Mortalidad entre los pacientes en tratamiento con metadona e infectados con el virus de la inmunodeficiencia humana y/o hepatitis C [Mortality rate in patients on methadone treatment and infected with the human immunodeficiency virus and/or the hepatitis C virus ]

Sr. Director: La adicción a la heroína es una enfermedad recidivante crónica con graves consecuencias, particularmente en términos de prematura y alta mortalidad (Hser, Hoffman, Grella y Anglin, 2001). Los programas de tratamiento de mantenimiento con metadona (TMM) han demostrado ser eficaces para reducir el uso ilícito de opioides, y el riesgo de infección por el virus de la inmunodeficiencia humana (VIH) y/o virus de la hepatitis C (VHC), entre otras variables (Kleber, 2008; Pedrero-Pérez y MethaQoL, 2017). A pesar de todo, la tasa de mortalidad anual entre los pacientes incluidos en programas de TMM, aproximadamente del 1%, es más de 10 veces superior al de la población general (Zanis y Woody, 1998); constituyendo la sobredosis y la infección por VIH y otros virus transmitidos por la sangre (p.e. VHC) las causas más comunes de muerte (Roncero, Vega, Martinez-Raga y Torrens, 2017). En efecto, entre los drogodependientes por vía parenteral e infectados por VIH, la co-infección por VIH y VHC se observa en el 50% -95% de los casos (Muga, Roca, Egea, Tor, Sirera y Rey-Joly, 2000); pudiendo provocar, dicha infección simultanea por VIH, una mayor carga viral del VHC y una evolución más rápida a la cirrosis hepática y sus complicaciones (Santos y Sanz, 22004; Elizalde, Iñarrairaegui, Rodríguez y Zozaya, 2004)... Dear Director, Heroin addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease with serious consequences, particularly in terms of premature and high mortality (Hser, Hoffman, Grella & Anglin, 2001). Methadone maintenance treatment programs (MMT’s) have shown to be effective in reducing illicit opioid use and the risk of infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and/or Hepatitis C virus (HCV), among other (Kleber, 2008; Pedrero-Pérez & MethaQoL, 2017). Nevertheless, the approximately 1% annual mortality among MMT patients is more than 10 times that of the general population (Zanis &y Woody, 1998); and overdose, HIV infection (VIH), and other viruses transmitted by blood (e.g., HCV infection) constitute the most common causes of death (Roncero, Vega, Martinez-Raga & Torrens, 2017). In fact, among HIV-infected patients, HIV–HCV co-infection is observed in 50–95% of cases (Muga, Roca, Egea, Tor, Sirera & Rey-Joly, 2000); this simultaneous HIV infection can cause an increased viral load of HCV and a more rapid evolution to liver cirrhosis and its complications (Santos & Sanz, 2004; Elizalde, Iñarrairaegui, Rodríguez & Zozaya, 2004)..

Energy-water-food nexus in the Spanish greenhouse tomato production

The nexus energy–water–food of the tomato greenhouse production in the Almeria region (Spain) has been studied following a Process Systems Analysis Method connecting the ecosystem services to the market demands with a holistic view based on Life Cycle Assessment. The management of the agri-food subsystem, the industrial subsystem and the urban subsystem plays an important role in the nexus of the E–W–F system, where transport and information technologies connect the three subsystems to the global markets. The local case study of the tomato production in Almeria (Spain) has been developed as an example of the food production under cropland restrictions, semiarid land. After study of the economic and social sustainability in time, the evolution of the ecosystem services supply is the main restriction of the system, where after the land use change in the region, water and energy supply play the mean role with a trade-off between the water quality degradation and the economic cost of the energy for water desalination. Water footprint, Carbon footprint and Chemicals footprint are useful indicators to the environmental sustainability assessment of local alternatives in the E–W–F system under study. As it is shown in the conclusions, the holistic view based on the process analysis method and the life cycle assessment methodology and indicators is an useful tool for decision support

Critical review of technologies for the on-site treatment of hospital wastewater: From conventional to combined advanced processes

