Evaluating the impact of individual, social, and environmental factors on bed net use for malaria prevention

The number of malaria cases in the world has been declining over the past decade, in large part due to the use of insecticide treated bed nets. There have been numerous studies evaluating where, when, and why people use nets. Some of the most widely explored factors that influence net use are socio-demographic characteristics including age, gender, and socio-economic status. In response to the implementation of social and behavior change communication about nets, more recent studies have focused on emotional, cognitive, and social predictors of net use. There is also evidence of climatic factors such as rainfall and temperature affecting net use, and qualitative research has reported decreased net use during the dry season due to perceptions of being too hot under a net as well as increased use during the rains due to increases in perceived nuisance biting. One of the most important considerations when evaluating net use behavior is whether an individual had access to a net to use in the first place. The objective of this thesis was to evaluate how individual, household, social, and environmental factors impact bed net use, especially among individuals with access to a net in their household. This was done by defining ideational theory in the context of malaria control and modeling how ideation about bed nets can affect net use, in addition to evaluating the role of ideational factors at individual, household, and community levels. Also important was understanding individuals’ propensity to purchase nets, and how particular beliefs and family settings affect this propensity. Finally, this thesis assessed how bed net use was influenced by different ecological factors among individuals with access to a net

Editorial

“As palavras de Infância diziam um mundo desconhecido que transitava de Alagoas a Pernambuco e chegava ao Amazonas por meio de uma voz áspera. Um mundo povoado por personagens inesquecíveis [...].” Neste trânsito da literatura de Graciliano Ramos, sobre o qual se debruça o escritor Milton Hatoum na crônica “Um jovem, o Velho e um livro”, aqui citada e publicada, já se anunciam as recepções, as apropriações e a celebração da obra do autor alagoano que serão exploradas ao longo deste volume, por meio de entrevista, artigo, depoimento e resenha. O escritor, cujo primeiro romance, Caetés, completou 80 anos de lançamento recentemente, em 2013 – ano que também marcou os 50 anos da sua morte e da publicação de Memórias do cárcere – terá aqui a sua produção cultural examinada por pesquisadores e escritores que apontam tanto novas possibilidades de tematização quanto discutem e questionam antigos pressupostos que marcaram a sua fortuna crítica e a nossa historiografia. &nbsp

An Overview of the Strategies to Boost SARS-CoV-2-Specific Immunity in People with Inborn Errors of Immunity

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has heightened concerns about immunological protection, especially for individuals with inborn errors of immunity (IEI). While COVID-19 vaccines elicit strong immune responses in healthy individuals, their effectiveness in IEI patients remains unclear, particularly against new viral variants and vaccine formulations. This uncertainty has led to anxiety, prolonged self-isolation, and repeated vaccinations with uncertain benefits among IEI patients. Despite some level of immune response from vaccination, the definition of protective immunity in IEI individuals is still unknown. Given their susceptibility to severe COVID-19, strategies such as immunoglobulin replacement therapy (IgRT) and monoclonal antibodies have been employed to provide passive immunity, and protection against both current and emerging variants. This review examines the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and antibody-based therapies in IEI patients, their capacity to recognize viral variants, and the necessary advances required for the ongoing protection of people with IEIs.</p

Gribov horizon and i-particles: about a toy model and the construction of physical operators

Restricting the functional integral to the Gribov region $\Omega$ leads to a deep modification of the behavior of Euclidean Yang-Mills theories in the infrared region. For example, a gluon propagator of the Gribov type, $\frac{k^2}{k^4+{\hat \gamma}^4}$, can be viewed as a propagating pair of unphysical modes, called here $i$-particles, with complex masses $\pm i{\hat \gamma}^2$. From this viewpoint, gluons are unphysical and one can see them as being confined. We introduce a simple toy model describing how a suitable set of composite operators can be constructed out of $i$-particles whose correlation functions exhibit only real branch cuts, with associated positive spectral density. These composite operators can thus be called physical and are the toy analogy of glueballs in the Gribov-Zwanziger theory.Comment: 35 pages, 10 .pdf figures. v2: version accepted for publication in Physical Review

Ladder operators for subtle hidden shape invariant potentials

Ladder operators can be constructed for all potentials that present the integrability condition known as shape invariance, satisfied by most of the exactly solvable potentials. Using the superalgebra of supersymmetric quantum mechanics we construct the ladder operators for two exactly solvable potentials that present a subtle hidden shape invariance.Comment: 9 pages, based on the talk given at International Conference Progress in Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics (PSQM03), Valladolid, Spain, 15-19 July, 2003, to appear in a Special Issue of J. Phys. A: Math. Ge

Quantifying the extent of plant functional specialization using Grime's CSR strategies

