Antibiotic resistance: how did we get here and what can we do?

Executive summary Does antibiotic resistance exist? Yes. It is a worsening phenomenon seen all over the world, including Australia. What are the implications of antibiotic resistance? Infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria is associated with longer length of stay in hospitals and higher death rates. This amounts to significant financial costs; the European Union, for example, spends €1.5 billion annually on antibiotic-resistant infections. Significant indirect costs can also arise from antibiotic-resistant infections when they adversely affect other areas of medicine, for example, transplant medicine, surgery and chemotherapy. How did we get here? Antibiotic resistance has many causes but the most important ones include: excessive and inappropriate antibiotic use among humans and animals (including ‘over-the-counter’ antibiotic use), global trade, global travel, medical tourism, environmental contamination with antibiotics, and a decline in new antibiotic development. What can we do? Because there are multiple causes, a multi-pronged solution is required. The ‘EVADES BUGS’ strategy seeks to address the core problems: Education, Vaccine development, Animal health, Diagnostics, Environmental controls, Surveillance, Better antibiotics, Universal infection control and hand hygiene, Government and political will, Stewardship of antibiotics in hospitals. Many superbugs arrive here from overseas as a consequence of global trade and global travel. As a result, Australia must play a global role in addressing the issue as well as a local one. Implementing the EVADES BUGS strategy would require activity across portfolios (for example, Health, Trade, Agriculture, Environment, Tourism, Customs). Therefore, it is worth considering the establishment of a single coordinating body, such as an Australian Centre for Disease Control, to take responsibility for the strategy as part of a broader focus on monitoring and responding to communicable diseases

High Throughput Virtual Screening with Data Level Parallelism in Multi-core Processors

Improving the throughput of molecular docking, a computationally intensive phase of the virtual screening process, is a highly sought area of research since it has a significant weight in the drug designing process. With such improvements, the world might find cures for incurable diseases like HIV disease and Cancer sooner. Our approach presented in this paper is to utilize a multi-core environment to introduce Data Level Parallelism (DLP) to the Autodock Vina software, which is a widely used for molecular docking software. Autodock Vina already exploits Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) in multi-core environments and therefore optimized for such environments. However, with the results we have obtained, it can be clearly seen that our approach has enhanced the throughput of the already optimized software by more than six times. This will dramatically reduce the time consumed for the lead identification phase in drug designing along with the shift in the processor technology from multi-core to many-core of the current era. Therefore, we believe that the contribution of this project will effectively make it possible to expand the number of small molecules docked against a drug target and improving the chances to design drugs for incurable diseases.Comment: Information and Automation for Sustainability (ICIAfS), 2012 IEEE 6th International Conference o

Viscous effects in planar magnetic X-point reconnection

The impact of viscous dissipation is considered on magnetic reconnection in closed line-tied magnetic X-points. It is shown that viscous effects can provide fast energy dissipation for disturbances which do not alter the initial X-point topology. If the X-point topology is altered, then the rate of viscous dissipation depends on both the perturbed topology and the relative magnitudes of viscosity and electric resistivity. New solutions are demonstrated, which derive from the combination of resistive and viscous effects. The solutions are characterized by monotonically decaying modes which are qualitatively different from the previously known oscillatory modes in nonviscous resistive X-point reconnection. These results suggest that viscous heating in magnetic X-points may be an important effect in solar flares

Intuition in Nursing Practice : Knowledge, Experience, and Clinical Decision Making

Intuition is a commonly used aspect in nursing practice. As the evidence based practice is the prominent practice today, the intuition based practice is hidden and somewhat devalued. Although it is difficult to define due to its nature, intuition is an essential part of effective clinical decision making. This research is an inductive qualitative content analysis that focuses on novice nurse and expert nurse, and their use of intuition based on knowledge and experience. Benner’s From Novice to Expert theory as well as Carper’s Fundamental Patterns of Knowing in Nursing theory form the theoretical framework of this research. Benner’s theory talks about five stages of nurses’ professional development, whereas Carper’s theory focuses on the different ways of knowing in nursing profession. The aim is to define intuition, knowing, and clinical decision making. In addition, this research describes the impact of knowledge and experience on intuition and clinical decision making related to novice nurse and expert nurse. The research material consists of 20 scholarly articles, for instance from Sage and Research gate. Although intuition has been used by nurses in practice every day, the attention given to this kind of nursing practice is too little. Therefore, this subject area has not been researched enough. The research shows that intuition is a complex term to define. It can be seen as unconscious awareness of reasoning, a sixth sense, or a gut-feeling. It is used during nursing practice in clinical decision making. Intuition is mainly used by expert nurses, but unlike in Benner’s model, also novice nurses can use it, especially if they have some previously gained life experience. Knowledge and experience are the most influencing factors on intuition. Therefore, gaining nursing intuition requires a good knowledge base and clinical experience. Other factors affecting successful clinical decision making are the different aspects of knowing that include, for instance, knowing the self, the profession, and the patient

