Prevalence and vector distributions of bovine trypanosomosis in control (Sibu Sire) and noncontrol (Guto Gida) districts bordering upper Anger valley of East Wollega Zone, Western Ethiopia

A cross-sectional study was conducted from December 2008 to March 2009 in two districts where tsetse control implemented (Sibu Sire district) and non-control implemented (Guto Gida district) bordering Anger river valley in East Wollega Zone, Western Ethiopia. The objectives of the study were to determine the prevalence of bovine trypanosomosis and to assess the distribution and apparent densities of vectors of the trypanosomosis. A parasitological study using buffy coat technique was employed for the determination of prevalence of trypanosomosis while monoconical traps were used for the vector studies. A total of 368 cattle randomly selected from the study population (166 in Sibu Sire and 202 in Guto Gida) districts were examined for the parasitological study. The result of parasitological study revealed that the prevalence of trypanosomosis was found to be 5.42% and 11.88% in Sibu Sire and Guto Gida districts, respectively. There was statistically significant difference in the prevalence of trypanosomosis between tsetse control implemented and non-control implemented districts (

Non-Newtonian and flow pulsatility effects in simulation models of a stented intracranial aneurysm

Permission to redistribute provided by publishers.Three models of different stent designs implanted in a cerebral aneurysm, originating from the Virtual Intracranial Stenting Challenge'07, are meshed and the flow characteristics simulated using commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software in order to investigate the effects of non-Newtonian viscosity and pulsatile flow. Conventional mass inflow and wall shear stress (WSS) output are used as a means of comparing the cfd simulations. In addition, a WSS distribution is presented, which clearly discriminates in favour of the stent design identified by other groups. It is concluded that non-Newtonian and pulsatile effects are important to include in order to avoid underestimating wss, to understand dynamic flow effects, and to discriminate more effectively between stent designs. © Authors 2011

Analysis of maternal and newborn training curricula and approaches to inform future trainings for routine care, basic and comprehensive emergency obstetric and newborn care in the low- and middle-income countries: Lessons from Ethiopia and Nepal

Program managers routinely design and implement specialised maternal and newborn health trainings for health workers in low- and middle-income countries to provide better-coordinated care across the continuum of care. However, in these countries details on the availability of different training packages, skills covered in those training packages and the gaps in their implementation are patchy. This paper presents an assessment of maternal and newborn health training packages to describe differences in training contents and implementation approaches used for a range of training packages in Ethiopia and Nepal. We conducted a mixed-methods study. The quantitative assessment was conducted using a comprehensive assessment questionnaire based on validated WHO guidelines and developed jointly with global maternal and newborn health experts. The qualitative assessment was conducted through key informant interviews with national stakeholders involved in implementing these training packages and working with the Ministries of Health in both countries. Our quantitative analysis revealed several key gaps in the technical content of maternal and newborn health training packages in both countries. Our qualitative results from key informant interviews provided additional insights by highlighting several issues with trainings related to quality, skill retention, logistics, and management. Taken together, our findings suggest four key areas of improvement: first, training materials should be updated based on the content gaps identified and should be aligned with each other. Second, trainings should address actual health worker performance gaps using a variety of innovative approaches such as blended and self-directed learning. Third, post-training supervision and ongoing mentoring need to be strengthened. Lastly, functional training information systems are required to support planning efforts in both countries

Vortex formation and recirculation zones in left anterior descending artery stenoses: computational fluid dynamics analysis

Flow patterns may affect the potential of thrombus formation following plaque rupture. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were employed to assess hemodynamic conditions, and particularly flow recirculation and vortex formation in reconstructed arterial models associated with ST-elevation myocardial infraction (STEMI) or stable coronary stenosis (SCS) in the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD). Results indicate that in the arterial models associated with STEMI, a 50% diameter stenosis immediately before or after a bifurcation creates a recirculation zone and vortex formation at the orifice of the bifurcation branch, for most of the cardiac cycle, thus allowing the creation of stagnating flow. These flow patterns are not seen in the SCS model with an identical stenosis. Post-stenotic recirculation in the presence of a 90% stenosis was evident at both the STEMI and SCS models. The presence of 90% diameter stenosis resulted in flow reduction in the LAD of 51.5% and 35.9% in the STEMI models and 37.6% in the SCS model, for a 10 mmHg pressure drop. CFD simulations in a reconstructed model of stenotic LAD segments indicate that specific anatomic characteristics create zones of vortices and flow recirculation that promote thrombus formation and potentially myocardial infarction

