Measles outbreak in Simada District, South Gondar Zone, Amhara Region, May - June 2009: Immediate need for strengthened routine and supplemental immunization activities (SIAs)

Background: Recently measles outbreaks have been occurring in several areas of Ethiopia.Methods: Desk review of outbreak surveillance data was conducted to identify the susceptible subjects and highly affected groups of the community in Simada District, Amhara Region, May and June, 2009.Results: A total of 97 cases with 13 deaths (Case fatality Rate (CFR) of 13.4%) were reported delayed about 2 weeks. Cases ranged in of age range from 3 months to 79 years, with 43.3% aged 15 years and above; and high age specific attack rate in children under 5 and infants (p-value<0.0001).Conclusion and Recommendation: These findings indicate accumulation of susceptible children under 5 and a need to strengthen both routine and supplemental immunization activities (SIAs) and surveillance, with monitoring of accumulation of susceptible individuals to protect both target and non-target age groups. Surveillance should be extended to and owned by volunteer community health workers and the community, particularly in such remote areas

Generation of flavors and fragrances through biotransformation and de novo synthesis

Flavors and fragrances are the result of the presence of volatile and non-volatile compounds, appreciated mostly by the sense of smell once they usually have pleasant odors. They are used in perfumes and perfumed products, as well as for the flavoring of foods and beverages. In fact the ability of the microorganisms to produce flavors and fragrances has been described for a long time, but the relationship between the flavor formation and the microbial growth was only recently established. After that, efforts have been put in the analysis and optimization of food fermentations that led to the investigation of microorganisms and their capacity to produce flavors and fragrances, either by de novo synthesis or biotransformation. In this review, we aim to resume the recent achievements in the production of the most relevant flavors by bioconversion/biotransformation or de novo synthesis, its market value, prominent strains used, and their production rates/maximum concentrations.We would like to thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469 unit, COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145FEDER-006684), and BiotecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020—Programa Operacional Regional do Norte.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hybrid Processing

Human societies have converted biomass into energy and products for millennia using both biochemical and thermochemical processes. Familiar examples of biochemical processing includes fermentation of sugar- or starch-rich crops and milk into sauerkraut, beer, wine, yogurt, and cheese. Familiar examples of thermochemical processing include baking and cooking of food and burning wood for heat and power

A PRACTICAL FORMULATION FOR COMPUTATION OF COMPLEX GRADIENTS AND ITS APPLICATION TO MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ICA

We introduce a framework for complex-valued signal processing such that all computations can be directly carried out in the complex domain. The framework, based on an elegant result due to Brandwood, allows for easy derivation of many complex-valued algorithms and their efficient analyses. We demonstrate its application to derivation of relative gradient updates for independent component analysis using maximum likelihood and discuss the selection of score functions within this framework. Index Terms- Maximum likelihood estimation, optimization methods, signal analysis. 1