Methods for the automatic alignment of colour histograms

Colour provides important information in many image processing tasks such as object identification and tracking. Different images of the same object frequently yield different colour values due to undesired variations in lighting and the camera. In practice, controlling the source of these fluctuations is difficult, uneconomical or even impossible in a particular imaging environment. This thesis is concerned with the question of how to best align the corresponding clusters of colour histograms to reduce or remove the effect of these undesired variations. We introduce feature based histogram alignment (FBHA) algorithms that enable flexible alignment transformations to be applied. The FBHA approach has three steps, 1) feature detection in the colour histograms, 2) feature association and 3) feature alignment. We investigate the choices for these three steps on two colour databases : 1) a structured and labeled database of RGB imagery acquired under controlled camera, lighting and object variation and 2) grey-level video streams from an industrial inspection application. The design and acquisition of the RGB image and grey-level video databases are a key contribution of the thesis. The databases are used to quantitatively compare the FBHA approach against existing methodologies and show it to be effective. FBHA is intended to provide a generic method for aligning colour histograms, it only uses information from the histograms and therefore ignores spatial information in the image. Spatial information and other context sensitive cues are deliberately avoided to maintain the generic nature of the algorithm; by ignoring some of this important information we gain useful insights into the performance limits of a colour alignment algorithm that works from the colour histogram alone, this helps understand the limits of a generic approach to colour alignment

A Chemical Investigation of New Zealand Unifloral Honeys

The diethyl ether-extracted organic compounds of 155 samples of unifloral grade New Zealand kamahi and honeydew honeys, and New Zealand and Norwegian erica honeys, together with a series of active and inactive manuka honeys were analysed using combined gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. It was found that Kamahi honey is characterized by the presence of 2,6-dimethylocta-3,7-diene-2,6-diol, meliracemoic acid, and kamahines A-C and these compounds were typically present at average levels of 31, 14, and 73 mg/kg of honey, respectively. 2,6-Dimethylocta-3,7-diene-2,6-diol was isolated and the structure of this compound was defined using one- and two-dimensional NMR analyses. The only recognizably distinct peak present in the honeydew honey profile was indole acetic acid. In this honey, a relatively low to moderate level of indole acetic acid, ranging from 0.9 to 9.1 mg/kg honey was detected. In the New Zealand erica honey samples, ericinic acid, isoericinic acid isomers (average levels 363 and 34 mg/kg respectively), trans,cis and trans,trans-abscisic acid isomers (average levels 302 and 224 mg/kg respectively) and benzoic acid (average level 6950 mg/kg) were identified as floral marker compounds. Ericinic acid was isolated and the structure of this acid was defined using one-and two-dimensional NMR analyses. Low levels of ericinic and isoericinic acids (average levels of 1.1 and 0.32 mg/kg respectively) were detected in the Norwegian erica-rich honeys. The results presented here indicate that ericinic and isoericinic acids are likely to be universally present in erica honeys at levels which may range from as low as 1 mg/kg or less, as found in some Norwegian samples, to more than 100 mg/kg in some New Zealand samples. Two groups, namely a fingerprint pattern which characterized active manuka honeys, and a fingerprint pattern that characterized inactive manuka honeys were identified. Some substances contributing to the GCMS profile were found as marker compounds for the presence of unidentified substances responsible for the UMF activity. A statistically significant correlation was found between a small set of marker compounds (i.e. phenylacetic acid, 2-methoxyacetophenone, 2-methoxybenzoic, phenyllactic, octanedioic, cis-cinnamic, trans-cinnamic, nonanedioic, 4-methoxyphenyllactic and decanedioic acids and methyl syringate) and UMF activity of manuka honey. The best-fit marker compound regression equation (R = 0.92) was obtained for a set of pooled 30 moderate to high activity (UMF gt 14.1) samples. It was shown that the marker compound regression equation is capable of predicting the approximate UMF activity in both active and inactive manuka and kanuka honey samples. The leaf oil profiles of manuka (L. scoparium) plants that yielded active and inactive manuka honeys were characterized using an adaption of the micro-scale extraction and GC/FID or GC/MS, technique developed by Brophy et al. (1989). Six major groups of volatile (steam distillable) compounds (monoterpenes, sesquiterpene hydrocarbons, oxygenated sesquiterpenes [excluding eudesmols], eudesmols, triketones, and nor-triketones) and 3 groups of non-volatile or semi-volatile compounds (flavonoids, grandiflorone and nor-grandiflorone) were recognized in the leaf oil components. The active manuka honeys do not appear to be derived uniquely, or predominantly, from a single leaf oil chemotype

Solvent as a Tool to Tune the Association of Structured Ionic Block Co-Polymers: Neutron Scattering and Computational Study