In vitro anti-HIV activity of some Indian medicinal plant extracts

Background Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) persists to be a significant public health issue worldwide. The current strategy for the treatment of HIV infection, Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), has reduced deaths from AIDS related disease, but it can be an expensive regime for the underdeveloped and developing countries where the supply of drugs is scarce and often not well tolerated, especially in persons undergoing long term treatment. The present therapy also has limitations of development of multidrug resistance, thus there is a need for the discovery of novel anti-HIV compounds from plants as a potential alternative in combating HIV disease. Methods Ten Indian medicinal plants were tested for entry and replication inhibition against laboratory adapted strains HIV-1IIIB, HIV-1Ada5 and primary isolates HIV-1UG070, HIV-1VB59 in TZM-bl cell lines and primary isolates HIV-1UG070, HIV-1VB59 in PM1 cell lines. The plant extracts were further evaluated for toxicity in HEC-1A epithelial cell lines by transwell epithelial model. Results The methanolic extracts of Achyranthes aspera, Rosa centifolia and aqueous extract of Ficus benghalensis inhibited laboratory adapted HIV-1 strains (IC80 3.6–118 μg/ml) and primary isolates (IC80 4.8–156 μg/ml) in TZM-bl cells. Methanolic extract of Strychnos potatorum, aqueous extract of Ficus infectoria and hydroalcoholic extract of Annona squamosa inhibited laboratory adapted HIV-1 strains (IC80 4.24–125 μg/ml) and primary isolates (IC80 18–156 μg/ml) in TZM-bl cells. Methanolic extracts of Achyranthes aspera and Rosa centifolia, (IC801-9 μg/ml) further significantly inhibited HIV-1 primary isolates in PM1cells. Methanolic extracts of Tridax procumbens, Mallotus philippinensis, Annona reticulate, aqueous extract of Ficus benghalensis and hydroalcoholic extract of Albizzia lebbeck did not exhibit anti-HIV activity in all the tested strains. Methanolic extract of Rosa centifolia also demonstrated to be non-toxic to HEC-1A epithelial cells and maintained epithelial integrity (at 500 μg/ml) when tested in transwell dual-chamber. Conclusion These active methanolic extracts of Achyranthes aspera and Rosa centifolia, could be further subjected to chemical analysis to investigate the active moiety responsible for the anti-HIV activity. Methanolic extract of Rosa centifolia was found to be well tolerated maintaining the epithelial integrity of HEC-1A cells in vitro and thus has potential for investigating it further as candidate microbicide

Worry is associated with robust reductions in heart rate variability: a transdiagnostic study of anxiety psychopathology

Background Individuals with anxiety disorders display reduced resting-state heart rate variability (HRV), although findings have been contradictory and the role of specific symptoms has been less clear. It is possible that HRV reductions may transcend diagnostic categories, consistent with dimensional-trait models of psychopathology. Here we investigated whether anxiety disorders or symptoms of anxiety, stress, worry and depression are more strongly associated with resting-state HRV. Methods Resting-state HRV was calculated in participants with clinical anxiety (n = 25) and healthy controls (n = 58). Symptom severity measures of worry, anxiety, stress, and depression were also collected from participants, regardless of diagnosis. Results Participants who fulfilled DSM-IV criteria for an anxiety disorder displayed diminished HRV, a difference at trend level significance (p = .1, Hedges’ g = -.37, BF10 = .84). High worriers (Total n = 41; n = 22 diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and n = 19 not meeting criteria for any psychopathology) displayed a robust reduction in resting state HRV relative to low worriers (p = .001, Hedges’ g = -.75, BF10 = 28.16). Conclusions The specific symptom of worry – not the diagnosis of an anxiety disorder – was associated with the most robust reductions in HRV, indicating that HRV may provide a transdiagnostic biomarker of worry. These results enhance understanding of the relationship between the cardiac autonomic nervous system and anxiety psychopathology, providing support for dimensional-trait models consistent with the Research Domain Criteria framework

Evaluation of durum wheat varieties for yield and yield related traits in highland areas of southern Ethiopia

Durum wheat productivity in Ethiopia is hindered by different factors mainly lack of improved adapted varieties for specific locations. This experiment was done to identify the most performing durum wheat varieties in the tested environment. The average productivity of the tested genotypes were evaluated at two locations (Alicho and Analimo) using randomized complete block design with four replication for two consecutive years (2016 and 2017). The experimental material consists of seven improved durum wheat genotypes. The Combined analysis of variance showed significant (P<0.05) difference among tested genotypes on collected parameter indicating the presence of adequate variability. The highest average grain yield recorded was 4446 kg ha-1 from Hitosa variety while the lowest obtained was 3634 kg ha-1 from Denbi variety. Grain yield had strong positive correlations (P<0.01) with plant height, number of seed spike-1 and biomass

Comparison of Task Scheduling Algorithms for Traffic Surveillance Application Using Fog Computing

One of the issues that service consumers face when using cloud-based solutions is the delay in processing large and real-time data. Fog computing has been introduced as a solution to this issue since it allows the data to be processed at the edge of a network while enabling different tasks to be scheduled for processing in fog devices at the edge network. These devices still require cloud resources to give them the capacity of processing real-time applications. However, scheduling these tasks must be made in such a way that they do not consume all the available resources on a fog device. When a task consumes all available resources, it can lead to network breakdown or high latency which is not acceptable for real-time applications. Therefore, to address this problem, this chapter proposes a task scheduling technique for traffic surveillance vehicular network application through smart cameras. We used the iFogSim simulator, where the scenario of vehicle tracking is considered. Simulations are conducted to find an efficient scheduling algorithm among a pool of available ones that can optimize the energy consumption and average delay of our proposed real-time application model. The results show that the First Come First Serve (FCFS) scheduling algorithm outperforms the Short Job First (SJF), Generalized Priority (GP) and Round Robin (RR) counterparts in terms of average latency, energy usage, execution time and network usage

Information extraction model from Ge’ez texts

Nowadays, voluminous and unstructured textual data is found on the Internet that could provide varied valuable information for different institutions such as health care, business-related, training, religion, culture, and history, among others. A such alarming growth of unstructured data fosters the need for various methods and techniques to extract valuable information from unstructured data. However, exploring helpful information to satisfy the needs of the stakeholders becomes a problem due to information overload via the internet. This paper, therefore, presents an effective model for extracting named entities from Ge'ez text using deep learning algorithms. A data set with a total of 5,270 sentences were used for training and testing purposes. Two experimental setups, i.e., long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) were used to make an empirical evaluation with training and a testing split ratio of 80% to 20%, respectively. Experimental results showed that the proposed model could be a practical solution for building information extraction (IE) systems using Bi-LSTM, reaching a training, validation, and testing accuracy as high as 98.59%, 97.96%, and 96.21%, respectively. The performance evaluation results reflect a promising performance of the model compared with resource-rich languages such as English