Profile of HIV Infection in Children and Its Correlation with their CD4 Counts

Objectives: (i) To study the clinical profile of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in children. (ii) To establish the pattern of correlation of these clinical features with the CD4 counts. (iii) To evaluate the effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) on CD4 count of children at 6 months of therapy. Material and methods: Sixty-eight children enrolled at our ART centre or admitted at our hospital were enrolled for the study. Their case papers were reviewed. Complete clinical profile was obtained and baseline investigations including CD4 counts done. Children were then followed up and repeat CD4 levels done 6 monthly. The children were managed as per current guidelines. Results: The mean age at presentation was 6.54 ± 2.69 years. Male-to-female ratio was 2.579:1. Vertical transmission accounted for 95.58% of cases. Prolonged fever and chronic diarrhea were the most common symptoms and hepatosplenomegaly and lymphadenopathy were the most common signs. There was strong correlation between clinical and immunological staging (p < 0.0001). Failure to thrive, recurrent skin infections and abscesses were signs and symptoms at lowest CD4 levels. Orphan-hood (p < 0.0001) and socioeconomic status (p = 0.0003) significantly affected schooling among these children. Malnutrition, anemia and stunting were features of severe immunosuppression. HAART significantly raised the CD4 count at 6 months of therapy (paired ‘t’ = 6.830, p < 0.0001) with best results at higher baseline CD4 levels. Gastritis was the most common (81.5%) adverse effect and the major cause of decreased compliance. Tuberculosis and candidiasis were the commonest opportunistic infections and pneumonia accounted for majority of hospitalizations (61.5%). Conclusions: Clinical and immunological staging have good correlation. The features of severe immunosuppression are failure to thrive, recurrent bacterial skin infections, abscesses, Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia, extrapulmonary tuberculosis, anemia and stunting. Orphan-hood and poor socioeconomic status affect schooling in these children. Early initiation of ART at higher baseline CD4 has best results. Gastritis is the major adverse effect causing decreased compliance.&nbsp

Feed and Fodder–A Major Challenge in Cold Arid Region of Leh

Agriculture and animal husbandry in cold arid region are interwoven with the complex fabric of the society in sociocultural, religious and economical ways. Mixed crop-livestock farming systems have exerted a powerful influence on climate of Leh because of dissected topography with high peaks and deep valleys, having immense surface area and substantial area of which is clothed with a massive green mantle of plant cover during cropping season. Increased development in terms of increased agriculture, construction of roads, other miscellaneous constructions, and revenue oriented forestry has accentuated deforestation to meet the demand of fuel, fodders based industries. This has also exerted negative impact on pasture lands. However, the area under permanent pasture and grazing lands and net sown area have been surprisingly constant in the last decade. While the area under fallow other than current fallow has reduced by 50 per cent and the current fallow have increased almost two folds clearly indicated the need ever increasing demand for feed and fodder. The data/estimates of fodder production in the country vary widely. Fodder production and its utilization depend on the cropping pattern, climate, socio-economic conditions and type of livestock in a particular region. The cattle and other livestock are normally fed on the fodder available from cultivated areas, supplemented to a small extent by harvested grasses and top feeds. The three major sources of fodder supply are: crop residues, cultivated fodder and fodder from common property resources, forests, permanent pastures and grazing lands. The regional deficit is more important than the national deficit, especially for fodder, which is not economical to transport over long distances. The pattern of deficit varies block to block of the region. For instance, in general fodder availability in cold arid region is 40-50 per cent of the actual requirement, however, in few blocks, it is below 40%

Biological Posts: Natural Alternatives in Restoring Smile

Traumatic injuries leading to severely mutilated anterior teeth are common in dentistry. These injuries may leave a severe impact when they affect  ndodontically treated teeth as strength of such teeth is compromised. Proper functional and esthetic rehabilitation of such badly broken teeth is a challenge. Dealing with the patient’s mental suffering and their impatience to regain the natural smile back makes the treatment even more challenging. An effective treatment plan including a suitable and cost-effective choice of post is very much necessary in such conditions. Biological posts obtained through extracted teeth from another individual represent an economic option and alternative technique for the functional recovery of extensively damaged teeth. All-ceramic crowns further add to enhanced esthetics. This paper presents a case where biological posts with composite core build up followed by all-ceramic crown adaptation have been used with successful outcom

