The consequences for human health of stratospheric ozone depletion in association with other environmental factors

Due to the implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which has limited, and is now probably reversing, the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, only modest increases in solar UV-B radiation at the surface of the Earth have occurred. For many fair-skinned populations, changing behaviour with regard to exposure to the sun over the past half century - more time in the sun, less clothing cover (more skin exposed), and preference for a tan - has probably contributed more to greater levels of exposure to UV-B radiation than ozone depletion. Exposure to UV-B radiation has both adverse and beneficial effects on human health. This report focuses on an assessment of the evidence regarding these outcomes that has been published since our previous report in 2010. The skin and eyes are the organs exposed to solar UV radiation. Excessive solar irradiation causes skin cancer, including cutaneous malignant melanoma and the non-melanoma skin cancers, basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, and contributes to the development of other rare skin cancers such as Merkel cell carcinoma. Although the incidence of melanoma continues to increase in many countries, in some locations, primarily those with strong sun protection programmes, incidence has stabilised or decreased over the past 5 years, particularly in younger age-groups. However, the incidence of non-melanoma skin cancers is still increasing in most locations. Exposure of the skin to the sun also induces systemic immune suppression that may have adverse effects on health, such as through the reactivation of latent viral infections, but also beneficial effects through suppression of autoimmune reactivity. Solar UV-B radiation damages the eyes, causing cataracts and pterygium. UV-B irradiation of the skin is the main source of vitamin D in many geographic locations. Vitamin D plays a critical role in the maintenance of calcium homeostasis in the body; severe deficiency causes the bone diseases, rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. Although many studies have implicated vitamin D deficiency in a wide range of diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, more recent evidence is less compelling, with meta-analyses of supplementation trials failing to show a beneficial effect on the health outcomes that have been tested. It continues to be difficult to provide public health messages to guide safe exposure to the sun that are accurate, simple, and can be used by people with different skin types, in different locations, and for different times of the year or day. There is increasing interest in relating sun protection messages to the UV Index. Current sun protection strategies are outlined and assessed. Climatic factors affect the amount of UV radiation received by the skin and eyes, separately from the effect of ozone depletion. For example, cloud cover can decrease or increase the intensity of UV radiation at Earth's surface and warmer temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns may alter the amount of time people spend outdoors and their choice of clothing. The combination of changes in climate and UV radiation may affect the number of pathogenic microorganisms in surface waters, and could have an impact on food security through effects on plant and aquatic systems. It remains difficult to quantify these effects and their possible importance for human health.Prof Robyn Lucas’ participation in the Panel was supported through funding from the Australian Government’s Ozone Science Strategy. A/Prof Rachel Neale was supported by the QIMR Berghofer Institute for Medical Research. Prof Yukio Takizawa was sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment. Ms Tammy Gibbs provided support with the figures in this paper

Importance of the Doppler Effect to the Determination of the Deuteron Binding Energy

The deuteron binding energy extracted from the reaction ${}^1H(n,\gamma){}^2H$ is reviewed with the exact relativistic formula, where the initial kinetic energy and the Doppler effect are taken into account. We find that the negligible initial kinetic energy of the neutron could cause a significant uncertainty which is beyond the errors available up to now. Therefore, we suggest an experiment which should include the detailed informations about the initial kinetic energy and the detection angle. It could reduce discrepancies among the recently reported values about the deuteron binding energy and pin down the uncertainty due to the Doppler broadening of $\gamma$ ray.Comment: 5 page

Crime among irregular immigrants and the influence of internal border control

Both the number of crime suspects without legal status and the number of irregular or undocumented immigrants held in detention facilities increased substantially in theNetherlands between 1997 and 2003. In this period, theDutch state increasingly attempted to exclude irregular immigrants from the formal labour market and public provisions. At the same time the registered crime among irregular migrants rose. The 'marginalisation thesis' asserts that a larger number of migrants have become involved in crime in response to a decrease in conventional life chances. Using police and administrative data, the present study takes four alternative interpretations into consideration based on: 1) reclassification of immigrant statuses by the state and redefinition of the law, 2) criminal migration and crossborder crime, 3) changes in policing, and 4) demographic changes. A combination of factors is found to have caused the rise in crime, but the marginalisation thesis still accounts for at least 28%. These findings accentuate the need for a more thorough discussion on the intended and unintended consequences of border control for immigrant crime

Ethnic profiling in the Netherlands? A reflection on expanding preventive powers, ethnic profiling and a changing social and political context

Criminal Justice: Legitimacy, accountability, and effectivit

Pseudovector vs. pseudoscalar coupling in one-boson exchange NN potentials

We examine the effects of pseudoscalar and pseudovector coupling of the pi and eta mesons in one-boson exchange models of the NN interaction using two approaches: time-ordered perturbation theory unitarized with the relativistic Lippmann-Schwinger equation, and a reduced Bethe-Salpeter equation approach using the Thompson equation. Contact terms in the one-boson exchange amplitudes in time-ordered perturbation theory lead naturally to the introduction of s-channel nucleonic cutoffs for the interaction, which strongly suppresses the far off-shell behavior of the amplitudes in both approaches. Differences between the resulting NN predictions of the various models are found to be small, and particularly so when coupling constants of the other mesons are readjusted within reasonable limits.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure

