Super Staph in the Community: Is It Evolving?

Staphylococcus aureus infections are a common cause of disease, particularly in colonized people. They frequently cause staph infections and are often dubbed “Super Staph” because they are virulent and multidrug resistant. Recently, a series of published articles have reported that community-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (CA-MRSA) strains are evolving and becoming more prevalent in households. In contrast, health care acquired MRSA (HA-MRSA) is declining in the United States. The changing “Superbugs” have often been used as an example of “evolution in action.” Although MRSA infections have become more prevalent in the community, studies of college students carrying S. aureus and MRSA colonization are lacking. In early studies at Liberty University, we have found that students in microbiology classes who have more contact with individuals in a healthcare setting are more likely to carry MRSA in their body. The classes that had the highest rate of HA-MRSA carriage were those primarily populated by nursing students. Nursing students typically have greater exposure to clinical settings and nursing homes than students in other fields of study. However, in research collected this past year, 2014–2015, we observed a shift to students of many majors now carrying CA-MRSA. At Liberty University, we sampled 544 students and had up to 20%+ MRSA rates common among clinically oriented students, five to ten times the national average. We have seen a changing profile from HA-MRSA to CA-MRSA; this change has the potential to be dangerous, since the new strains are more virulent and aggressive. CA-MRSA is somewhat difficult to define, but is mostly associated with antibiotic profile, toxin genes, and place of acquisition. There is a variation of S. aureusstrains, but most change is found in tightly knit groups: households, dorms, and other close living quarters. The bacteria are “ping-ponging” around among students, changing as they go. This change is real and clearly indicates an emergence of new MRSA variants that some may call microevolution. It is, however, not Darwinian upward-onward evolution but clearly adaptive changes within a species: variants on a theme. MRSA strains are acquiring more genes as they “ping-pong” from one person to another. They change their virulence as they pick up more foreign genes (via phage or plasmids) and vary as they go. The purpose of this article is to provide a reasonable explanation for the genesis, emergence, and the new dominance of Community-associated (CA) MRSA. It also addresses the issue of whether this phenomenon is “evolution in action.” Microbiology research based on the creation paradigm appears to provide some answers to these puzzling questions regarding the new variants of Staphylococcus aureus and its emerging dominance in the United States

Working at home: statistical evidence for seven key hypotheses

It is frequently suggested that working at home will be the future of work for many people in the UK and that trends in this direction are already well underway. This paper examines these claims by analysing data from the Labour Force Survey which has, at various times, asked questions about the location of work. Seven key hypotheses are identified, including issues surrounding the extent and growth of working at home, reliance on information and communication technology,prevalence of low pay, average pay rates, gender issues, ethnic minority participation and household composition. The results paint a variegated and complex picture which suggests that those who work at home do not comprise a homogeneous group.The paper in particular highlights differences between non-manual and manual workers, and those who work mainly, partially and sometimes at home

A Double-Blind Trial of Adjunctive Valacyclovir to Improve Cognition in Early Phase Schizophrenia

poster abstractSchizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating neuropsychiatric disease that occurs in approximately one percent of the population and is characterized by cognitive deficits, including difficulties with abstract thinking, discerning reality from fiction, and communication. Cognitive deficits are a prominent feature of the illness and contribute to significant occupational and social disabilities. Additionally, there are no clinically effective treatments for cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. Although the etiology of these symptoms is unknown, recent studies have shown an association between Herpes Simplex Virus 1 (HSV-1) exposure and the severity of cognitive deficits in the schizophrenic population. Valacyclovir is an oral antiviral medication approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for treatment of herpes virus infections, including HSV-1. Results from a pilot study at the University of Pittsburgh show that treatment with adjunctive valacyclovir improved working and visual memory in comparison to placebo in a population of older adults with chronic phase schizophrenia. The primary goal of the main study is to determine the efficacy of adjunctive valacyclovir to improve cognition by studying visual and working memory in HSV-1 positive early phase schizophrenia patients in a multi-site clinical trial coordinated by the Indiana University Psychotic Disorders Program. The aim of this research is to present a comprehensive review of recent findings regarding the importance of HSV-1 exposure and inflammatory markers in schizophrenia, and to discuss the methods and expected outcomes of our ongoing study

Screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm - a pilot study in six medical schemes

No Abstract

Analysis of paediatric prescribing profiles in two health-funding systems

No Abstract

On the Optimal Node Ratio between Hidden Layers: A Probabilistic Study

Two-hidden layer feedforward neural networks (TLFNs) have been shown to outperform single-hidden-layer neural networks (SLFNs) for function approximation in many cases. However, their added complexity makes them more difficult to find. Given a constant number of hidden nodes nh, this paper investigates how their allocation between the first and second hidden layers (n h = n1 + n2 ) affects the likelihood of finding the best generaliser. The experiments were carried out over a total of ten public domain datasets with nh = 8 and 16. The findings were that the heuristic n1 = 0.5nh + 1 has an average probability of at least 0.85 of finding a network with a generalisation error within 0.18% of the best generaliser. Furthermore, the worst case over all data sets was within 0.23% for nh = 8, and within 0.15% for nh = 16. These findings could be used to reduce the complexity of the search for TLFNs from quadratic to linear, or alternatively for ‘topology mapping’ between TLFNs and SLFNs, given the same number of hidden nodes, to compare their performance