Kinetics of biodegradation of diethylketone by Arthrobacter viscosus

The performance of an Arthrobacter viscosus culture to remove diethylketone from aqueous solutions was evaluated. The effect of initial concentration of diethylketone on the growth of the bacteria was evaluated for the range of concentration between 0 and 4.8 g/l, aiming to evaluate a possible toxicological effect. The maximum specific growth rate achieved is 0.221 h-1 at 1.6 g/l of initial diethylketone concentration, suggesting that for higher concentrations an inhibitory effect on the growth occurs. The removal percentages obtained were approximately 88%, for all the initial concentrations tested. The kinetic parameters were estimated using four growth kinetic models for biodegradation of organic compounds available in the literature. The experimental data found is well fitted by the Haldane model (R2 = 1) as compared to Monod model (R2 = 0.99), Powell (R2 = 0.82) and Loung model (R2 = 0.95). The biodegradation of diethylketone using concentrated biomass was studied for an initial diethylketone concentration ranging from 0.8–3.9 g/l in a batch with recirculation mode of operation. The biodegradation rate found followed the pseudo-second order kinetics and the resulting kinetic parameters are reported. The removal percentages obtained were approximately 100%, for all the initial concentrations tested, suggesting that the increment on the biomass concentration allows better results in terms of removal of diethylketone. This study showed that these bacteria are very effective for the removal of diethylketone from aqueous solutions.The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of this project by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT), Ministerio da Ciencia e Tecnologia, Portugal and Fundo Social Europeu (FSE). Cristina Quintelas thanks FCT for a Post-Doc grant

Enhancement of immune response of HBsAg loaded poly(L-lactic acid) microspheres against Hepatitis B through incorporation of alum and chitosan

Purpose: Poly (L-lactic acid) (PLA) microparticles encapsulating Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) with alum and chitosan were investigated for their potential as a vaccine delivery system. Methods: The microparticles, prepared using a water-in-oil-in-water (w/o/w) double emulsion solvent evaporation method with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) or chitosan as the external phase stabilising agent showed a significant increase in the encapsulation efficiency of the antigen. Results: PLA-Alum and PLA-chitosan microparticles induced HBsAg serum specific IgG antibody responses significantly higher than PLA only microparticles and free antigen following subcutaneous administration. Chitosan not only imparted a positive charge to the surface of the microparticles but was also able to increase the serum specific IgG antibody responses significantly. Conclusions: The cytokine assays showed that the serum IgG antibody response induced is different according to the formulation, indicated by the differential levels of interleukin 4 (IL-4), interleukin 6 (IL-6) and interferon gamma (IFN-γ). The microparticles eliciting the highest IgG antibody response did not necessarily elicit the highest levels of the cytokines IL-4, IL-6 and IFN-γ

The sequence of rice chromosomes 11 and 12, rich in disease resistance genes and recent gene duplications

Background: Rice is an important staple food and, with the smallest cereal genome, serves as a reference species for studies on the evolution of cereals and other grasses. Therefore, decoding its entire genome will be a prerequisite for applied and basic research on this species and all other cereals. Results: We have determined and analyzed the complete sequences of two of its chromosomes, 11 and 12, which total 55.9 Mb (14.3% of the entire genome length), based on a set of overlapping clones. A total of 5,993 non-transposable element related genes are present on these chromosomes. Among them are 289 disease resistance-like and 28 defense-response genes, a higher proportion of these categories than on any other rice chromosome. A three-Mb segment on both chromosomes resulted from a duplication 7.7 million years ago (mya), the most recent large-scale duplication in the rice genome. Paralogous gene copies within this segmental duplication can be aligned with genomic assemblies from sorghum and maize. Although these gene copies are preserved on both chromosomes, their expression patterns have diverged. When the gene order of rice chromosomes 11 and 12 was compared to wheat gene loci, significant synteny between these orthologous regions was detected, illustrating the presence of conserved genes alternating with recently evolved genes. Conclusion: Because the resistance and defense response genes, enriched on these chromosomes relative to the whole genome, also occur in clusters, they provide a preferred target for breeding durable disease resistance in rice and the isolation of their allelic variants. The recent duplication of a large chromosomal segment coupled with the high density of disease resistance gene clusters makes this the most recently evolved part of the rice genome. Based on syntenic alignments of these chromosomes, rice chromosome 11 and 12 do not appear to have resulted from a single whole-genome duplication event as previously suggested

Human Centric Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) is an area of active research, both in computer science and in behavioural science. Across these domains there is evidence to suggest that humans and machines find it easier to recognise certain emotions, for example happiness, in comparison to others. Recent behavioural studies have explored human perceptions of emotion further, by evaluating the relative contribution of features in the face when evaluating human sensitivity to emotion. It has been identified that certain facial regions have more salient features for certain expressions of emotion, especially when emotions are subtle in nature. For example, it is easier to detect fearful expressions when the eyes are expressive. Using this observation as a starting point for analysis, we similarly examine the effectiveness with which knowledge of facial feature saliency may be integrated into current approaches to automated FER. Specifically, we compare and evaluate the accuracy of ‘full-face’ versus upper and lower facial area convolutional neural network (CNN) modelling for emotion recognition in static images, and propose a human centric CNN hierarchy which uses regional image inputs to leverage current understanding of how humans recognise emotions across the face. Evaluations using the CK+ dataset demonstrate that our hierarchy can enhance classification accuracy in comparison to individual CNN architectures, achieving overall true positive classification in 93.3% of cases