Asymptomatic urinary tract infection among pregnant women receiving ante-natal care in a traditional birth home in Benin city, Nigeria

Background: A good proportion of pregnant women patronize traditional birth homes in Nigeria for ante-natal care. This study aimed at determining the prevalence, risk factors, and susceptibility profile of etiologic agents of urinary tract infection among ante-natal attendees in a traditional birth home in Benin City, Nigeria.Methods: Clean-catch urine was collected from 220 pregnant women attending a traditional birth home in Benin City, Nigeria. Urine samples were processed, and microbial isolates identified using standard bacteriological procedures. A cross-sectional study design was used.Results: The prevalence of urinary tract infection among pregnant women was 55.0%, significantly affected by parity and gestational age (P<0.05). Mixed infection was recorded among 13(10.7%) pregnant women, and was unaffected by maternal age, parity, gravidity, gestational age, and educational status. Irrespective of trimester Escherichia coli was the most prevalent etiologic agent of urinary tract infection, followed by Staphylococcus aureus. The flouroquinolones were the most effective antibacterial agents, while Sulphamethoxazole-trimetoprim, Amoxicillin, Nalidixic acid, and Nitrofurantoin had poor activity against uropathogens isolated.Conclusion: The prevalence of urinary tract infection among pregnant women was 55.0% and significantly affected by gestational age and parity. The most prevalent etiologic agent observed was Escherichia coli. With the exception of the flouroquinolones, aminoglycoside, and Amoxicillin-cluvanate, the activity of other antibiotics used on uropathogens were poor. Health education of the traditional birth attendant and her clients by relevant intervention agencies is strongly advocated.Keywords: Urinary tract infection, pregnancy, orthodox birth center, traditional birth center, Nigeri

Technology for large-scale translation of clinical practice guidelines : a pilot study of the performance of a hybrid human and computer-assisted approach

Background: The construction of EBMPracticeNet, a national electronic point-of-care information platform in Belgium, was initiated in 2011 to optimize quality of care by promoting evidence-based decision-making. The project involved, among other tasks, the translation of 940 EBM Guidelines of Duodecim Medical Publications from English into Dutch and French. Considering the scale of the translation process, it was decided to make use of computer-aided translation performed by certificated translators with limited expertise in medical translation. Our consortium used a hybrid approach, involving a human translator supported by a translation memory (using SDL Trados Studio), terminology recognition (using SDL Multiterm termbases) from medical termbases and support from online machine translation. This has resulted in a validated translation memory which is now in use for the translation of new and updated guidelines. Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of the hybrid human and computer-assisted approach in comparison with translation unsupported by translation memory and terminology recognition. A comparison was also made with the translation efficiency of an expert medical translator. Methods: We conducted a pilot trial in which two sets of 30 new and 30 updated guidelines were randomized to one of three groups. Comparable guidelines were translated (a) by certificated junior translators without medical specialization using the hybrid method (b) by an experienced medical translator without this support and (c) by the same junior translators without the support of the validated translation memory. A medical proofreader who was blinded for the translation procedure, evaluated the translated guidelines for acceptability and adequacy. Translation speed was measured by recording translation and post-editing time. The Human Translation Edit Rate was calculated as a metric to evaluate the quality of the translation. A further evaluation was made of translation acceptability and adequacy. Results: The average number of words per guideline was 1,195 and the mean total translation time was 100.2 min/1,000 words. No meaningful differences were found in the translation speed for new guidelines. The translation of updated guidelines was 59 min/1,000 words faster (95% CI 2-115; P=.044) in the computer-aided group. Revisions due to terminology accounted for one third of the overall revisions by the medical proofreader. Conclusions: Use of the hybrid human and computer-aided translation by a non-expert translator makes the translation of updates of clinical practice guidelines faster and cheaper because of the benefits of translation memory. For the translation of new guidelines there was no apparent benefit in comparison with the efficiency of translation unsupported by translation memory (whether by an expert or non-expert translator

The synthesis of 15 mu infrared horizon radiance profiles from meteorological data inputs

Computational computer program for modeling infrared horizon radiance profile using pressure and temperature profile input

A Rare case of Rosacea Rhinophyma in an African Patient

No Abstrac

Delay sensitive and power-aware SMDP-based connection admission control mechanism in cognitive radio sensor networks

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Due to the opportunistically resource usage of users in cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs), the availability of network resources is highly variable. Therefore, admission control is an essential mechanism to manage the traffic of cognitive radio users in order to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of applications. In this study, a connection admission control (CAC) mechanism is introduced to satisfy the requirements of delay sensitivity and power consumption awareness. This proposed mechanism is modeled through a semi Markov decision process (SMDP) and a linear programming problem is derived with the aim of obtaining the optimal policy to control the traffic of CRSNs and achieving maximum reward. The number of required channels at each network state is estimated through a graph coloring approach. An end to end delay constraint is defined for the optimization problem which is inspired from Kleinrock independence approximation. Furthermore, a power-aware weighting method is proposed for this mechanism. We conduct different simulation-based scenarios to investigate the performance of the proposed mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of this SMDP-based mechanism in comparison to the last CAC mechanism in CRSNs

Perception of Women Knowledge on the Nutritive Value of Fish in Kaduna North Local Government Area of Kaduna State, Nigeria

