Allergic enterocolitis and protein-losing enteropathy as the presentations of manganese leak from an ingested disk battery: A case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Disk battery ingestions can lead to serious complications including airway or digestive tract perforation, blood vessel erosions, mediastinitis, and stricture formation.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We report a 20-month-old Caucasian child who developed eosinophilic enterocolitis and subsequent protein-losing enteropathy from manganese that leaked from a lithium disk battery. The disk battery was impacted in her esophagus for 10 days resulting in battery corrosion. We postulate that this patient's symptoms were due to a manganese leak from the 'retained' disk battery; this resulted in an allergic response in her gut and protein-losing enteropathy. Her symptoms improved gradually over the next 2 weeks with conservative management.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This is the first case report to highlight the potential complication of allergic enterocolitis and protein-losing enteropathy secondary to ingested manganese. Clinicians should be vigilant about this rare complication in managing patients with disk battery ingestions.</p

Electrospinning piezoelectric fibers for biocompatible devices

The field of nanotechnology has been gaining great success due to its potential in developing new generations of nanoscale materials with unprecedented properties and enhanced biological responses. This is particularly exciting using nanofibers, as their mechanical and topographic characteristics can approach those found in naturally occurring biological materials. Electrospinning is a key technique to manufacture ultrafine fibers and fiber meshes with multifunctional features, such as piezoelectricity, to be available on a smaller length scale, thus comparable to subcellular scale, which makes their use increasingly appealing for biomedical applications. These include biocompatible fiber-based devices as smart scaffolds, biosensors, energy harvesters, and nanogenerators for the human body. This paper provides a comprehensive review of current studies focused on the fabrication of ultrafine polymeric and ceramic piezoelectric fibers specifically designed for, or with the potential to be translated toward, biomedical applications. It provides an applicative and technical overview of the biocompatible piezoelectric fibers, with actual and potential applications, an understanding of the electrospinning process, and the properties of nanostructured fibrous materials, including the available modeling approaches. Ultimately, this review aims at enabling a future vision on the impact of these nanomaterials as stimuli-responsive devices in the human body

The Consensus from the Mycobacterium avium ssp. paratuberculosis (MAP) Conference 2017.

On March 24 and 25, 2017 researchers and clinicians from around the world met at Temple University in Philadelphia to discuss the current knowledge of Mycobacterium avium ssp. paratuberculosis (MAP) and its relationship to human disease. The conference was held because of shared concern that MAP is a zoonotic bacterium that poses a threat not only to animal health but also human health. In order to further study this problem, the conferees discussed ways to improve MAP diagnostic tests and discussed potential future anti-MAP clinical trials. The conference proceedings may be viewed on the www.Humanpara.org website. A summary of the salient work in this field is followed by recommendations from a majority of the conferees

Resolution of Crohn\u27s disease and complex regional pain syndrome following treatment of paratuberculosis

A cohort of family members with various chronic diseases including Crohn\u27s disease, asthma, complex regional pain syndrome, hypothyroidism, type 1 diabetes mellitus, and lymphangiomatosis and/or evidence of infection by Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) are described in this series of case reports. MAP was cultured from the blood of three members affected by the first five diseases and there was accompanying elevated anti-MAP IgG in two members. The patient affected by the sixth disease has a markedly elevated anti-MAP titer. The two patients affected by the first four diseases have been treated with a combination of anti-MAP antibiotics and ultraviolet blood irradiation therapy with resolution of the disease symptomatology and inability to culture MAP in post treatment blood samples. These case reports of patients with MAP infections provide supportive evidence of a pathogenic role of MAP in humans

Determination of the potential form of operators

.The author extends ideas of duality [see, for example, B. Noble and M. J. Sewell, J. Inst. Math. Appl. 9 (1972), 123–193; MR0307012] to a class of nonlinear operators on Banach spaces. Let U, V be Banach spaces and a(u,v) a bilinear form on U×V. Let N be a (nonlinear) operator N:U→V. GN(u)h denotes the Gâteaux derivative of N in the direction of h, computed at the point u∈U. Let us assume that a separates points in U×V (as defined by Marshall Stone). If there is v∈V such that a(h,v)=⟨h,Gf(u)⟩ for a functional f:U→R then v is called the gradient of f(u). The operator N is called potential if a suitable functional f satisfying this condition exists. The problem of symmetrizing N involves a suitable choice of the bilinear form a. For example, the operator N(u(t))=[(du/dt)2−g(t)] is not potential with respect to the usual L2 product. The author formulates a number of variational principles and discusses specific examples. This is an interesting article, supplementing the ideas of E. Tonti and of R. W. Atherton and G. M. Homsy [Studies in Appl. Math. 54 (1975), no. 1, 31–60; MR0458271]