Audit of Antenatal Testing of Sexually Transmissible Infections and Blood Borne Viruses at Western Australian Hospitals

In August 2007, the Western Australian Department of Health (DOH) released updated recommendations for testing of sexually transmissible infections (STI) and blood-borne viruses (BBV) in antenates. Prior to this, the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) antenatal testing recommendations had been accepted practice in most antenatal settings. The RANZCOG recommends that testing for HIV, syphilis, hepatitis B and C be offered at the first antenatal visit. The DOH recommends that in addition, chlamydia testing be offered. We conducted a baseline audit of antenatal STI/BBV testing in women who delivered at selected public hospitals before the DOH recommendations. We examined the medical records of 200 women who had delivered before 1st July 2007 from each of the sevenWAhospitals included in the audit. STI and BBV testing information and demographic data were collected. Of the 1,409 women included, 1,205 (86%) were non-Aboriginal and 200 (14%) were Aboriginal. High proportions of women had been tested for HIV (76%), syphilis (86%), hepatitis C (87%) and hepatitis B (88%). Overall, 72% of women had undergone STI/BBV testing in accordance with RANZCOG recommendations. However, chlamydia testing was evident in only 18% of records. STI/BBV prevalence ranged from 3.9% (CI 1.5– 6.3%) for chlamydia, to 1.7% (CI 1–2.4%) for hepatitis C, 0.7% (CI 0.3–1.2) for hepatitis B and 0.6% (CI 0.2–1) for syphilis. Prior to the DOH recommendations, nearly three-quarters of antenates had undergone STI/BBV testing in accordance with RANZCOG recommendations, but less than one fifth had been tested for chlamydia. The DOH recommendations will be further promoted with the assistance of hospitals and other stakeholders. A future audit will be conducted to determine the proportion of women tested according to the DOH recommendations. The hand book from this conference is available for download Published in 2008 by the Australasian Society for HIV Medicine Inc © Australasian Society for HIV Medicine Inc 2008 ISBN: 978-1-920773-59-

Implications of Hadron Collider Observables on Parton Distribution Function Uncertainties

Standard parton distribution function sets do not have rigorously quantified uncertainties. In recent years it has become apparent that these uncertainties play an important role in the interpretation of hadron collider data. In this paper, using the framework of statistical inference, we illustrate a technique that can be used to efficiently propagate the uncertainties to new observables, assess the compatibility of new data with an initial fit, and, in case the compatibility is good, include the new data in the fit.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Snowmass 2001: Jet Energy Flow Project

Conventional cone jet algorithms arose from heuristic considerations of LO hard scattering coupled to independent showering. These algorithms implicitly assume that the final states of individual events can be mapped onto a unique set of jets that are in turn associated with a unique set of underlying hard scattering partons. Thus each final state hadron is assigned to a unique underlying parton. The Jet Energy Flow (JEF) analysis described here does not make such assumptions. The final states of individual events are instead described in terms of flow distributions of hadronic energy. Quantities of physical interest are constructed from the energy flow distribution summed over all events. The resulting analysis is less sensitive to higher order perturbative corrections and the impact of showering and hadronization than the standard cone algorithms.Comment: REVTeX4, 13 pages, 6 figures; Contribution to the P5 Working Group on QCD and Strong Interactions at Snowmass 200

Next-to-leading order predictions for WW + 1 jet distributions at the LHC

We present numerical results for the production of a $W^+W^-$ pair in association with a jet at the LHC in QCD at next-to-leading order (NLO). We include effects of the decay of the massive vector bosons into leptons with spin correlations and contributions from the third generation of massive quarks. The calculation is performed using a semi-numerical method for the virtual corrections, and is implemented in MCFM. In addition to its importance {\it per se} as a test of the Standard Model, this process is an important background to searches for the Higgs boson and to many new physics searches. As an example, we study the impact of NLO corrections to $W^+W^-+$ jet production on the search for a Higgs boson at the LHC.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures; v3 published versio

How accurately can we measure the W cross section?

We study the QCD sources of systematic uncertainties in the experimental extraction of the W cross section at hadron colliders. The uncertainties appear in the evaluation of the detector acceptances used to convert the number of observed events into a total production cross section. We consider the effect of NLO corrections, as well as of the inclusion of parton showers, and evaluate the impact of spin correlations and of PDF and scale uncertainties.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Next-to-Leading Order Cross Sections for Tagged Reactions

We extend the phase space slicing method of Giele, Glover and Kosower for performing next-to-leading order jet cross section calculations in two important ways: we show how to include fragmentation functions and how to include massive particles. These extensions allow the application of this method to not just jet cross sections but also to cross sections in which a particular final state particle, including a $D$ or $B$-meson, is tagged.Comment: 36 pages, Latex Small corrections to text. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Factorization and soft-gluon divergences in isolated-photon cross sections

We study the production of isolated photons in $e^+e^-$ annihilation and give the proof of the all-order factorization of the collinear singularities. These singularities are absorbed in the standard fragmentation functions of partons into a photon, while the effects of the isolation are consistently included in the short-distance cross section. We compute this cross section at order \as and show that it contains large double logarithms of the isolation parameters. We explain the physical origin of these logarithms and discuss the possibility to resum them to all orders in \as.Comment: 18 pages, LaTex, 2 eps figures, few modifications in the text, results unchange

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to one hadron-production in polarized pp collisions at RHIC

We calculate the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the spin-dependent cross section for single-inclusive hadron production in hadronic collisions. This process will be soon studied experimentally at RHIC, providing a tool to unveil the polarized gluon distribution $\Delta g$. We observe a considerably improvement in the perturbative stability for both unpolarized and polarized cross sections. The NLO corrections are found to be non-trivial, resulting in a reduction of the asymmetry.Comment: 8 pages, RevTeX4, 9 figures include

Hard Interactions of Quarks and Gluons: a Primer for LHC Physics

In this review article, we develop the perturbative framework for the calculation of hard scattering processes. We undertake to provide both a reasonably rigorous development of the formalism of hard scattering of quarks and gluons as well as an intuitive understanding of the physics behind the scattering. We emphasize the importance of logarithmic corrections as well as power counting of the strong coupling constant in order to understand the behavior of hard scattering processes. We include "rules of thumb" as well as "official recommendations", and where possible seek to dispel some myths. Experiences that have been gained at the Fermilab Tevatron are recounted and, where appropriate, extrapolated to the LHC.Comment: 118 pages, 107 figures; to be published in Reports on Progress in Physic

On the Numerical Evaluation of Loop Integrals With Mellin-Barnes Representations

An improved method is presented for the numerical evaluation of multi-loop integrals in dimensional regularization. The technique is based on Mellin-Barnes representations, which have been used earlier to develop algorithms for the extraction of ultraviolet and infrared divergencies. The coefficients of these singularities and the non-singular part can be integrated numerically. However, the numerical integration often does not converge for diagrams with massive propagators and physical branch cuts. In this work, several steps are proposed which substantially improve the behavior of the numerical integrals. The efficacy of the method is demonstrated by calculating several two-loop examples, some of which have not been known before.Comment: 13 pp. LaTe