Sampling of environment and carcasses for the detection of Salmonella in swine abattoirs

The understanding of the epidemiology of Salmonella in slaughterhouses is a prerequisite for the establishment of control measures. In this study, 2841 samples were taken from the environment (before and during the operations), fecal material of incoming animals, different steps during the slaughter process and from carcasses to detect the presence of Salmonella in 4 abattoirs in the province of Quebec. Samples were processed using conventional enrichment and culture procedures and positive isolates were serotyped. Salmonella were found in 4.0% of the environment samples, including gloves and aprons. Despite an exceptionally high isolation rate of 21.3% in feces, probably the reflect of many clinical outbreaks of S. Typhimurium in the field, the percentage of positive isolates recovered from carcasses was 6.3%

Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary debates

This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction of www.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary proceedings at the centre of its architecture

Recommended Priorities for Research on Ecological Impacts of Ocean and Coastal Acidification in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic

The estuaries and continental shelf system of the United States Mid-Atlantic are subject to ocean acidification driven by atmospheric CO2, and coastal acidification caused by nearshore and land-sea interactions that include biological, chemical, and physical processes. These processes include freshwater and nutrient input from rivers and groundwater; tidally-driven outwelling of nutrients, inorganic carbon, alkalinity; high productivity and respiration; and hypoxia. Hence, these complex dynamic systems exhibit substantial daily, seasonal, and interannual variability that is not well captured by current acidification research on Mid-Atlantic organisms and ecosystems. We present recommendations for research priorities that target better understanding of the ecological impacts of acidification in the U. S. Mid-Atlantic region. Suggested priorities are: 1) Determining the impact of multiple stressors on our resource species as well as the magnitude of acidification; 2) Filling information gaps on major taxa and regionally important species in different life stages to improve understanding of their response to variable temporal scales and sources of acidification; 3) Improving experimental approaches to incorporate realistic environmental variability and gradients, include interactions with other environmental stressors, increase transferability to other systems or organisms, and evaluate community and ecosystem response; 4) Determining the capacity of important species to acclimate or adapt to changing ocean conditions; 5) Considering multi-disciplinary, ecosystem-level research that examines acidification impacts on biodiversity and biotic interactions; and 6) Connecting potential acidification-induced ecological impacts to ecosystem services and the economy. These recommendations, while developed for the Mid-Atlantic, can be applicable to other regions will help align research towards knowledge of potential larger-scale ecological and economic impacts

Developing Consensus-Based Outcome Domains for Trials in Children and Adolescents With CKD: An International Delphi Survey

RATIONALE & OBJECTIVE: The inconsistency in outcomes reported and lack of patient-reported outcomes across trials in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD) limits shared decision making. As part of the Standardized Outcomes in Nephrology (SONG)-Kids initiative, we aimed to generate a consensus-based prioritized list of critically important outcomes to be reported in all trials in children with CKD. STUDY DESIGN: An online 2-round Delphi survey in English, French, and Hindi languages. SETTINGS & PARTICIPANTS: Patients (aged 8-21 years), caregivers/family, and health care professionals (HCPs) rated the importance of outcomes using a 9-point Likert scale (7-9 indicating critical importance) and completed a Best-Worst Scale. ANALYTICAL APPROACH: We assessed the absolute and relative importance of outcomes. Comments were analyzed thematically. RESULTS: 557 participants (72 [13%] patients, 132 [24%] caregivers, and 353 [63%] HCPs) from 48 countries completed round 1 and 312 (56%) participants (28 [40%] patients, 64 [46%] caregivers, and 220 [56%] HCPs) completed round 2. Five outcomes were common in the top 10 for each group: mortality, kidney function, life participation, blood pressure, and infection. Caregivers and HCPs rated cardiovascular disease higher than patients. Patients gave lower ratings to all outcomes compared with caregivers/HCPs except they rated life participation (round 2 mean difference, 0.1), academic performance (0.1), mobility (0.4), and ability to travel (0.4) higher than caregivers and rated ability to travel (0.4) higher than HCPs. We identified 3 themes: alleviating disease and treatment burden, focusing on the whole child, and resolving fluctuating and conflicting goals. LIMITATIONS: Most participants completed the survey in English. CONCLUSIONS: Mortality, life participation, kidney function, and blood pressure were consistently highly prioritized by patients, caregivers, and HCPs. Patients gave higher priority to some lifestyle-related outcomes compared with caregivers/HCPs. Establishing critically important outcomes for all trials in children with CKD may improve consistent reporting of survival, kidney health, and clinical and life impact outcomes that are meaningful for decision making