This study investigated women knowledge on the nutritive value of fish in Kaduna North local government area of Kaduna State. One hundred and twenty (120) household wives were randomly selected for the study. Structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Date was analyzed using frequency distribution, percentages, means and logistic regression to determine the factors affecting fish consumption at the household level. The result shows that majority (91.8%) of the respondents were within the age range of between 20-40 years and majority (98.8%) posses formal education. Also a greater proportion (94.29%) of the respondents had moderate household size. Furthermore, majority (65%) belongs to one form of cooperative or the other and vast majority (79.2%) had been in marriage institution for more than 10 years. The respondents perceived the following sources of information about nutritive value of fish as important: home economics staff/extension agents; friends and relatives; books/leaflets; television; and radio. Also the following constraints were perceived as important: availability of fish; household size; method of processing; method of harvesting; and seasonality of fish supply. The following factors in the logistic regression were significant: major occupation of the respondents; years spent in marriage institution and number of years spent in formal education. It is recommended that home economics staff/extension agents and other concerned institutions should be encourage to intensify efforts in creating more awareness on the nutritive value of fish to encourage its consumption, so as to reduce the rate of mal-nutrition in the rural areas

Understanding SUMO-mediated adaptive responses in plants to improve crop productivity

The response to abiotic and biotic stresses in plants and crops is considered a multifaceted process. Due to their sessile nature, plants have evolved unique mechanisms to ensure that developmental plasticity remains during their life cycle. Among these mechanisms, post-translational modifications (PTMs) are crucial components of adaptive responses in plants and transduce environmental stimuli into cellular signalling through the modulation of proteins. SUMOylation is an emerging PTM that has received recent attention due to its dynamic role in protein modification and has quickly been considered a significant component of adaptive mechanisms in plants during stress with great potential for agricultural improvement programs. In the present review, we outline the concept that small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO)-mediated response in plants and crops to abiotic and biotic stresses is a multifaceted process with each component of the SUMO cycle facilitating tolerance to several different environmental stresses. We also highlight the clear increase in SUMO genes in crops when compared with Arabidopsis thaliana. The SUMO system is understudied in crops, given the importance of SUMO for stress responses, and for some SUMO genes, the apparent expansion provides new avenues to discover SUMO-conjugated targets that could regulate beneficial agronomical traits

Equilibrium model selection: dTTP induced R1 dimerization

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Biochemical equilibria are usually modeled iteratively: given one or a few fitted models, if there is a lack of fit or over fitting, a new model with additional or fewer parameters is then fitted, and the process is repeated. The problem with this approach is that different analysts can propose and select different models and thus extract different binding parameter estimates from the same data. An alternative is to first generate a comprehensive standardized list of plausible models, and to then fit them exhaustively, or semi-exhaustively.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A framework is presented in which equilibriums are modeled as pairs (<it>g</it>, <it>h</it>) where <it>g </it>= 0 maps total reactant concentrations (system inputs) into free reactant concentrations (system states) which <it>h </it>then maps into expected values of measurements (system outputs). By letting dissociation constants <it>K</it>_{<it>d </it>}be either freely estimated, infinity, zero, or equal to other <it>K</it>_<it>d</it>, and by letting undamaged protein fractions be either freely estimated or 1, many <it>g </it>models are formed. A standard space of <it>g </it>models for ligand-induced protein dimerization equilibria is given. Coupled to an <it>h </it>model, the resulting (<it>g</it>, <it>h</it>) were fitted to dTTP induced R1 dimerization data (R1 is the large subunit of ribonucleotide reductase). Models with the fewest parameters were fitted first. Thereafter, upon fitting a batch, the next batch of models (with one more parameter) was fitted only if the current batch yielded a model that was better (based on the Akaike Information Criterion) than the best model in the previous batch (with one less parameter). Within batches models were fitted in parallel. This semi-exhaustive approach yielded the same best models as an exhaustive model space fit, but in approximately one-fifth the time.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Comprehensive model space based biochemical equilibrium model selection methods are realizable. Their significance to systems biology as mappings of data into mathematical models warrants their development.</p

The Catalytic Site Atlas 2.0: cataloging catalytic sites and residues identified in enzymes.

Understanding which are the catalytic residues in an enzyme and what function they perform is crucial to many biology studies, particularly those leading to new therapeutics and enzyme design. The original version of the Catalytic Site Atlas (CSA) (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/thornton-srv/databases/CSA) published in 2004, which catalogs the residues involved in enzyme catalysis in experimentally determined protein structures, had only 177 curated entries and employed a simplistic approach to expanding these annotations to homologous enzyme structures. Here we present a new version of the CSA (CSA 2.0), which greatly expands the number of both curated (968) and automatically annotated catalytic sites in enzyme structures, utilizing a new method for annotation transfer. The curated entries are used, along with the variation in residue type from the sequence comparison, to generate 3D templates of the catalytic sites, which in turn can be used to find catalytic sites in new structures. To ease the transfer of CSA annotations to other resources a new ontology has been developed: the Enzyme Mechanism Ontology, which has permitted the transfer of annotations to Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes (MACiE) and UniProt Knowledge Base (UniProtKB) resources. The CSA database schema has been re-designed and both the CSA data and search capabilities are presented in a new modern web interface