Circumcision for prevention against HIV: marked seasonal variation in demand and potential public sector readiness in Soweto, South Africa

The public sector delivery of male circumcision in the only public sector hospital in Soweto, South Africa was examined to gauge local capacity to deliver this procedure as an intervention for prevention of HIV acquisition. During the period from July 1998 to March 2006, approximately 360 procedures were performed per annum. Striking seasonal variations and the relatively few procedures performed may create challenges for program planning, if male circumcision is increased to a level required to have an impact on the incidence of HIV among this population

Distinctive Gut Microbiota of Honey Bees Assessed Using Deep Sampling from Individual Worker Bees

Surveys of 16S rDNA sequences from the honey bee, Apis mellifera, have revealed the presence of eight distinctive bacterial phylotypes in intestinal tracts of adult worker bees. Because previous studies have been limited to relatively few sequences from samples pooled from multiple hosts, the extent of variation in this microbiota among individuals within and between colonies and locations has been unclear. We surveyed the gut microbiota of 40 individual workers from two sites, Arizona and Maryland USA, sampling four colonies per site. Universal primers were used to amplify regions of 16S ribosomal RNA genes, and amplicons were sequenced using 454 pyrotag methods, enabling analysis of about 330,000 bacterial reads. Over 99% of these sequences belonged to clusters for which the first blastn hits in GenBank were members of the known bee phylotypes. Four phylotypes, one within Gammaproteobacteria (corresponding to “Candidatus Gilliamella apicola”) one within Betaproteobacteria (“Candidatus Snodgrassella alvi”), and two within Lactobacillus, were present in every bee, though their frequencies varied. The same typical bacterial phylotypes were present in all colonies and at both sites. Community profiles differed significantly among colonies and between sites, mostly due to the presence in some Arizona colonies of two species of Enterobacteriaceae not retrieved previously from bees. Analysis of Sanger sequences of rRNA of the Snodgrassella and Gilliamella phylotypes revealed that single bees contain numerous distinct strains of each phylotype. Strains showed some differentiation between localities, especially for the Snodgrassella phylotype

How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data

The frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct is a matter of controversy. Many surveys have asked scientists directly whether they have committed or know of a colleague who committed research misconduct, but their results appeared difficult to compare and synthesize. This is the first meta-analysis of these surveys

Characterization in vitro and in vivo of a pandemic H1N1 influenza virus from a fatal case

Pandemic 2009 H1N1 (pH1N1) influenza viruses caused mild symptoms in most infected patients. However, a greater rate of severe disease was observed in healthy young adults and children without co-morbid conditions. Here we tested whether influenza strains displaying differential virulence could be present among circulating pH1N1 viruses. The biological properties and the genotype of viruses isolated from a patient showing mild disease (M) or from a fatal case (F), both without known co-morbid conditions were compared in vitro and in vivo. The F virus presented faster growth kinetics and stronger induction of cytokines than M virus in human alveolar lung epithelial cells. In the murine model in vivo, the F virus showed a stronger morbidity and mortality than M virus. Remarkably, a higher proportion of mice presenting infectious virus in the hearts, was found in F virus-infected animals. Altogether, the data indicate that strains of pH1N1 virus with enhanced pathogenicity circulated during the 2009 pandemic. In addition, examination of chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) genotype, recently reported as involved in severe influenza virus disease, revealed that the F virus-infected patient was homozygous for the deleted form of CCR5 receptor (CCR5Δ32).Funding Statement: This work was supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Programa especial de investigación sobre la gripe pándemica GR09/0023, GR09/0040, GR09/0039) and Ciber de Enfermedades Respiratorias. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.S

Evolving uses of oral reverse transcriptase inhibitors in the HIV-1 epidemic: From treatment to prevention

The HIV epidemic continues unabated, with no highly effective vaccine and no cure. Each new infection has significant economic, social and human costs and prevention efforts are now as great a priority as global antiretroviral therapy (ART) scale up. Reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the first licensed class of ART, have been at the forefront of treatment and prevention of mother to child transmission over the past two decades. Now, their use in adult prevention is being

Vertically aligned ZnO nanorod core-polypyrrole conducting polymer sheath and nanotube arrays for electrochemical supercapacitor energy storage

Nanocomposite electrodes having three-dimensional (3-D) nanoscale architecture comprising of vertically aligned ZnO nanorod array core-polypyrrole (PPy) conducting polymer sheath and the vertical PPy nanotube arrays have been investigated for supercapacitor energy storage. The electrodes in the ZnO nanorod core-PPy sheath structure are formed by preferential nucleation and deposition of PPy layer over hydrothermally synthesized vertical ZnO nanorod array by controlled pulsed current electropolymerization of pyrrole monomer under surfactant action. The vertical PPy nanotube arrays of different tube diameter are created by selective etching of the ZnO nanorod core in ammonia solution for different periods. Cyclic voltammetry studies show high areal-specific capacitance approximately 240 mF.cm(-2) for open pore and approximately 180 mF.cm(-2) for narrow 30-to-36-nm diameter PPy nanotube arrays attributed to intensive faradic processes arising from enhanced access of electrolyte ions through nanotube interior and exterior. Impedance spectroscopy studies show that capacitive response extends over larger frequency domain in electrodes with PPy nanotube structure. Simulation of Nyquist plots by electrical equivalent circuit modeling establishes that 3-D nanostructure is better represented by constant phase element which accounts for the inhomogeneous electrochemical redox processes. Charge-discharge studies at different current densities establish that kinetics of the redox process in PPy nanotube electrode is due to the limitation on electron transport rather than the diffusive process of electrolyte ions. The PPy nanotube electrodes show deep discharge capability with high coulomb efficiency and long-term charge-discharge cyclic studies show nondegrading performance of the specific areal capacitance tested for 5,000 cycles

Large-scale optimization with the primal-dual column generation method

The primal-dual column generation method (PDCGM) is a general-purpose column generation technique that relies on the primal-dual interior point method to solve the restricted master problems. The use of this interior point method variant allows to obtain suboptimal and well-centered dual solutions which naturally stabilizes the column generation. As recently presented in the literature, reductions in the number of calls to the oracle and in the CPU times are typically observed when compared to the standard column generation, which relies on extreme optimal dual solutions. However, these results are based on relatively small problems obtained from linear relaxations of combinatorial applications. In this paper, we investigate the behaviour of the PDCGM in a broader context, namely when solving large-scale convex optimization problems. We have selected applications that arise in important real-life contexts such as data analysis (multiple kernel learning problem), decision-making under uncertainty (two-stage stochastic programming problems) and telecommunication and transportation networks (multicommodity network flow problem). In the numerical experiments, we use publicly available benchmark instances to compare the performance of the PDCGM against recent results for different methods presented in the literature, which were the best available results to date. The analysis of these results suggests that the PDCGM offers an attractive alternative over specialized methods since it remains competitive in terms of number of iterations and CPU times even for large-scale optimization problems.Comment: 28 pages, 1 figure, minor revision, scaled CPU time