Correlation between Discharged Worms and Fecal Egg Counts in Human Clonorchiasis

Clonorchiasis is a major neglected disease in East Asia. Worm data in infected humans are very limited, and only egg counts roughly estimate infection burden of the worms. In endemic areas, we recruited infected cases and tried to collect the adult worms from them. They were treated with 3 doses of praziquantel, and purged next day under fasting. Adult worms of C. sinensis were recovered from their diarrheal feces. The worms discharged from humans after treatment are minimum confirmed numbers. The worm recovery rate noticeably increased in subjects with higher egg counts. The number of collected worms was well-correlated with the egg counts. Worm collection by praziquantel medication and purgation is a safe non-invasive method to get worm information from human. The present study confirms that at least 110 worms are infected in a human body with egg counts per gram of feces around 3,000, and egg productivity of a worm per day is around 4,000

Effect of Control Strategies on Prevalence, Incidence and Re-infection of Clonorchiasis in Endemic Areas of China

Clonorchiasis is a liver fluke disease prevalent in East Asia, which is transmitted to humans mainly by eating raw freshwater fish. It induces various complications in the liver or bile duct including cholelithiasis, cholecystitis, cholangitis, and cirrhosis. Clonorchis sinensis has been known to cause cholangiocarcinoma, and is still a major health problem in endemic areas. People in endemic areas are repeatedly infected with C. sinensis, as they continue to consume raw freshwater fish in spite of control activities and availability of a highly effective drug, praziquantel. Reservoir hosts such as cats, dogs, and pigs supply eggs continuously to the environment and act as a source of infection. The present study analyzed the data produced by the Korea-China collaborative project for helminthiasis control in China during 2001–2004 to find out effective chemotherapeutic control strategies with praziquantel in endemic areas and to evaluate their effects on the transmission of C. sinensis infection by repeated mass or selective treatment. The four-year control trial found that repeated treatment is essential to the effective reduction of prevalence and infection intensity in heavily endemic areas. Mass chemotherapy is more effective than selective treatment, and more repeated treatments produce better outcomes in clonorchiasis control. Health education to change the habit of consuming raw or undercooked fish is an important and practical measure to prevent and reduce human infections in endemic areas. Together with chemotherapy, health education could be highly effective and produce sustainable effects in clonorchiasis control. Treatment of reservoirs, if applicable, will contribute to reduce the source of infection

Collective emotions online and their influence on community life

E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. It is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group activities. We show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large scale as observed in 4 million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of emotion in messages fell during discussions. Our results prove that collective emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.Comment: 23 pages including Supporting Information, accepted to PLoS ON

Emergence of structural patterns out of synchronization in networks with competitive interactions

Synchronization is a collective phenomenon occurring in systems of interacting units, and is ubiquitous in nature, society and technology. Recent studies have enlightened the important role played by the interaction topology on the emergence of synchronized states. However, most of these studies neglect that real world systems change their interaction patterns in time. Here, we analyze synchronization features in networks in which structural and dynamical features co-evolve. The feedback of the node dynamics on the interaction pattern is ruled by the competition of two mechanisms: homophily (reinforcing those interactions with other correlated units in the graph) and homeostasis (preserving the value of the input strength received by each unit). The competition between these two adaptive principles leads to the emergence of key structural properties observed in real world networks, such as modular and scale–free structures, together with a striking enhancement of local synchronization in systems with no global order

Visual Recognition of Age Class and Preference for Infantile Features: Implications for Species-Specific vs Universal Cognitive Traits in Primates

Despite not knowing the exact age of individuals, humans can estimate their rough age using age-related physical features. Nonhuman primates show some age-related physical features; however, the cognitive traits underlying their recognition of age class have not been revealed. Here, we tested the ability of two species of Old World monkey, Japanese macaques (JM) and Campbell's monkeys (CM), to spontaneously discriminate age classes using visual paired comparison (VPC) tasks based on the two distinct categories of infant and adult images. First, VPCs were conducted in JM subjects using conspecific JM stimuli. When analyzing the side of the first look, JM subjects significantly looked more often at novel images. Based on analyses of total looking durations, JM subjects looked at a novel infant image longer than they looked at a familiar adult image, suggesting the ability to spontaneously discriminate between the two age classes and a preference for infant over adult images. Next, VPCs were tested in CM subjects using heterospecific JM stimuli. CM subjects showed no difference in the side of their first look, but looked at infant JM images longer than they looked at adult images; the fact that CMs were totally naïve to JMs suggested that the attractiveness of infant images transcends species differences. This is the first report of visual age class recognition and a preference for infant over adult images in nonhuman primates. Our results suggest not only species-specific processing for age class recognition but also the evolutionary origins of the instinctive human perception of baby cuteness schema, proposed by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz

Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase C677T polymorphism in patients with lung cancer in a Korean population

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This study was designed to investigate an association between methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) C677T polymorphism and the risk of lung cancer in a Korean population.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We conducted a large-scale, case-control study involving 3938 patients with newly diagnosed lung cancer and 1700 healthy controls. Genotyping was performed with peripheral blood DNA for MTHFR C677T polymorphisms. Statistical significance was estimated by logistic regression analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The MTHFR C677T frequencies of CC, CT, and TT genotypes were 34.5%, 48.5%, and 17% among lung cancer patients, and 31.8%, 50.7%, and 17.5% in the controls, respectively. The MTHFR 677CT and TT genotype showed a weak protection against lung cancer compared with the homozygous CC genotype, although the results did not reach statistical significance. The age- and gender-adjusted odds ratio (OR) of overall lung cancer was 0.90 (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.77-1.04) for MTHFR 677 CT and 0.88 (95% CI, 0.71-1.07) for MTHFR 677TT. However, after stratification analysis by histological type, the MTHFR 677CT genotype showed a significantly decreased risk for squamous cell carcinoma (age- and gender-adjusted OR, 0.78; 95% CI, 0.64-0.96). The combination of 677 TT homozygous with 677 CT heterozygous also appeared to have a protection effect on the risk of squamous cell carcinoma. We observed no significant interaction between the MTHFR C677T polymorphism and age and gender or smoking habit.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This is the first reported study focusing on the association between MTHFR C677T polymorphisms and the risk of lung cancer in a Korean population. The T allele was found to provide a weak protective association with lung squamous cell carcinoma.</p