Analysis of the U.S.-Mexico Sugar Trade - 10 Years of NAFTA Regime and 10 Years from Now

The U.S.- Mexico sugar trade was examined, paying a close attention to the provisions of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the circumstances surrounding the industries of the two countries. Quantitative analyses provided the outlook of the future sugar market and shed light on the political implications.International Relations/Trade,

Estimation of alkali dosage and contact time for treating human excreta containing viruses as an emergency response: a systematic review

Water, sanitation, and hygiene provisions are essential during emergencies to prevent infectious disease outbreaks caused by improper human excreta management in settlements for people affected by natural disasters and conflicts. Human excreta disinfection is required when long-term containment in latrines is not feasible on-site. Alkali additives, including lime, are effective disinfectants for wastewater and faecal sludge containing large amounts of solid and dissolved organic matter. The aim of this study was to determine the minimum dose and contact time of alkali additives for treating virus-containing human excreta in emergency situations. We used literature data collected by searching Google Scholar and Web of Science. The date of the last search for each study was 31th May 2023. Only peer-reviewed articles that included disinfection practices in combination with quantitative data for the physicochemical data of a matrix and viral decay were selected for data extraction. Two reviewers independently collected data from each study. We extracted datasets from 14 studies that reported quantitative information about their disinfection tests, including viral decay over time, matrix types, and physicochemical properties. Three machine learning algorithms were applied to the collected dataset to determine the time required to achieve specified levels of virus inactivation under different environmental conditions. The best model was used to estimate the contact time to achieve a 3-log10 inactivation of RNA virus in wastewater and faeces. The most important variables for predicting the contact time were pH, temperature, and virus type. The estimated contact time for 3 log inactivation of RNA virus was <2 h at pH 12, which was achieved by adding 1.8 and 3.1% slaked lime to wastewater and faeces, respectively. The contact time decreased exponentially with the pH of the sludge and wastewater. In contrast, the pH of the sludge and wastewater increased linearly with the slaked lime dosage. Lime treatment is a promising measure where long-term containment in latrine is not feasible in densely populated areas, as 1 day is sufficient to inactivate viruses. The relationship we have identified between required contact time and lime dosage is useful for practitioners in determining appropriate treatment conditions of human waste

Resource recovery technologies as microbial risk barriers: towards safe use of excreta in agriculture based on hazard analysis and critical control point

Agricultural use of human excreta contributes to sustainable nutrient resource management. In contrast, resource recovery from human excreta is associated with the risk of infection by pathogenic microorganisms. The microbial risk associated with human excreta needs to be properly managed. Pathogen inactivation efficacy of resource recovery technologies should be evaluated so that individual resource recovery processes can be monitored as health risk barriers. To this end, we reviewed the sanitization potential of resource recovery technologies from human excreta and identified the monitoring parameters of hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP). We describe the inactivation of surrogate microorganisms in selected technologies in terms of the physicochemical conditions of matrices, different tolerances among surrogate microorganisms, and inactivation mechanisms. The estimated storage/operating time required to achieve the target log reduction values (LRVs) is shortened in thermal processes such as thermophilic storage, drying, composting, microwaving, and thermophilic digestion. In most processes, phage and helminth eggs were found to be appropriate indicators for conservative estimation. Finally, we argue that sanitization is congruent with decomposition of readily degradable organic matter and resource recovery. The barrier efficacy of resource recovery technologies should be validated using a pathogen inactivation kinetics model so that the exposure risk to infectious pathogens is sufficiently reduced through a reasonable combination of non-treatment and non-technical health risk barriers

Dry Small Pleural Dissemination of Adenocarcinoma of the Lung Preoperatively Detected by PET/CT: A Report of Two Cases

Dry pleural dissemination in non-small cell lung cancer, defined as solid pleural metastasis of lung cancer without pleural eff usion, is a condition occurring in T4 lung cancer. Positron emission tomography (PET) has been reported to be useful for the diagnosis and staging of lung cancer. It has been reported that positive findings on PET scans of indeterminate pleural abnormalities at computed tomography (CT) are sensitive to malignancy. We encountered two cases of dry small pleural dissemination of adenocarcinoma of the lung preoperatively detected by PET/CT. A 75-year-old man and a 66-year-old man underwent CT scan, which demonstrated solitary tumor in the lung, an enlarged mediastinal lymph node, and a small pleural nodule less than 10 mm in size, all of which were positive findings on the fluorine 18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET portion of an integrated PET/CT. Both patients underwent thoracoscopic biopsy of the dry pleural nodule revealing dissemination of adenocarcinoma of the lung (T4). Whereas histological thoracoscopic diagnosis remains mandatory before planning treatment, our cases may suggest that PET/CT will be useful as a screening modality for dry pleural dissemination of lung cancer.</p

Random phase-free kinoform for large objects

We propose a random phase-free kinoform for large objects. When not using the random phase in kinoform calculation, the reconstructed images from the kinoform are heavy degraded, like edge-only preserved images. In addition, the kinoform cannot record an entire object that exceeds the kinoform size because the object light does not widely spread. In order to avoid this degradation and to widely spread the object light, the random phase is applied to the kinoform calculation; however, the reconstructed image is contaminated by speckle noise. In this paper, we overcome this problem by using our random phase-free method and error diffusion method