Neoadjuvant nivolumab and nivolumab plus ipilimumab induce (near-) complete responses in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma:The IMCISION trial

BackgroundNivolumab (NIVO) alone or with ipilimumab (COMBO) immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) prior to curative surgery has shown promising results in multiple tumor types. We completed a phase Ib/II study with neoadjuvant NIVO or COMBO in resectable head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) and show safety, efficacy and correlative biomarker results.Methods32 stage II-IVB HNSCC patients indicated for curative (salvage) surgery were treated with NIVO (240mg, weeks 1&3, N=6) or NIVO (240mg, weeks 1&3) + IPI (1mg/kg, week 1, N=26) prior to surgery in week 5. Imaging was performed at baseline and week 4. AEs were reported in terms of CTCAE. Pathological response (pR) was defined as % change in viable tumor cells from baseline to on-treatment; ≥90% pR was considered (near-) complete response (pCR). WES and RNAseq were performed on paired tumor biopsies.Results32 (31 HPV-negative) patients started treatment (stage II n=3, III n=8, IVA-B n=11, recurrent disease n=10). 6 patients included with recurrent disease had had previous (C)RT. 1 patient discontinued ICB after one course due to patient’s preference. Surgery was not postponed in any patient. 3/32 patients did not undergo surgery: 1 due to unresectable PD and 2 due to reasons unrelated to ICB or disease. Grade 3-4 irAEs in 11/32 patients were well manageable. (Near-)pCR in the primary tumor was seen in 9/29 evaluable patients (31%). Another 31% of patients had 20-89% pR. At 14 months median FU, RFS for patients with (near-)pCR was 100%, significantly better than patients with <90% pR (p=<0.05). Metabolic response assessment with FDG-PET (week 4) was able to identify (near-)pCRs. A baseline AID/APOBEC-associated tumor mutational profile was correlated with (near)pCR (p=<0.05). Finally, (near)pCR tumors were characterized by a decrease in hypoxia gene expression after ICB.ConclusionsNeoadjuvant ICB was feasible in HNSCC and induced (near)pCR in 31% of evaluable patients at time of surgery, which was accompanied by 100% RFS. Baseline AID/APOBEC-related mutations, on-treatment FDG-PET and resolution of hypoxia need future validation to discover their potential role as biomarkers for (near)pCR after ICB in HNSCC

Soft-core baryon-baryon potentials for the complete baryon octet

SU(3) symmetry relations on the recently constructed hyperon-nucleon potentials are used to develop potential models for all possible baryon-baryon interaction channels. The main focus is on the interaction channels with total strangeness S=-2, -3, and -4, for which no experimental data exist yet. The potential models for these channels are based on SU(3) extensions of potential models for the S=0 and S=-1 sectors, which are fitted to experimental data. Although the SU(3) symmetry is not taken to be exact, the S=0 and S=-1 sectors still provide the necessary constraints to fix all free parameters. The potentials for the S=-2, -3, and -4 sectors, therefore, do not contain any additional free parameters, which makes them the first models of this kind. Various properties of the potentials are illustrated by giving results for scattering lengths, bound states, and total cross sections.Comment: 22 pages RevTex, 6 postscript figure

The high-precision, charge-dependent Bonn nucleon-nucleon potential (CD-Bonn)

We present a charge-dependent nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential that fits the world proton-proton data below 350 MeV available in the year of 2000 with a chi^2 per datum of 1.01 for 2932 data and the corresponding neutron-proton data with chi^2/datum = 1.02 for 3058 data. This reproduction of the NN data is more accurate than by any phase-shift analysis and any other NN potential. The charge-dependence of the present potential (that has been dubbed `CD-Bonn') is based upon the predictions by the Bonn Full Model for charge-symmetry and charge-independence breaking in all partial waves with J <= 4. The potential is represented in terms of the covariant Feynman amplitudes for one-boson exchange which are nonlocal. Therefore, the off-shell behavior of the CD-Bonn potential differs in a characteristic and well-founded way from commonly used local potentials and leads to larger binding energies in nuclear few- and many-body systems, where underbinding is a persistent problem.Comment: 69 pages (RevTex) including 20 tables and 9 figures (ps files

Weak capture of protons by protons

The cross section for the proton weak capture reaction $^1H(p,e^+\nu_e)^2H$ is calculated with wave functions obtained from a number of modern, realistic high-precision interactions. To minimize the uncertainty in the axial two-body current operator, its matrix element has been adjusted to reproduce the measured Gamow-Teller matrix element of tritium $\beta$ decay in model calculations using trinucleon wave functions from these interactions. A thorough analysis of the ambiguities that this procedure introduces in evaluating the two-body current contribution to the pp capture is given. Its inherent model dependence is in fact found to be very weak. The overlap integral $\Lambda^2(E=0)$ for the pp capture is predicted to be in the range 7.05--7.06, including the axial two-body current contribution, for all interactions considered.Comment: 17 pages RevTeX (twocolumn), 5 postscript figure

Ecuadorian Migration in Amsterdam and Madrid: The Structural Contexts

AbstractThe scope of this chapter is to outline the main characteristics of the two contexts that were the scenario of the phenomenon that is the object of this book. The analysis will centre on those structural features of the cities of Amsterdam and Madrid and, more in general, of the Netherlands and Spain, that may have had an influence on the experience of Ecuadorian irregular migrants