Experimental status of pionium at CERN

The DIRAC Collaboration presents a first search for "atomic pi(+) pi(-) pairs" from ionization of pionium.Comment: 2 pages, LaTex, 2 figures, talk at Chiral Dynamics 2000, Newport News (USA), July 17-20, 200

A Critical Concern: Pediatrician Self-care After Disasters

As of this writing, health care in the areas impacted by Hurricane Katrina has shifted from emergency to primary care mode. Disasters take a heavy toll not only on victims but also on professionals and volunteers who experience the immediate, short-term, and long- term impact through their patients. The impact may occur because of the helping professional’s effort to empathize with and be compassionate to patients. There is a rich literature that discusses the risks and impact of vicarious traumatization on psychotherapists, rescue workers, and health care providers who work with survivors, including those who have experienced community traumas such as natural disasters, state-sponsored terrorism, torture, mass murder, and acts of war. The psychological impact of working with those who have suffered trauma has been variously referred to as “vicarious traumatization,” “compassion fatigue,” or, more simply, “burnout.” Vicarious traumatization is described as the emotional and psychological reactions that are triggered by the experience of empathic engagement with patients who are survivors of trauma. This reaction is considered an inescapable aspect of trauma work. Community traumas involve multiple threats to and actual losses of life but also can cause the breakdown of social structures such as family, communities, employment, and housing, thereby dealing a blow to the basic structure of social life by damaging connections between people and their sense of community. A large percentage of health care providers had to evacuate their homes and offices after Katrina and lost their livelihoods and sense of community. It is also likely that many experienced the loss of loved ones. As a result, the emotional toll on health care professionals continuing to treat a traumatized and dislocated population is likely to be significant

Workshop on Hadronic Atoms

These are the proceedings of the workshop "HadAtom02", held at the CERN, October 14 - 15, 2002. The main topic of the workshop concerned the physics of hadronic atoms and in this contest recent results from experiments and theory were presented. These proceedings contain the list of participants, the scientific program and a short contribution from each speaker

Antimatter and Matter Production in Heavy Ion Collisions at CERN (The NEWMASS Experiment NA52)

Besides the dedicated search for strangelets NA52 measures light (anti)particle and (anti)nuclei production over a wide range of rapidity. Compared to previous runs the statistics has been increased in the 1998 run by more than one order of magnitude for negatively charged objects at different spectrometer rigidities. Together with previous data taking at a rigidity of -20 GeV/c we obtained 10^6 antiprotons 10^3 antideuterons and two antihelium3 without centrality requirements. We measured nuclei and antinuclei (p,d,antiprotons, antideuterons) near midrapidity covering an impact parameter range of b=2-12 fm. Our results strongly indicate that nuclei and antinuclei are mainly produced via the coalescence mechanism. However the centrality dependence of the antibaryon to baryon ratios show that antibaryons are diminished due to annihilation and breakup reactions in the hadron dense environment. The volume of the particle source extracted from coalescence models agrees with results from pion interferometry for an expanding source. The chemical and thermal freeze-out of nuclei and antinuclei appear to coincide with each other and with the thermal freeze-out of hadrons.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the conference on 'Fundamental Issues in Elementary Matter' Bad Honnef, Germany, Sept. 25-29, 200

MAP1272c Encodes an NlpC/P60 Protein, an Antigen Detected in Cattle with Johne’s Disease

The protein encoded by MAP1272c has been shown to be an antigen of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis that con- tains an NlpC/P60 superfamily domain found in lipoproteins or integral membrane proteins. Proteins containing this domain have diverse enzymatic functions that include peptidases, amidases, and acetyltransferases. The NlpC protein was examined in comparison to over 100 recombinant proteins and showed the strongest antigenicity when analyzed with sera from cattle with Johne’s disease. To further localize the immunogenicity of NlpC, recombinant proteins representing defined regions were ex- pressed and evaluated with sera from cattle with Johne’s disease. The region from amino acids 74 to 279 was shown to be the most immunogenic. This fragment was also evaluated against a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Two monoclonal antibodies were produced in mice immunized with the full-length protein, and each recognized a dis- tinct epitope. These antibodies cross-reacted with proteins from other mycobacterial species and demonstrated variable sizes of the proteins expressed from these subspecies. Both antibodies were further analyzed, and their interaction with MAP1272c and MAP1204 was characterized by a solution-based, luminescent binding assay. These tools provide additional means to study a strong antigen of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis