Perceptions and behaviours of infectious diseases physicians when managing urinary tract infections due to MDR organisms

Objectives The objective of this study was to attain a better understanding of infectious diseases (ID) physicians' experience with MDR organism (MDRO) urinary tract infections (UTIs) by means of a survey on disease perception, diagnostic management and treatment preferences. Methods A nine-question survey was developed and distributed to members of the North American Emerging Infections Network (EIN) in September 2013. Results Seven hundred and fourteen out of 1461 EIN members responded to the survey (49%). The responses of 603 responders were studied. Most providers perceived an increase in the incidence of MDRO UTIs over the past 3 years (75% of adult ID responders and 63% of paediatric ID responders). One hundred and thirty-four (22%) responders prefer intravenous over oral administration of antimicrobials when both are available, 171 (28%) prefer longer durations of therapy when comparing an MDRO with a susceptible isolate of the same species and 142 (24%) order a repeat urine culture as ‘proof of cure' after treating an MDRO UTI. Nevertheless, 530 (88%) responders perceived MDRO UTIs to be of similar severity as non-MDRO UTIs. Fifty-five percent of providers prescribed fosfomycin for MDRO UTI at least once; the most common prescribing pattern (among a wide spectrum of approaches) was a single dose (16%). Conclusions Future studies on MDRO UTIs should clarify the role of resistance in patient outcomes and the comparative efficacy of different antimicrobials. Of particular interest is fosfomycin, which is unrelated to other antibiotic classes and may take a more prominent role in treating MDRO cystiti

De novo meningitis caused by Propionibacterium acnes in a patient with metastatic melanoma

Propionibacterium acnes is a known cause of postneurosurgical meningitis; however, it is rarely implicated in de novo meningitis. Herein we report a case of a 49-year-old male with de novo meningitis caused by P. acnes with metastatic melanoma as the only identified risk factor for his infection

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass

Impacts of the Tropical Pacific/Indian Oceans on the Seasonal Cycle of the West African Monsoon

The current consensus is that drought has developed in the Sahel during the second half of the twentieth century as a result of remote effects of oceanic anomalies amplified by local land–atmosphere interactions. This paper focuses on the impacts of oceanic anomalies upon West African climate and specifically aims to identify those from SST anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Oceans during spring and summer seasons, when they were significant. Idealized sensitivity experiments are performed with four atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). The prescribed SST patterns used in the AGCMs are based on the leading mode of covariability between SST anomalies over the Pacific/Indian Oceans and summer rainfall over West Africa. The results show that such oceanic anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Ocean lead to a northward shift of an anomalous dry belt from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel as the season advances. In the Sahel, the magnitude of rainfall anomalies is comparable to that obtained by other authors using SST anomalies confined to the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean. The mechanism connecting the Pacific/Indian SST anomalies with West African rainfall has a strong seasonal cycle. In spring (May and June), anomalous subsidence develops over both the Maritime Continent and the equatorial Atlantic in response to the enhanced equatorial heating. Precipitation increases over continental West Africa in association with stronger zonal convergence of moisture. In addition, precipitation decreases over the Gulf of Guinea. During the monsoon peak (July and August), the SST anomalies move westward over the equatorial Pacific and the two regions where subsidence occurred earlier in the seasons merge over West Africa. The monsoon weakens and rainfall decreases over the Sahel, especially in August.Peer reviewe

Search for anomalous production of events with three or more leptons in pp collisions at √s = 8TeV

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published articles title, journal citation, and DOI.A search for physics beyond the standard model in events with at least three leptons is presented. The data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5fb-1 of proton-proton collisions with center-of-mass energy s=8TeV, was collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC during 2012. The data are divided into exclusive categories based on the number of leptons and their flavor, the presence or absence of an opposite-sign, same-flavor lepton pair (OSSF), the invariant mass of the OSSF pair, the presence or absence of a tagged bottom-quark jet, the number of identified hadronically decaying τ leptons, and the magnitude of the missing transverse energy and of the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta. The numbers of observed events are found to be consistent with the expected numbers from standard model processes, and limits are placed on new-physics scenarios that yield multilepton final states. In particular, scenarios that predict Higgs boson production in the context of supersymmetric decay chains are examined. We also place a 95% confidence level upper limit of 1.3% on the branching fraction for the decay of a top quark to a charm quark and a Higgs boson (t→cH), which translates to a bound on the left- and right-handed top-charm flavor-violating Higgs Yukawa couplings, λtcH and λctH, respectively, of |λtcH|2+|λctH|2<0.21

Prevalence of Asymptomatic Bacteriuria in Hospitalized Patients

The prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) varies widely based on the studied population. Currently, the prevalence of ASB in patients hospitalized in acute care institutions is unknown. Awareness of the prevalence of ASB in this setting would be useful in both medical decision-making as well as public reporting of hospital-acquired urinary tract infections. In this prevalence study, 200 consecutive patients admitted in April/May 2013 to a tertiary care academic center, had a urine sample collected for culture within 24 hours of being admitted. Data from the medical record was collected during their hospitalization up to 30 days post-enrollment. The objective was to determine the prevalence of ASB. Of the 200 patients, 17 were found to have ASB for a prevalence of 8.5%