Endolimax nana and urticaria

Endolimax nana is a commensal protozoan of the colon. We report a case of chronic urticaria associated with E. nana in a 34-year-old Italian woman. The patient suffered from abdominal pain, diarrhoea and weight loss. The disease appeared after a trip to Vietnam. Laboratory examinations showed mild blood eosinophilia. Three coproparasitological examinations were positive for cysts of E. nana. The patient was successfully treated with two courses of metronidazole (2 g/day for 10 days each). No antihistamines were used. Three coproparasitological examinations, carried out at the end of the therapy, were negative. Follow up (six months) was negative. E. nana can be responsible for very rare cases of abdominal pain, diarrhoea, polyarthritis and urticaria

Feast of sacrifice and orf, Milan, Italy, 2015–2018

Orf (ecthyma contagiosum) is an infection of the skin caused by a DNA virus belonging to the genus Parapoxvirus. We recently observed 7 cases of orf in Muslim men living in the metropolitan area of Milan, Italy, who acquired the infection after the Feast of Sacrific

WNT4 deficiency—a clinical phenotype distinct from the classic Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome: A Case Report

The pathways leading to female sexual determination in mammals are incompletely defined. Loss-of-function mutations in the WNT4 gene appear to cause developmental abnormalities of sexual differentiation in women and mice. We recruited six patients with different degrees of Müllerian abnormalities, with or without renal aberrations and a normal female 46,XX karyotype. A clear androgen excess was found only in one patient. This 19-year-old woman was affected by primary amenorrhoea, absence of Müllerian ducts derivatives, clinical (acne and hirsutism) and biochemical (repeatedly high levels of testosterone) signs of androgen excess. Direct sequencing of her WNT4 gene followed by functional studies in human ovarian cells (OVCAR3) was performed. This patient carried the novel R83C loss-of-function dominant negative mutation in her WNT4, confirming the role of WNT4 in the development and maintenance of the female phenotype in women. Our study can also help refine the phenotype of WNT4 deficiency in humans. In fact, it appears that at least in this limited casuistic small group of patients, the absence of a uterus (and not other Müllerian abnormalities) and the androgen excess are the pathognomonic signs of WNT4 defects, suggesting that this might be a clinical entity distinct from the classic Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrom

49° Festival dei Popoli

Il Festival dei Popoli è la più antica e prestigiosa manfestazione intranazionale di documentaristica sociale ed antropologica in Italia. Al suo interno sono previste proiezioni; seminari; convegni; laboratori: ecc

Leptonic decay constants fK, fD and fDs with Nf = 2+1+1 twisted-mass lattice QCD

We present a lattice QCD calculation of the pseudoscalar decay constants fK, fD and fDs performed using the gauge configurations produced by the European Twisted Mass Collaboration with Nf = 2 + 1 + 1 dynamical quarks, which include in the sea, besides two light mass degenerate quarks, also the strange and charm quarks with masses close to their values in the real world. The simulations are based on a unitary setup for the two light mass-degenerate quarks and on a mixed action approach for the strange and charm quarks. We use data simulated at three different values of the lattice spacing in the range 0.06 - 0.09 fm and at pion masses in the range 210 - 450 MeV. Our main results are: fK+ / fpi+ = 1.184 (16), fK+ = 154.4 (2.0) MeV, which incorporate the leading strong isospin breaking correction due to the up- and down-quark mass difference, and fK = 155.0 (1.9) MeV, fD = 207.4 (3.8) MeV, fDs = 247.2 (4.1) MeV, fDs / fD = 1.192 (22) and (fDs / fD) / (fK / fpi) = 1.003 (14) obtained in the isospin symmetric limit of QCD. Combined with the experimental measurements of the leptonic decay rates of kaon, pion, D- and Ds-mesons our results lead to the following determination of the CKM matrix elements: |Vus| = 0.2269 (29), |Vcd| = 0.2221 (67) and |Vcs| = 1.014 (24). Using the latest value of |Vud| from superallowed nuclear beta decays the unitarity of the first row of the CKM matrix is fulfilled at the permille level.Comment: 20 pp., 4 figures; revised version to appear in PRD; improved calculation of IB effects for fK+; minor changes in the final values. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1403.450

BoolSurf: Boolean Operations on Surfaces

We port Boolean set operations between 2D shapes to surfaces of any genus, with any number of open boundaries. We combine shapes bounded by sets of freely intersecting loops, consisting of geodesic lines and cubic Bézier splines lying on a surface. We compute the arrangement of shapes directly on the surface and assign integer labels to the cells of such arrangement. Differently from the Euclidean case, some arrangements on a manifold may be inconsistent. We detect inconsistent arrangements and help the user to resolve them. Also, we extend to the manifold setting recent work on Boundary-Sampled Halfspaces, thus supporting operations more general than standard Booleans, which are well defined on inconsistent arrangements, too. Our implementation discretizes the input shapes into polylines at an arbitrary resolution, independent of the level of resolution of the underlying mesh. We resolve the arrangement inside each triangle of the mesh independently and combine the results to reconstruct both the boundaries and the interior of each cell in the arrangement. We reconstruct the control points of curves bounding cells, in order to free the result from discretization and provide an output in vector format. We support interactive usage, editing shapes consisting up to 100k line segments on meshes of up to 1M triangles