Legal capacities required for prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases

Law lies at the centre of successful national strategies for prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. By law we mean international agreements, national and subnational legislation, regulations and other executive instruments, and decisions of courts and tribunals. However, the vital role of law in global health development is often poorly understood, and eclipsed by other disciplines such as medicine, public health and economics. This paper identifies key areas of intersection between law and noncommunicable diseases, beginning with the role of law as a tool for implementing policies for prevention and control of leading risk factors. We identify actions that the World Health Organization and its partners could take to mobilize the legal workforce, strengthen legal capacity and support effective use of law at the national level. Legal and regulatory actions must move to the centre of national noncommunicable disease action plans. This requires high-level leadership from global and national leaders, enacting evidence-based legislation and building legal capacities

Assessing the Value of Coordinated Sire Genetics in a Synchronized AI Program

Synchronized artificial insemination was used to inseminate cows using different types of sire genetics, including low-accuracy, calving-ease, and high-accuracy. These three calf sire groups were compared to calves born to cows bred using natural service. We found substantial production efficiency grains, carcass merit improvement, and economic value to calves born to cows following a synchronized artificial insemination program with high-accuracy semen included. The economic advantage to the high-accuracy calf sire group was computed to be in the neighborhood of $40 to$80/head, relative to the natural service calf sire group.artificial insemination, beef, cow, carcass, feed-out, genetics, pre-conditioning, sire synchronization., Agricultural Finance,

Realization of Coherent Optically Dense Media via Buffer-Gas Cooling

We demonstrate that buffer-gas cooling combined with laser ablation can be used to create coherent optical media with high optical depth and low Doppler broadening that offers metastable states with low collisional and motional decoherence. Demonstration of this generic technique opens pathways to coherent optics with a large variety of atoms and molecules. We use helium buffer gas to cool 87Rb atoms to below 7 K and slow atom diffusion to the walls. Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in this medium allows for 50% transmission in a medium with initial OD >70 and for slow pulse propagation with large delay-bandwidth products. In the high-OD regime, we observe high-contrast spectrum oscillations due to efficient four-wave mixing.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. V2: modified title, abstract, introduction, conclusion; added references; improved theoretical fit in figure 3(b); shortened slow light theory description; clarified simplicity of apparatus. Final version as published in Phys. Rev.

Management considerations in beef heifer development (2002)

Because decisions about selecting and managing replacement beef heifers can affect the future productivity of an entire cowherd, programs to develop breeding heifers have focused on the physiological processes that influence puberty. The timing of puberty is critical to whether a heifer remains in the herd and whether lifetime productivity is optimized.New 6/97; Reviewed and reprinted 10/02/5M

WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY FOR VALUE ADDED BRED HEIFER CHARACTERISTICS

Livestock Production/Industries,

SMaSH: A Benchmarking Toolkit for Human Genome Variant Calling

Motivation: Computational methods are essential to extract actionable information from raw sequencing data, and to thus fulfill the promise of next-generation sequencing technology. Unfortunately, computational tools developed to call variants from human sequencing data disagree on many of their predictions, and current methods to evaluate accuracy and computational performance are ad-hoc and incomplete. Agreement on benchmarking variant calling methods would stimulate development of genomic processing tools and facilitate communication among researchers. Results: We propose SMaSH, a benchmarking methodology for evaluating human genome variant calling algorithms. We generate synthetic datasets, organize and interpret a wide range of existing benchmarking data for real genomes, and propose a set of accuracy and computational performance metrics for evaluating variant calling methods on this benchmarking data. Moreover, we illustrate the utility of SMaSH to evaluate the performance of some leading single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), indel, and structural variant calling algorithms. Availability: We provide free and open access online to the SMaSH toolkit, along with detailed documentation, at smash.cs.berkeley.edu

Electromagnetic trapping of chiral molecules: orientational effects of the irradiating beam

The photonic interaction generally responsible for the electromagnetic trapping of molecules is forward-Rayleigh scattering, a process that is mediated by transition electric dipoles connecting the ground electronic state and virtual excited states. Higher order electric and magnetic multipole contributions to the scattering amplitude are usually negligible. However, on consideration of chiral discrimination effects (in which an input light of left-handed circular polarization can present different observables compared to right-handed polarization, or molecules of opposite enantiomeric form respond differently to a set circular polarization), the mechanism must be extended to specifically accommodate transition magnetic dipoles. Moreover, it is important to account for the fact that chiral molecules are necessarily non-spherical, so that their interactions with a laser beam will have an orientational dependence. Using quantum electrodynamics, this article quantifies the extent of the energetic discrimination that arises when chiral molecules are optically trapped, placing particular emphasis on the orientational effects of the trapping beam. An in-depth description of the intricate ensemble-weighted method used to incorporate the latter is presented. It is thus shown that, when a mixture of molecular enantiomers is irradiated by a continuous beam of circularly polarized light, a difference arises in the relative rates of migration of each enantiomer in and out of the most intense regions of the beam. In consequence, optical trapping can be used as a means of achieving enantiomer separation

Hepatitis B surface antigen in urine of hemodialysis patients

Hepatitis B surface antigen in urine of hemodialysis patients. As part of an extensive epidemiological survey of chronic hemodialysis patients in Michigan, hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) was identified in the sera of 79 of 701 (11%) patients. Of these patients, 59 were carriers of HBsAg for three or more months. Urine samples were collected from 36 of 39 HBsAg carriers having urinary output. Of these samples, 19 (52%) were positive for HBsAg by radioimmunoassay; this was confirmed by specific antibody neutralization. The HBsAg was not identified in the urine of seven hemodialysis patients who were lacking serum HBsAg or in urine samples from three HBsAg sero-carriers who had normal renal function. Patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis appear to constitute a large reservoir of HBsAg chronic carriers. This study indicates that a minimum of 50% of persistent HBsAg carriers who are producing urine have detectable. HBsAg in single, randomly timed, unconcentrated urine specimen. These data suggest that urine may represent a potential vehicle for transmission in nonparenterally acquired hepatitis B.Antigène de surface de l'hépatite B dans l'urine de malades en hémodialyse. Dans le cadre d'une large enquête épidémiologique à propos des malades en hémodialyse chronique dans le Michigan, l'antigène de surface de l'hépatite B (HBsAg) a été identifié dans le sérum de 79 parmi 701 malades (11%). Parmi ces malades, 59 étaient des porteurs de HBsAg depuis 3 mois ou plus. L'urine de 36 des 39 porteurs de HBsAg, qui avaient une diurèse, a été recueillie. Parmi ces 36 urines, 19 (52%) sont positives pour HBsAg par radio-immunologie, ce qui est confirmé par la neutralisation au moyen d'anticorps spécifique. Le HBsAg n'apas été identifié dans l'urine de 7 malades en hémodialyse qui n'avaient pas le HBsAg sérique et dans l'urine de 3 porteurs de HBsAg dont les fonctions rénales étaient normales. Les malades soumis à l'hémodialyse itérative paraissent constituer un grand réservoir de porteurs chroniques de HBsAg. Cette étude indique qu'au minimum 50% des porteurs chroniques de HBsAg qui ont une diurèse, ont un HBsAg détectable dans un échantillon unique d'urine, prélevé au hasard, non concentré. Ces résultats suggèrent que l'urine peut être un véhicule de transmission de l'hépatite B acquise par voie non parentérale