Specialization refers to a species adaptation to a restricted range of environmental conditions. While generalist species are able to exploit a wide variety of resources in a broad range of habitats, specialist species tend to have narrower niche breadths. From an evolutionary perspective, specialization is the result of a functional syndrome in which a suite of traits covary to allow the effective exploitation of specific resources. Accordingly, the measurement of specialization should be based on a multi-trait approach. In plant ecology, a well-known classification of the adaptive strategies of plants is Grime's competitor, stress tolerator, ruderal (CSR) theory in which the three principal strategies represent relatively easily measurable trait combinations from the global spectrum of plant form and function arising under conditions of competition, abiotic restriction to growth or periodic disturbance, respectively. In this paper, we thus introduce a method to summarize the functional specialization of plant species and communities by applying inequality measures to Grime's CSR strategies. The general idea is that a plant species that can be exclusively assigned to one CSR strategy can be considered a specialist (as it adopts only one adaptive strategy to access resources), while species that share functional characteristics of multiple CSR strategies can be considered more generalist. The behavior of the proposed measures is shown with one case study on the functional changes of six Alpine vegetation types ordered along a gradient, from pioneer to more stable communities

Immunoglobulin free light chains and GAGs mediate multiple myeloma extracellular vesicles uptake and secondary NfkB nuclear traslocation

Multiplemyeloma(MM) is a hematological malignancy caused by a microenviromentally aided persistence of plasmacells in the bone marrow. Monoclonal plasmacells often secrete high amounts of immunoglobulin free light chains(FLCs)that could induce tissue damage. Recently, we showed that FLCs are internalized in endothelial and myocardial cell lines and secreted in extracellular vesicles(EVs). MM serum derived EVs presented phenotypic differences if compared with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS)serum derived EVs suggesting their involvement in MM pathogenesis or progression. To investigate the effect of circulating EVs on endothelial and myocardial cells, we purified MM and MGUS serum derived EVs with differential ultracentrifugation protocols and tested their biological activity. We found that MM and MGUS EVs induced different proliferation and internalization rates in endothelial and myocardial cells, thus we tried to find specific targets in MM EVs docking and processing. Pre-treatment of EVs withanti-FLCs antibodies or heparin blocked the MM EVs uptake, highlighting that FLCs and glycosaminoglycans are involved. Indeed, only MM EVs exposure induced a strong nuclear factor kappa B nuclear translocation that was completely abolished afteranti-FLCs antibodies and heparin pre-treatment. The protein tyrosine kinase c-src is present on MM circulating EVs and redistributes to the cell plasma membrane after MM EVs exposure.The anti-FLCs antibodies and heparin pre-treatments were able to block the intracellular redistribution of the c-src kinase and the subsequent c-src kinase containing EVs production. Our results open new insights in EVs cellular biology and in MM therapeutic and diagnostic approaches

Immunoglobulin free light chains and GAGs mediate multiple myeloma extracellular vesicles uptake and secondary NfkB nuclear traslocation

Multiplemyeloma(MM) is a hematological malignancy caused by a microenviromentally aided persistence of plasmacells in the bone marrow. Monoclonal plasmacells often secrete high amounts of immunoglobulin free light chains(FLCs)that could induce tissue damage. Recently, we showed that FLCs are internalized in endothelial and myocardial cell lines and secreted in extracellular vesicles(EVs). MM serum derived EVs presented phenotypic differences if compared with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS)serum derived EVs suggesting their involvement in MM pathogenesis or progression. To investigate the effect of circulating EVs on endothelial and myocardial cells, we purified MM and MGUS serum derived EVs with differential ultracentrifugation protocols and tested their biological activity. We found that MM and MGUS EVs induced different proliferation and internalization rates in endothelial and myocardial cells, thus we tried to find specific targets in MM EVs docking and processing. Pre-treatment of EVs withanti-FLCs antibodies or heparin blocked the MM EVs uptake, highlighting that FLCs and glycosaminoglycans are involved. Indeed, only MM EVs exposure induced a strong nuclear factor kappa B nuclear translocation that was completely abolished afteranti-FLCs antibodies and heparin pre-treatment. The protein tyrosine kinase c-src is present on MM circulating EVs and redistributes to the cell plasma membrane after MM EVs exposure.The anti-FLCs antibodies and heparin pre-treatments were able to block the intracellular redistribution of the c-src kinase and the subsequent c-src kinase containing EVs production. Our results open new insights in EVs cellular biology and in MM therapeutic and diagnostic approaches

On the mutual relatedness of evenness measures

Several evenness measures have been proposed for quantifying the distribution of abundance among community species, but none seems to be generally preferred. Since these measures have the common objective of summarizing community structure, they may be expected to be intercorrelated. In this paper, seven standard measures of evenness were calculated for 65 sample plots of ruderal vegetation within the archaeological sites of Paestum and Venosa (southern Italy). Principal component analysis was used to identify the primary aspects of community structure being characterized by these seven indices. The first two principal components explained 96% of total variance. A comparison of the first two principal components with the analyzed measures of evenness provides insight into what aspects of community structure they are expressing. While the first principal component is most sensitive to the relative abundances of rare species, the second principal component is clearly associated to changes in the abundance of the dominant community species