Diagnostic tools in Rhinology EAACI position paper

This EAACI Task Force document aims at providing the readers with a comprehensive and complete overview of the currently available tools for diagnosis of nasal and sino-nasal disease. We have tried to logically order the different important issues related to history taking, clinical examination and additional investigative tools for evaluation of the severity of sinonasal disease into a consensus document. A panel of European experts in the field of Rhinology has contributed to this consensus document on Diagnostic Tools in Rhinology

Renal amyloidosis in children

Renal amyloidosis is a detrimental disease caused by the deposition of amyloid fibrils. A child with renal amyloidosis may present with proteinuria or nephrotic syndrome. Chronic renal failure may follow. Amyloid fibrils may deposit in other organs as well. The diagnosis is through the typical appearance on histopathology. Although chronic infections and chronic inflammatory diseases used to be the causes of secondary amyloidosis in children, the most frequent cause is now autoinflammatory diseases. Among this group of diseases, the most frequent one throughout the world is familial Mediterranean fever (FMF). FMF is typically characterized by attacks of clinical inflammation in the form of fever and serositis and high acute-phase reactants. Persisting inflammation in inadequately treated disease is associated with the development of secondary amyloidosis. The main treatment is colchicine. A number of other monogenic autoinflammatory diseases have also been identified. Among them cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome (CAPS) is outstanding with its clinical features and the predilection to develop secondary amyloidosis in untreated cases. The treatment of secondary amyloidosis mainly depends on the treatment of the disease. However, a number of new treatments for amyloid per se are in the pipeline

The Salivary Secretome of the Tsetse Fly Glossina pallidipes (Diptera: Glossinidae) Infected by Salivary Gland Hypertrophy Virus

Tsetse fly (Diptera; Glossinidae) transmits two devastating diseases to farmers (human African Trypanosomiasis; HAT) and their livestock (Animal African Trypanosomiasis; AAT) in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. During the rainy seasons, vast areas of fertile, arable land remain uncultivated as farmers flee their homes due to the presence of tsetse. Available drugs against trypanosomiasis are ineffective and difficult to administer. Control of the tsetse vector by Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) has been effective. This method involves repeated release of sterilized males into wild tsetse populations, which compete with wild type males for females. Upon mating, there is no offspring, leading to reduction in tsetse populations and thus relief from trypanosomiasis. The SIT method requires large-scale tsetse rearing to produce sterile males. However, tsetse colony productivity is hampered by infections with the salivary gland hypertrophy virus, which is transmitted via saliva as flies take blood meals during membrane feeding and often leads to colony collapse. Here, we investigated the salivary gland secretome proteins of virus-infected tsetse to broaden our understanding of virus infection, transmission and pathology. By this approach, we obtain insight in tsetse-hytrosavirus interactions and identified potential candidate proteins as targets for developing biotechnological strategies to control viral infections in tsetse colonies

QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories : challenges and perspectives

We highlight the progress, current status, and open challenges of QCD-driven physics, in theory and in experiment. We discuss how the strong interaction is intimately connected to a broad sweep of physical problems, in settings ranging from astrophysics and cosmology to strongly coupled, complex systems in particle and condensed-matter physics, as well as to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We also discuss how success in describing the strong interaction impacts other fields, and, in turn, how such subjects can impact studies of the strong interaction. In the course of the work we offer a perspective on the many research streams which flow into and out of QCD, as well as a vision for future developments.Peer reviewe