Estrategia de capacitación para el trabajo sobre vih/sida en adolescentes

Durante los meses de enero a marzo del año 2007, se realizó un estudio de intervención tipo cuasiexperimental con estudiantes de la ESBU “Fernando Mederos” del Municipio Guines, Provincia La Habana con el objetivo de capacitar en VIH/SIDA a un grupo de adolescentes de 9no grado de dicha institución educacional. La estrategia de capacitación instrumentada cuenta con 2 etapas bien definidas: Una primera etapa de diagnóstico de conocimientos y una segunda etapa de capacitación propiamente dicha. La muestra lo constituyó durante la fase inicial 47 estudiantes que cumplieron con criterios de inclusión previamente establecidos. Durante la fase de intervención se trabajó con 24 estudiantes que se seleccionaron mediante el método aleatorio. Se demostró que los adolescentes estudiados presentaron adecuados conocimientos sobre las vías de transmisión de la infección durante la fase inicial de la investigación, siendo menos significativos sus conocimientos sobre los factores de riesgos, así como de los líquidos o fluidos corporales en que se encuentra presente el virus en cantidades suficientes para transmitir la infección. Los adolescentes estudiados no tienen una adecuada percepción individual sobre los comportamientos de riesgos para contraer la infección. Se evidenció una mejoría ostensible de los conocimientos posterior a la estrategia de capacitación aplicada

Determination of bacteria morphotypes associated with the rhizosphere of organic coffee plantations

Objective: To determine bacterial diversity associated with the coffee rhizosphere on coffee plantations on Oaxaca, Mexico. Design/methodology/approach: Soil samples collected from organic arabic coffee plantations in the Loxicha region of Oaxaca were analyzed to isolate and characterize populations of bacteria associated with the rhizosphere of the plantations. Six sites were sampled in three altitudinal ranges; low (≥1200, ≤1400 masl), medium (≥1700, ≤1800 masl) and high (≥1900 masl); two sites per rank. The population distribution of the bacteria by altitudinal range was compared using the Tukey test. A multivariate analysis (Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis) was performed considering four morphological characters of the colonies: Shape, Surface, Border and Color, and two microscopic characters: Type and Gram. Results: 43 bacterial colonies were isolated and purified, whose population distribution showed a significant difference (Tukey α = 0.5) with respect to the altitudinal range of collection. The Principal Component Analysis showed that the first three principal components expressed 74.19% of the total variation of the 43 bacterial colonies, indicating a wide distribution of the bacterial colonies from the evaluated characters. The Hierarchical Cluster Analysis determined eight groups divided into subgroups based on the semipartial correlation coefficient of 0.05. Limitations on study/implications: The environmental conditions where bacteria grow allow the interspecific variation of each species to change. Findings/conclusions: The morphological and microscopic characterization of the bacterial colonies shows the existence of a high variability that is expressed in characters that indicate high diversity of bacterial species in organically managed coffee soils in Oaxaca.Objective: To determine the bacterial diversity in the rhizosphere of coffee (Coffea arabica L.) in coffee plantations in Oaxaca, Mexico. Design/methodology/approach: Soil samples collected from organic arabian coffee plantations in the Loxicha region of Oaxaca were analyzed to isolate and characterize bacterial populations associated with the rhizosphere of those plantations. Samples were collected from six sites in three altitude ranges (two sampling sites per each range): low (≥1,200, ≤1,400 masl), medium (≥1,700, ≤1,800 masl), and high (≥1,900 masl). Tukey’s test was used to compare the bacteria population distribution per altitude range. A multivariate analysis (Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis) was performed considering four morphological —shape, surface, border, and color— and two microscopic —type and Gram— characteristics of the colonies.   Results: Forty-three bacterial colonies were isolated and purified; their population distribution showed a significant difference (Tukey α = 0.5) with respect to the altitude range in which they were collected. The Principal Components Analysis showed that the first three principal components accounted for 74.19% of the total variation of the 43 bacterial colonies, indicating that the evaluated characteristics were widely distributed. The Hierarchical Cluster Analysis determined eight groups and divided them into subgroups, based on the semi partial correlation coefficient (0.05). Study limitations/implications: The environmental conditions where bacteria grow allow changes in the interspecific variation of each species. Findings/conclusions: The morphological and microscopic characterization of the bacterial colonies shows a high variability that is expressed in characteristics, indicating a high diversity of bacterial species in organically-managed coffee soils in Oaxac

Treatment with tocilizumab or corticosteroids for COVID-19 patients with hyperinflammatory state: a multicentre cohort study (SAM-COVID-19)

