Animal attacks - a red herring of child abuse?

Injuries sustained as a result of attacks by domestic animals, particularly canines, are occasionally encountered at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital Trauma Unit in Cape Town. Less than 1% of admissions are directly attributable to animal attacks. Animal attacks causing lethal injuries are very rare and should be assessed carefully. We recently dealt with two fatalities attributed to animal attacks

Animal attacks – a red herring of child abuse?

No Abstract. South African Medical Journal Vol. 96 (3) 2006: 184-18

The Multidimensional Study of Viral Campaigns as Branching Processes

Viral campaigns on the Internet may follow variety of models, depending on the content, incentives, personal attitudes of sender and recipient to the content and other factors. Due to the fact that the knowledge of the campaign specifics is essential for the campaign managers, researchers are constantly evaluating models and real-world data. The goal of this article is to present the new knowledge obtained from studying two viral campaigns that took place in a virtual world which followed the branching process. The results show that it is possible to reduce the time needed to estimate the model parameters of the campaign and, moreover, some important aspects of time-generations relationship are presented.Comment: In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 201

Maze learning and memory in a decapod crustacean

Spatial learning is an ecologically important trait well studied in vertebrates but only in a few invertebrates and poorly understood in crustaceans. We explored the ability of European shore crabs, Carcinus maenas, to learn a complex maze over four consecutive weeks using food as a motivator. Crabs showed a steady improvement in their ability to learn and use the maze to find food during this conditioning period. Improvements were seen both in the time taken to find the food and in a reduciton in the number of wrong turns taken before the food was located. Crabs also clearly showed the ability to remember the maze. When we returned them to the maze following a two week break, but without any food in the maze, they all returned to the end of the maze in under eight minutes. Crabs that had not been conditioned to the maze took far longer to reach the end and 42% of individuals did not get to the end of the maze at all during a one-hour study period. Our study provides an initial description of spatial learning in the European shore crab. Bettering our understanding of this adaptive trait will develop our understanding of resource exploitation by benthic crustaceans and their ecological roles

Polarization degrees of freedom in photoinduced two-nucleon knockout from finite nuclei

The polarization degrees of freedom in photoinduced two-nucleon knockout from finite nuclei are studied. It is pointed out that they open good perspectives to study the dynamics of dinucleons in the medium in detail. The ($\gamma,pp$) and ($\gamma,pn$) angular cross sections, photon asymmetries and outgoing nucleon polarizations are calculated for the target nuclei $^{16}$O and $^{12}$C and photonenergies ranging from 100 up to 500 MeV. It is investigated to which degree the two-nucleon emission reaction is dominated by photoabsorption on $^3S_1(T=0)$ proton-neutron and $^1S_0(T=1)$ proton-proton pairs in the nuclear medium. The calculations demonstrate that dominance of $S$ wave photoabsorption in the ($\gamma,pn$) channel does not necessarily imply that the reaction mechanism is similar to what is observed in deuteron photodisintegration.Comment: 27 pages, REVTeX 3.0 with epsf.sty, 11 figures in EPS forma

Brain Swelling and Mannitol Therapy in Adult Cerebral Malaria: A Randomized Trial

Mild cerebral swelling on CT-scan was common in adult patients with cerebral malaria, but severity of swelling was not correlated with coma depth or survival. Mannitol as adjunctive treatment for cerebral malaria prolonged coma duration and may be harmful

Pitfalls and complications in the treatment of cervical spine fractures in patients with ankylosing spondylitis

Patients with ankylosing spondylitis are at significant risk for sustaining cervical spine injuries following trauma predisposed by kyphosis, stiffness and osteoporotic bone quality of the spine. The risk of sustaining neurological deficits in this patient population is higher than average. The present review article provides an outline on the specific injury patterns in the cervical spine, diagnostic algorithms and specific treatment modalities dictated by the underlying disease in patients with ankylosing spondylitis. An emphasis is placed on the risks and complication patterns in the treatment of these rare, but challenging injuries

IFNAR1-Signalling Obstructs ICOS-mediated Humoral Immunity during Non-lethal Blood-Stage Plasmodium Infection

Funding: This work was funded by a Career Development Fellowship (1028634) and a project grant (GRNT1028641) awarded to AHa by the Australian National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC). IS was supported by The University of Queensland Centennial and IPRS Scholarships. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 has no effect on survival during experimental malaria but affects parasitemia in a parasite strain-specific manner

status: publishe