PreCam, a Precursor Observational Campaign for Calibration of the Dark Energy Survey

PreCam, a precursor observational campaign supporting the Dark Energy Survey (DES), is designed to produce a photometric and astrometric catalog of nearly a hundred thousand standard stars within the DES footprint, while the PreCam instrument also serves as a prototype testbed for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam)'s hardware and software. This catalog represents a potential 100-fold increase in Southern Hemisphere photometric standard stars, and therefore will be an important component in the calibration of the Dark Energy Survey. We provide details on the PreCam instrument's design, construction and testing, as well as results from a subset of the 51 nights of PreCam survey observations on the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy's Curtis-Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. We briefly describe the preliminary data processing pipeline that has been developed for PreCam data and the preliminary results of the instrument performance, as well as astrometry and photometry of a sample of stars previously included in other southern sky surveys.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, submitted to PAS

Implementation strategies for knowledge products in primary healthcare: A systematic review of systematic reviews

BACKGROUND: The underuse or overuse of knowledge products leads to waste in healthcare, and primary care is no exception. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to characterize which knowledge products are frequently implemented, the implementation strategies used in primary care, and the implementation outcomes that are measured. METHODS: We performed a systematic review of systematic reviews (SR) using the Cochrane systematic approach to include eligible SR. The inclusion criteria were: any primary care contexts; healthcare professionals and patients; any EPOC implementation strategies of specified knowledge products; any comparator; and any implementation outcomes based on the Proctor framework. We searched the Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL, Ovid PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library databases from their inception to October 2019, without any restriction. We searched the references of the included SR. Pairs of reviewers independently performed selection, data extraction and methodological quality assessment with AMSTAR 2. Data extraction was informed by EPOC taxonomy for implementation strategies and the Proctor framework for implementation outcomes. We performed a descriptive analysis and summarized the results using a narrative synthesis. RESULTS: Of the 11,101 records identified, 81 SR were included. Forty-seven SR involved healthcare professionals alone. Fifteen SR were of high or moderate methodological quality. Most of them addressed one type of knowledge product (56/81), common clinical practice guidelines (26/56) or management, and behavioural or pharmacological health interventions (24/56). Mixed strategies were used for implementation (67/81), predominantly educational-based (meetings in 60/81, materials distribution in 59/81, and academic detailing in 45/81), reminder (53/81) and audit and feedback (40/81) strategies. Education meetings (P=.13) and academic detailing (P=.11) seem to be more used when the population is composed of Healthcare professionals alone. The improvement of the adoption of knowledge products was the most commonly measured outcome (72/81). The evidence level was reported in 10/81 SR on 62 outcomes (including 48 improvement of adoption), of which 16 outcomes were of moderate or high level. CONCLUSIONS: Clinical practice guidelines and management, behavioural or pharmacological health interventions are the most commonly implemented knowledge products through the mixed use of educational, reminders and audit and feedback strategies. There is need for a strong methodology for the SR of RCTs to explore their effectiveness and the whole cascade of implementation outcomes. CLINICALTRIAL: Not applicable

Tractography passes the test: Results from the diffusion-simulated connectivity (disco) challenge.

Estimating structural connectivity from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging is a challenging task, partly due to the presence of false-positive connections and the misestimation of connection weights. Building on previous efforts, the MICCAI-CDMRI Diffusion-Simulated Connectivity (DiSCo) challenge was carried out to evaluate state-of-the-art connectivity methods using novel large-scale numerical phantoms. The diffusion signal for the phantoms was obtained from Monte Carlo simulations. The results of the challenge suggest that methods selected by the 14 teams participating in the challenge can provide high correlations between estimated and ground-truth connectivity weights, in complex numerical environments. Additionally, the methods used by the participating teams were able to accurately identify the binary connectivity of the numerical dataset. However, specific false positive and false negative connections were consistently estimated across all methods. Although the challenge dataset doesn't capture the complexity of a real brain, it provided unique data with known macrostructure and microstructure ground-truth properties to facilitate the development of connectivity estimation methods