This review aims to assess different technologies for the on-site treatment of hospital wastewater (HWW) to remove pharmaceutical compounds (PhCs) as sustances of emerging concern at a bench, pilot, and full scales from 2014 to 2020. Moreover, a rough characterisation of hospital effluents is presented. The main detected PhCs are antibiotics and psychiatric drugs, with concentrations up to 1.1 mg/L. On the one hand, regarding the presented technologies, membrane bioreactors (MBRs) are a good alternative for treating HWW with PhCs removal values higher than 80% in removing analgesics, anti-inflammatories, cardiovascular drugs, and some antibiotics. Moreover, this system has been scaled up to the pilot plant scale. However, some target compounds are still present in the treated effluent, such as psychiatric and contrast media drugs and recalcitrant antibiotics (erythromycin and sulfamethoxazole). On the other hand, ozonation effectively removes antibiotics found in the HWW (>93%), and some studies are carried out at the pilot plant scale. Even though, some families, such as the X-ray contrast media, are recalcitrant to ozone. Other advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), such as Fenton-like or UV treatments, seem very effective for removing pharmaceuticals, Antibiotic Resistance Bacteria (ARBs) and Antibiotic Resistance Genes (ARGs). However, they are not implanted at pilot plant or full scale as they usually consider extra reactants such as ozone, iron, or UV-light, making the scale-up of the processes a challenging task to treat high-loading wastewater. Thus, several examples of biological wastewater treatment methods combined with AOPs have been proposed as the better strategy to treat HWW with high removal of PhCs (generally over 98%) and ARGs/ARBs (below the detection limit) and lower spending on reactants. However, it still requires further development and optimisation of the integrated processes.Comunidad de Madri

Critical review of technologies for the on-site treatment of hospital wastewater: From conventional to combined advanced processes

In this work, a raw and low cost mineral, ilmenite (FeTiO3), has been tested for the first time as a photocatalyst paired with peroxymonosulfate (HSO5-; PMS) for the inactivation of Enterococcus faecalis as an alternative to conventional treatments to disinfect wastewater for reuse. The influence of some operational parameters such as reagent dosage, catalyst concentration, initial pH, or flow rate was also studied and optimized. After several tests, the scarce pure photoactivity under UV-A was remarked by ilmenite because of its high iron content, which favors photogenerated charge recombination. However, ilmenite activity was highly promoted when combined with low concentrations of PMS and UV-A light, reaching total inactivation of Enterococcus faecalis in 120 min. Quenching tests were performed using methanol, tert-butyl alcohol, furfuryl alcohol, and Cu(II) to assess the main reactive species involved in the disinfection process determining the critical role of both HO·and SO4·- radicals in the process. Finally, the influence of the water matrix was also evaluated by studying the effect of water hardness and the presence of nutrients on the system. Overall, the PMS/Ilmenite/UV-A system yielded promising results with a total removal of Enterococcus faecalis in 120 min. However, it also showed the need for further study and understanding of the disinfection mechanism to achieve the same level of performance in real wastewaterThe "Comunidad de Madrid" supported this research through REMTAVARES S2013/MAE-2716 and S2018/EMT-434

Upcycling spent brewery grains through the production of carbon adsorbents: application to the removal of carbamazepine from water

Spent brewery grains, a by-product of the brewing process, were used as precursor of biochars and activated carbons to be applied to the removal of pharmaceuticals from water. Biochars were obtained by pyrolysis of the raw materials, while activated carbons were produced by adding a previous chemical activation step. The influence of using different precursors (from distinct fermentation processes), activating agents (potassium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide, and phosphoric acid), pyrolysis temperatures, and residence times was assessed. The adsorbents were physicochemically characterized and applied to the removal of the antiepileptic carbamazepine from water. Potassium hydroxide activation produced the materials with the most promising properties and adsorptive removals, with specific surface areas up to 1120 m2 g-1 and maximum adsorption capacities up to 190 ± 27 mg g-1 in ultrapure water. The adsorption capacity suffered a reduction of < 70% in wastewater, allowing to evaluate the impact of realistic matrices on the efficiency of the materials.publishe