Objectives: The objective of this study was to estimate the association between tocilizumab or corticosteroids and the risk of intubation or death in patients with coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) with a hyperinflammatory state according to clinical and laboratory parameters. Methods: A cohort study was performed in 60 Spanish hospitals including 778 patients with COVID-19 and clinical and laboratory data indicative of a hyperinflammatory state. Treatment was mainly with tocilizumab, an intermediate-high dose of corticosteroids (IHDC), a pulse dose of corticosteroids (PDC), combination therapy, or no treatment. Primary outcome was intubation or death; follow-up was 21 days. Propensity score-adjusted estimations using Cox regression (logistic regression if needed) were calculated. Propensity scores were used as confounders, matching variables and for the inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTWs). Results: In all, 88, 117, 78 and 151 patients treated with tocilizumab, IHDC, PDC, and combination therapy, respectively, were compared with 344 untreated patients. The primary endpoint occurred in 10 (11.4%), 27 (23.1%), 12 (15.4%), 40 (25.6%) and 69 (21.1%), respectively. The IPTW-based hazard ratios (odds ratio for combination therapy) for the primary endpoint were 0.32 (95%CI 0.22-0.47; p < 0.001) for tocilizumab, 0.82 (0.71-1.30; p 0.82) for IHDC, 0.61 (0.43-0.86; p 0.006) for PDC, and 1.17 (0.86-1.58; p 0.30) for combination therapy. Other applications of the propensity score provided similar results, but were not significant for PDC. Tocilizumab was also associated with lower hazard of death alone in IPTW analysis (0.07; 0.02-0.17; p < 0.001). Conclusions: Tocilizumab might be useful in COVID-19 patients with a hyperinflammatory state and should be prioritized for randomized trials in this situatio

Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries and territories: a pooled analysis of 2181 population-based studies with 65 million participants

Summary Background Comparable global data on health and nutrition of school-aged children and adolescents are scarce. We aimed to estimate age trajectories and time trends in mean height and mean body-mass index (BMI), which measures weight gain beyond what is expected from height gain, for school-aged children and adolescents. Methods For this pooled analysis, we used a database of cardiometabolic risk factors collated by the Non-Communicable Disease Risk Factor Collaboration. We applied a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate trends from 1985 to 2019 in mean height and mean BMI in 1-year age groups for ages 5–19 years. The model allowed for non-linear changes over time in mean height and mean BMI and for non-linear changes with age of children and adolescents, including periods of rapid growth during adolescence. Findings We pooled data from 2181 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in 65 million participants in 200 countries and territories. In 2019, we estimated a difference of 20 cm or higher in mean height of 19-year-old adolescents between countries with the tallest populations (the Netherlands, Montenegro, Estonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina for boys; and the Netherlands, Montenegro, Denmark, and Iceland for girls) and those with the shortest populations (Timor-Leste, Laos, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea for boys; and Guatemala, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Timor-Leste for girls). In the same year, the difference between the highest mean BMI (in Pacific island countries, Kuwait, Bahrain, The Bahamas, Chile, the USA, and New Zealand for both boys and girls and in South Africa for girls) and lowest mean BMI (in India, Bangladesh, Timor-Leste, Ethiopia, and Chad for boys and girls; and in Japan and Romania for girls) was approximately 9–10 kg/m2. In some countries, children aged 5 years started with healthier height or BMI than the global median and, in some cases, as healthy as the best performing countries, but they became progressively less healthy compared with their comparators as they grew older by not growing as tall (eg, boys in Austria and Barbados, and girls in Belgium and Puerto Rico) or gaining too much weight for their height (eg, girls and boys in Kuwait, Bahrain, Fiji, Jamaica, and Mexico; and girls in South Africa and New Zealand). In other countries, growing children overtook the height of their comparators (eg, Latvia, Czech Republic, Morocco, and Iran) or curbed their weight gain (eg, Italy, France, and Croatia) in late childhood and adolescence. When changes in both height and BMI were considered, girls in South Korea, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and some central Asian countries (eg, Armenia and Azerbaijan), and boys in central and western Europe (eg, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, and Montenegro) had the healthiest changes in anthropometric status over the past 3·5 decades because, compared with children and adolescents in other countries, they had a much larger gain in height than they did in BMI. The unhealthiest changes—gaining too little height, too much weight for their height compared with children in other countries, or both—occurred in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, and the USA for boys and girls; in Malaysia and some Pacific island nations for boys; and in Mexico for girls. Interpretation The height and BMI trajectories over age and time of school-aged children and adolescents are highly variable across countries, which indicates heterogeneous nutritional quality and lifelong health advantages and risks

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Heterogeneous contributions of change in population distribution of body mass index to change in obesity and underweight NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC)

From 1985 to 2016, the prevalence of underweight decreased, and that of obesity and severe obesity increased, in most regions, with significant variation in the magnitude of these changes across regions. We investigated how much change in mean body mass index (BMI) explains changes in the prevalence of underweight, obesity, and severe obesity in different regions using data from 2896 population-based studies with 187 million participants. Changes in the prevalence of underweight and total obesity, and to a lesser extent severe obesity, are largely driven by shifts in the distribution of BMI, with smaller contributions from changes in the shape of the distribution. In East and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the underweight tail of the BMI distribution was left behind as the distribution shifted. There is a need for policies that address all forms of malnutrition by making healthy foods accessible and affordable, while restricting unhealthy foods through fiscal and regulatory restrictions

