Trypanosoma equiperdum in the horse : a neglected threat?

Dourine is a contagious disease caused by Trypanosoma equiperdum that is transmitted directly from animal to animal during coitus. Dourine is known as an important disease in many countries, and it threatens equidae worldwide. It is reported to be widespread in South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, Namibia and Ethiopia. The disease can be carried to various parts of the world through the transportation of infected animals and semen. Since knowledge of the prepatent infectiousness of a recently infected animal is lacking, introduction of the disease is in principle an ever-present threat. Definitive diagnosis depends on the identification of the parasite by means of direct microscopy. This is rarely possible in practice and therefore, diagnosis in the field is based on the observation of typical clinical signs, together with serological tests. This paper is an endeavour to review briefly and compile information on the appearance and importance of Dourine in terms of its epidemiological and clinical features, as well as on its diagnosis, treatment and prognosis

Nutritional Status of Adolescent Girls from Rural Communities of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

Background: Addressing the nutritional needs of adolescents could be an important step towards breaking the vicious cycle of intergenerational malnutrition. Objective: Assess nutritional status of rural adolescent girls. Design: Cross-sectional. Methods: Anthropometric and socio-demographic information from 211 adolescent girls representing 650 randomly selected households from thirteen communities in Tigray was used in data analysis. Height-for-age and BMI-for-age were compared to the 2007 WHO growth reference. Data were analyzed using SAS, Version 9.1. Results: None of the households reported access to adolescent micronutrient supplementation. The girls were shorter and thinner than the 2007 WHO reference population. The cross-sectional prevalence of stunting and thinness were 26.5% and 58.3%, respectively. Lack of latrine facilities was significantly associated with stunting (p = 0.0033) and thinness (p <0.0001). Age was strong predictor of stunting (r(2) = 0.8838, p <0.0001) and thinness (r(2) = 0.3324, p <0.0001). Conclusion: Undernutrition was prevalent among the girls. Strategies to improve the nutritional status of girls need to go beyond the conventional maternal and child health care programs to reach girls before conception to break the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition. Further, carefully designed longitudinal studies are needed to identify the reasons for poor growth throughout the period of adolescence in this population. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2009; 23(1):5-11

Experiment of oxygenated fuel on diesel engine: Performance, emission and particulate matter

The main purpose of the study is to characterise the effects of diesel, biodiesel blends B5M10 and B10M10 and emulsion fuels B5M10E3 and B10M10E3 as fuels for the impact on particulate matter emission. Engine tests have been performed to obtain results of engine performance, gas emission and particulate matter with various cycles. Excel analysis methods were used to analysethe data obtained.The B5M10E3 produces lowe

Effect Of Emulsification And Blending On The Oxygenation And Substitution Of Diesel Fuel For Compression Ignition Engine

Global emission standards are getting more stringent in which the existing diesel engine technologies are on the brink of losing their permit to operate. While there are successful engine side researches that can target the current emission norms, their implementation in existing engines will not be possible due to their higher price tag. With this respect, fuel side improvement with no or minimal modification to engine hardware is the best way to address the issue in the existing engines. The commonly used fuel oxygenators in diesel engines are water, alcohol, biodiesel and the combinations of these. The method of oxygenation and their corresponding results on the combustion, performance and emissions that have been reported in the literatures are widely varied. The current review article targets the blending and emulsification techniques used in the oxygenation and fuel substitution of diesel. Based on the misconceptions about the stability of emulsions, many researchers are found to use the term blending even though the technique they have used is emulsification. While blending of fuels is convenient for fuels which have relatively similar boiling temperature, emulsification technique should be followed for fuel mixtures of varied boiling temperature so that the benefit of micro-explosion can be reflected in the fuel atomization. Secondary atomization resulting from the micro-explosion phenomenon of emulsified fuels and fuel oxygenation are responsible for the improvement of combustion, performance and CO and PM emissions. Latent heat of vaporization is found to be responsible for the reduction of NOx emissions

Invitro Antibacterial Screening of Extracts from Selected Ethiopian Medicinal Plants

Indigenous knowledge, literature reports and ethnobotanical records suggest that plants are the basis for medicines. They constitute natural source of antimicrobial drugs that will provide novel or lead compounds for the fight against disease. In this study, the antimicrobial activity of three selected Ethiopian medicinal plants was studied with the objective of  screening their antibacterial activity. The fruits of Measalanceolata, aerial part of Cissus quadrangularis and leaf of Dodonae angustifolia were collected, air dried under shed, powdered and soaked in 80% methanol and extracted. In vitro antibacterial activity of the extracts was tested at different concentrations by using agar disc diffusion method and  measuring the zone of inhibition. The plant extracts showed broad  spectrum activity against gram positive (S. aureus) as well as gram  negative (E. coli) bacteria, except Cissus quadrangularis which did not show any activity against E. coli. Furthermore, the plant extracts had also  concentration dependant zone of inhibition against the tested bacteria. In fact, the highest activity was obtained for Dodonae angustifolia at  1000mg/ml against S. aureus. The activities are attributed to the presence of some secondary metabolites present in the tested plants which have been associated with antibacterial activities. This finding suggests that these medicinal plants can be potential source to isolate antibacterial drugs.Keywords: Antibacterial activity, Disc diffusion, E. coli, Plant extract and S. aureus

Cell abundance aware deep learning for cell detection on highly imbalanced pathological data

Automated analysis of tissue sections allows a better understanding of disease biology, and may reveal biomarkers that could guide prognosis or treatment selection. In digital pathology, less abundant cell types can be of biological significance, but their scarcity can result in biased and sub-optimal cell detection model. To minimize the effect of cell imbalance on cell detection, we proposed a deep learning pipeline that considers the abundance of cell types during model training. Cell weight images were generated, which assign larger weights to less abundant cells and used the weights to regularize Dice overlap loss function. The model was trained and evaluated on myeloma bone marrow trephine samples. Our model obtained cell detection F1-score of 0.78, a 2% increase compared to baseline models, and it outperformed baseline models at detecting rare cell types. We found that scaling deep learning loss function by the abundance of cells improves cell detection performance. Our results demonstrate the importance of incorporating domain knowledge on deep learning methods for pathological data with class imbalance

The multispecific thyroid hormone transporter OATP1C1 mediates cell-specific sulforhodamine 101-labeling of hippocampal astrocytes

Sulforhodamine 101 (SR101) is widely used for astrocyte identification, though the labeling mechanism remains unknown and the efficacy of labeling in different brain regions is heterogeneous. By combining region-specific isolation of astrocytes followed by transcriptome analysis, two-photon excitation microscopy, and mouse genetics, we identified the thyroid hormone transporter OATP1C1 as the SR101-uptake transporter in hippocampus and cortex. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00429-013-0645-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Experimental of oxygenated fuel on diesel engine: fuel properties, performance and emission

The main purpose of the study was to characterise the effects of diesel, biodiesel blends B5M10 and B10M10 and emulsion fuels B5M10E3 and B10M10E3 as fuels for the impact on particulate matter emission. Engine tests have been performed to obtain results of engine performance, gas emission and particulate matter with various cycles. Excel analysis methods were used to analyze the data obtained. The B5M10E3 produces lower emission results than B10M10E3 as biodiesel fuel increases the combustion temperature. In conclusion, biodiesel blends can actually reduce emissions of particulate matter and gas emissions compared to diesel but increase emissions. Therefore, the emulsion fuel B5M10E3 and B10M10E3 can be the best alternative fuel for the future