Physico-chemical properties and antibacterial drug performance of amoxicillin from streets in Bamenda, Cameroon

Background: The advent of microbial drug resistance creates a concern about the quality of anti-infective drugs. The rise in some microbial resistance to therapy has urged us to investigate physico-chemical properties and antibacterial performance of amoxicillin from streets in Bamenda, Cameroon.Methods: Amoxicillin samples were purchased from street vendors in Bamenda. Cameroon. Visual inspection was done for defects and signs of discoloration, deterioration or other physical disfiguration. Weight uniformity test for each sample of antibiotic tablet was carried out. The time for drug disintegration for each sample of amoxicillin was evaluated. Microbial antibiotic susceptibility tests were done using both the agar disc diffusion and micro well broth dilution methods to check drug performance. Data analysis was done and comparison checked with Student-Newman-Keuls at p<0.05.Results: The mean weight of amoxicillin drugs ranged from 632.00±11.5 to 748.06±17.9 mg. Tablets from Austria had a significant decrease in weight compared to those from Germany and Nigeria. This was similar with the capsules from India and China. Average disintegration varied significantly from as small as 2.2 to 14.4 minutes. All the amoxicillin samples were active against the tested bacteria with mean zones of inhibitions ranging from 8.33±0.57 to 39.33±0.57 mm. The MICs and MBCs values range from 1 to 64 µg/ml. For the same bacterium the growth inhibitory effects of the various drugs were not all similar.Conclusions: Some of the amoxicillin samples studied in this paper showed significant differences in their weights and performances (antibacterial activities). Probably the required amount of API was not respected

Kielenoppimisen matemattiikka

Proceeding volume: 51Over the past decade, attention has gradually shifted from the estimation of parameters to the learning of linguistic structure (for a survey see Smith 2011). The Mathematics of Language (MOL) SIG put together this tutorial, composed of three lectures, to highlight some alternative learning paradigms in speech, syntax, and semantics in the hopes of accelerating this trend.Non peer reviewe

BHPR research: qualitative1. Complex reasoning determines patients' perception of outcome following foot surgery in rheumatoid arhtritis

Background: Foot surgery is common in patients with RA but research into surgical outcomes is limited and conceptually flawed as current outcome measures lack face validity: to date no one has asked patients what is important to them. This study aimed to determine which factors are important to patients when evaluating the success of foot surgery in RA Methods: Semi structured interviews of RA patients who had undergone foot surgery were conducted and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis of interviews was conducted to explore issues that were important to patients. Results: 11 RA patients (9 ♂, mean age 59, dis dur = 22yrs, mean of 3 yrs post op) with mixed experiences of foot surgery were interviewed. Patients interpreted outcome in respect to a multitude of factors, frequently positive change in one aspect contrasted with negative opinions about another. Overall, four major themes emerged. Function: Functional ability & participation in valued activities were very important to patients. Walking ability was a key concern but patients interpreted levels of activity in light of other aspects of their disease, reflecting on change in functional ability more than overall level. Positive feelings of improved mobility were often moderated by negative self perception ("I mean, I still walk like a waddling duck”). Appearance: Appearance was important to almost all patients but perhaps the most complex theme of all. Physical appearance, foot shape, and footwear were closely interlinked, yet patients saw these as distinct separate concepts. Patients need to legitimize these feelings was clear and they frequently entered into a defensive repertoire ("it's not cosmetic surgery; it's something that's more important than that, you know?”). Clinician opinion: Surgeons' post operative evaluation of the procedure was very influential. The impact of this appraisal continued to affect patients' lasting impression irrespective of how the outcome compared to their initial goals ("when he'd done it ... he said that hasn't worked as good as he'd wanted to ... but the pain has gone”). Pain: Whilst pain was important to almost all patients, it appeared to be less important than the other themes. Pain was predominately raised when it influenced other themes, such as function; many still felt the need to legitimize their foot pain in order for health professionals to take it seriously ("in the end I went to my GP because it had happened a few times and I went to an orthopaedic surgeon who was quite dismissive of it, it was like what are you complaining about”). Conclusions: Patients interpret the outcome of foot surgery using a multitude of interrelated factors, particularly functional ability, appearance and surgeons' appraisal of the procedure. While pain was often noted, this appeared less important than other factors in the overall outcome of the surgery. Future research into foot surgery should incorporate the complexity of how patients determine their outcome Disclosure statement: All authors have declared no conflicts of interes

All-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in the first Advanced LIGO run

We present the results from an all-sky search for short-duration gravitational waves in the data of the first run of the Advanced LIGO detectors between September 2015 and January 2016. The search algorithms use minimal assumptions on the signal morphology, so they are sensitive to a wide range of sources emitting gravitational waves. The analyses target transient signals with duration ranging from milliseconds to seconds over the frequency band of 32 to 4096 Hz. The first observed gravitational-wave event, GW150914, has been detected with high confidence in this search; the other known gravitational-wave event, GW151226, falls below the search’s sensitivity. Besides GW150914, all of the search results are consistent with the expected rate of accidental noise coincidences. Finally, we estimate rate-density limits for a broad range of non-binary-black-hole transient gravitational-wave sources as a function of their gravitational radiation emission energy and their characteristic frequency. These rate-density upper limits are stricter than those previously published by an order of magnitude

Generalized Encoding of Description Spaces and its Application to Typed Feature Structures

This paper presents a new formalization of a unification- or join-preserving encoding of partially ordered sets that more essentially captures what it means for an encoding to preserve joins, generalizing the standard definition in AI research. It then shows that every statically typable ontology in the logic of typed feature structures can be encoded in a data structure of fixed size without the need for resizing or additional union-find operations. This is important for any grammar implementation or development system based on typed feature structures, as it significantly reduces the overhead of memory management and reference-pointer-chasing during unification