Estrategia de capacitación para el trabajo sobre vih/sida en adolescentes

Durante los meses de enero a marzo del año 2007, se realizó un estudio de intervención tipo cuasiexperimental con estudiantes de la ESBU “Fernando Mederos” del Municipio Guines, Provincia La Habana con el objetivo de capacitar en VIH/SIDA a un grupo de adolescentes de 9no grado de dicha institución educacional. La estrategia de capacitación instrumentada cuenta con 2 etapas bien definidas: Una primera etapa de diagnóstico de conocimientos y una segunda etapa de capacitación propiamente dicha. La muestra lo constituyó durante la fase inicial 47 estudiantes que cumplieron con criterios de inclusión previamente establecidos. Durante la fase de intervención se trabajó con 24 estudiantes que se seleccionaron mediante el método aleatorio. Se demostró que los adolescentes estudiados presentaron adecuados conocimientos sobre las vías de transmisión de la infección durante la fase inicial de la investigación, siendo menos significativos sus conocimientos sobre los factores de riesgos, así como de los líquidos o fluidos corporales en que se encuentra presente el virus en cantidades suficientes para transmitir la infección. Los adolescentes estudiados no tienen una adecuada percepción individual sobre los comportamientos de riesgos para contraer la infección. Se evidenció una mejoría ostensible de los conocimientos posterior a la estrategia de capacitación aplicada

A Systematic Review on the Role of Wildlife as Carriers and Spreaders of <i>Campylobacter</i> spp.

Campylobacter spp. are important zoonotic pathogens and can cause one of the main bacterial diarrheal diseases worldwide. Research in the context of infection arising from transmission from other humans and other vertebrates has been extensive. A large fraction of these investigations has focused on domestic animals; however, there are also a number of publications which either totally, or at least in part, consider the role of wild or feral animals as carriers or spreaders of Campylobacter spp. Here, we carry out a systematic review to explore the role played by wild vertebrates as sources of Campylobacter spp. with a compilation of prevalence data for more than 150 species including reptiles, mammals and birds. We found that numerous vertebrate species can act as carriers of Campylobacter species, but we also found that some host specificity may exist, reducing the risk of spread from wildlife to domestic animals or humans

Similar local neuronal dynamics may lead to different collective behavior

This report is concerned with the relevance of the microscopic rules that implement individual neuronal activation, in determining the collective dynamics, under variations of the network topology. To fix ideas we study the dynamics of two cellular automaton models, commonly used, rather in-distinctively, as the building blocks of large-scale neuronal networks. One model, due to Greenberg and Hastings (GH), can be described by evolution equations mimicking an integrate-and-fire process, while the other model, due to Kinouchi and Copelli (KC), represents an abstract branching process, where a single active neuron activates a given number of postsynaptic neurons according to a prescribed "activity"branching ratio. Despite the apparent similarity between the local neuronal dynamics of the two models, it is shown that they exhibit very different collective dynamics as a function of the network topology. The GH model shows qualitatively different dynamical regimes as the network topology is varied, including transients to a ground (inactive) state, continuous and discontinuous dynamical phase transitions. In contrast, the KC model only exhibits a continuous phase transition, independently of the network topology. These results highlight the importance of paying attention to the microscopic rules chosen to model the interneuronal interactions in large-scale numerical simulations, in particular when the network topology is far from a mean-field description. One such case is the extensive work being done in the context of the Human Connectome, where a wide variety of types of models are being used to understand the brain collective dynamics.Fil: Sánchez Diaz, Margarita Maria. Universidad Nacional de San Martin. Escuela de Ciencia y Tecnologia. Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios En Sistemas Complejos y Ciencias del Cerebro.; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas. - Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas; ArgentinaFil: Aguilar Trejo, Eyisto José. Universidad Nacional de San Martin. Escuela de Ciencia y Tecnologia. Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios En Sistemas Complejos y Ciencias del Cerebro.; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas. - Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas; ArgentinaFil: Mártin, Daniel Alejandro. Universidad Nacional de San Martin. Escuela de Ciencia y Tecnologia. Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios En Sistemas Complejos y Ciencias del Cerebro.; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas. - Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas; ArgentinaFil: Cannas, Sergio Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Física Enrique Gaviola. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto de Física Enrique Gaviola; ArgentinaFil: Grigera, Tomas Sebastian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Departamento de Física; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas Biológicos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas Biológicos; ArgentinaFil: Chialvo, Dante Renato. Universidad Nacional de San Martin. Escuela de Ciencia y Tecnologia. Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios En Sistemas Complejos y Ciencias del Cerebro.; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas. - Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Ciencias Físicas; Argentin