a "fair" ASCVD risk prediction model with reduced variability in error rates across groups. We empirically demonstrate that our approach is capable of aligning the distribution of risk predictions conditioned on the outcome across several groups simultaneously for models built from high-dimensional EHR data. We also discuss the relevance of these results in the context of the empirical trade-off between fairness and model performance

Critical Wetting of a Liquid/Vapor Interface by Octane

The wetting of the planar interface between air saturated with octane vapor and an aqueous solution by octane is investigated by ellipsometry and interfacial tension measurements. The interfacial interactions are varied through the concentration of the uncharged solute (glucose). We observe abrupt and continuous increases of the octane coverage with growing solute concentration. This we attribute to short- and long-range (dispersion) interactions, respectively. The continuous thickness growth is analyzed as a critical wetting transition