Active memory controller

Inability to hide main memory latency has been increasingly limiting the performance of modern processors. The problem is worse in large-scale shared memory systems, where remote memory latencies are hundreds, and soon thousands, of processor cycles. To mitigate this problem, we propose an intelligent memory and cache coherence controller (AMC) that can execute Active Memory Operations (AMOs). AMOs are select operations sent to and executed on the home memory controller of data. AMOs can eliminate a significant number of coherence messages, minimize intranode and internode memory traffic, and create opportunities for parallelism. Our implementation of AMOs is cache-coherent and requires no changes to the processor core or DRAM chips. In this paper, we present the microarchitecture design of AMC, and the programming model of AMOs. We compare AMOs\u27 performance to that of several other memory architectures on a variety of scientific and commercial benchmarks. Through simulation, we show that AMOs offer dramatic performance improvements for an important set of data-intensive operations, e.g., up to 50x faster barriers, 12x faster spinlocks, 8.5x-15x faster stream/array operations, and 3x faster database queries. We also present an analytical model that can predict the performance benefits of using AMOs with decent accuracy. The silicon cost required to support AMOs is less than 1% of the die area of a typical high performance processor, based on a standard cell implementation

Positional Adaptation of Processors: Application to Energy Reduction

Although adaptive processors can exploit application variability to improve performance or save energy, effectively managing their adaptivity is challenging. To address this problem, we introduce a new approach to adaptivity: the Positional approach. In this approach, both the testing of configurations and the application of the chosen configurations are associated with particular code sections. This is in contrast to the currently-used Temporal approach to adaptation, where both the testing and application of configurations are tied to successive intervals in time

SYNTHESIS, CHARACTERIZATION AND ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF A Pd(II) COMPLEX WITH A 1,3-DIPHENYLPYRAZOLE-4-CARBOXALDEHYDE THIOSEMICARBAZONE LIGAND

This article describes the synthesis and characterization of a new complex, [Pd(Ph2PzTSC)2], formed between palladium(II) and 1,3-diphenylpyrazole-4-carboxaldehyde thiosemicarbazone ligand as a strategy for antimicrobial activity improvement the synthesized complex. The metal coordination leads to an improvement of ligand pharmacological activities and synergistic effects involving both metal ion as the ligand. The bidentate ligand is coordinated to metal ion through the azomethine nitrogen atoms and the sulphur in the form of thiol by deprotonation of the NH-C=S group. The antimicrobial activity of these new compounds was evaluated against gram-negative (Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and gram-positive (Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus thuringiensis) bacteria and two yeasts strains (Candida albicans and Saccharomyces cerevisiae). A comparison between the antimicrobial activity of the complex and that of the free ligand revealed that the coordination of Pd(II) improved the activity

Síntesis, caracterización y actividad Antimicrobial de un complejo de pd(ii) con Ligante 1,3-difenilpirazol-4-carboxaldehído Tiosemicarbazona

En este artículo se describe la síntesis y caracterización de un nuevo complejo de paladio(II), [Pd(Ph2PzTSC)2], con el ligante 1,3-difenilpirazol-4-carboxaldehído tiosemicarbazona (Ph2PzTSC) como una estrategia para mejorar la actividad antimicrobiana del complejo formado. La coordinación del ion metálico y el efecto sinérgico entre estos, conduce a mejorar la actividad biológica del complejo. El ligante se coordina al ion metálico de modo bidentado a través del átomo de nitrógeno del azometino y del azufre en forma de tiol, por la desprotonación del grupo NH-C=S. La actividad antimicrobiana de estos compuestos fueevaluada frente a bacterias Gram-negativas(Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Pseudomonas aeruginosa) yGram-positivas(Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus thuringensis) y dos levaduras (Candida albicans y Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Cuando fueron comparados los resultados de la actividad antimicrobiana con la actividad del ligante libre, se observó que la coordinación del Pd(II) mejoró la actividad.This article describes the synthesis and characterization of a new complex, [Pd(Ph2PzTSC)2], formed between palladium(II) and 1,3-diphenylpyrazole-4-carboxaldehyde thiosemicarba-zone ligand as a strategy for antimicrobial activity improve-ment the synthesized complex. The metal coordination leads to an improvement of ligand pharmacological activities and synergistic effects involving both metal ion as the ligand. The bidentate ligand is coordinated to metal ion through the azomethine nitrogen atoms and the sulphur in the form of thiol by deprotonation of the NH-C=S group. The antimicro-bial activity of these new compounds was evaluated against gram-negative (Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniaeand Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and gram-positive (Staphy-lococcus aureus and Bacillus thuringiensis) bacteria and two yeasts strains (Candida albicans and Saccharomyces cerevisiae). A comparison between the antimicrobial activity of the complex and that of the free ligand revealed that the coordination of Pd(II) improved the activity.Incluye referencias bibliográfica