The work probes the behavior of associating polymers including their assembly in different environments, using neutron scattering techniques coupled with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Polymers interact with their surroundings through van der Waals forces and through stronger association groups such as ionizable groups and p-p stacking, as well as specific chemical binding, where assembly depends on the strength of the interactions of the associating groups as well as the interactions of the polymers with their solvent environment. The current effort centers on understanding the assembly of structured polymers that consists of multiple blocks or components, each with their distinct interactions with solvents. The main body of the work focuses on the assembly of a multi- functional ionic polymers of the form ABCBA in which the center block is a sulfonated polystyrene (C) that enables transport tethered to, B, a polyethylene propylene (PEP) block, terminated by A, a t-butyl polystyrene (t-BPS) block. These polymers find broad uses in transport-controlled applications such as clean energy, separation membranes, and biotechnology. The aggregation of this polymer is driven by segregation of the ionizable block from the rest of the polymer as well as the interactions of each bock with solvents. The first part introduces experimental studies of assembly of this polymer as the solvent polarity is changed, followed by atomistic MD simulations insight into the assembly process. A more general insight into the assembly process is obtained by coarse grained MD The structural SANS studies have shown that the polymer forms core-shell aggregates with the ionic blocks in the core of the micelles in non-polar solvents such as cyclohexane. These micelles become gradually elongated with the addition of propanol to a propanol fraction of about 0.4. This change in shape of the micelles is driven by increasing of core-corona interfacial energy while collapsing the non-polar segments. Further increase in propanol results in reentrance to spherical micelles but with a smaller number of polymer molecules and significantly higher portion of solvent in the core. Solvent tuning of assembly to pentablock copolymer was further probed by fully atomistic MD simulation in cyclohexane, THF and propanol, solvents with different polarity. We find that the structure of the assemblies is driven by the different binding affinities of the solvents with polar and non-polar segments as well as the ionic fraction. Cyclohexane predominantly resides in the non-polar segments that are swollen, while the ionic blocks remain segregated in the micellar core. In contrast to cyclohexane, propanol and THF, which have an affinity towards both the ionic and non-ionic segments, swell the ionic blocks. With increasing sulfonation, the ionic blocks form a more stable spherical ionic core with cyclohexane associating around the core while THF and propanol penetrate into the core. To further understand the interactions of this structured block co polymer interactions with solvents, a thin polymer film in contact with solvent films were prepared, and the solvents were followed as they propagated across the interfaces, using MD simulations. We observed that exposure of water to pentablock copolymer membrane decreases the interfacial width, exposing more ionizable groups whereas the interfacial width for the film in contact propanol and THF increases and is dominated by hydrophobic blocks. Water molecules associate predominantly with the ionic blocks while propanol and THF reside in both the ionic and non-ionic segments.In order to understand the effects of associating groups in a more general way, coarse grained MD simulations of association were carried out. The polymer chains are modeled by a bead-spring model and the associating groups are incorporated in the form of associating beads with a stronger interaction strength between them than between the non-associating beads. The structure and dynamics of linear and star polymer melts was followed as a function of the interaction strength of the associating beads. The results show that addition of even a small number of associating groups has dramatic effects on the mobility and viscoelastic response of polymer melts. The associating group aggregate forming a polymer network. With increasing interaction strength between the associating beads, the mobility of the chains decreases. Blends of chains with and without associating groups macroscopically phase separation even for relatively weak interaction between the associating beads. To the last part of the work was focused on understanding the effects of associating groups in soft nanoparticles. For this purpose, we synthesized polyparaphenylene ethylene (PPE) with biotin groups attached to the side chains with the ultimate goal of understanding the effect of associating groups on structure and dynamics of biocompatible soft nanoparticles. The last chapter describes the synthesis of biotin substituted PPEs, where the effect of biotin groups on assembly of PPE will be carried out in the future

Infrastructure facilities for deep-sea and off-shore fishing

The author presents a brief account of the infrastructure facilities required for the fishing industry. He describes those facilities presently available in Sri Lanka, and those that are under construction, and gives a few suggestions indicating the nature of infrastructure facilities that are vital to the local situation at its present stage of development. The principal facilities discussed are (1) fish landing places; (2) unloading handling facilities; (3) vessel servicing facilities; and (4) navigation aids

Integrated maritime education and its suitability for technically advanced ships

In the first chapter a brief discription of shipping geography, trade, ports and types of ships available today and in future is given. In the chapter under the heading of The Influence of Modern Technology on Maritime Operations\u27\u27 the influence of modern technology\u27 in the fields of Communication, Navigation, Cargo Operations, Propulsion and Maintenance is given in order to highlight the degree of automation that is introduced which does not require highly trained personnel due to improved reliabality of equipment. In the chapter under the heading of The Impact of Modernized maritime Operations on E & T of Shipboard Personnel. I have highlighted the motive for integrating and the integration concept for officers and ratings.In this chapter I have argued out the wisdom to educate officers broadly on both the disciplines rather than narrowly training personnel on each discipline. Next chapter gives a brief outline of integrated Maritime Education as practiced in many leading maritime countries. In the last chapter as a conclusion an outline of a Integrated Maritime Education System is given with comments on some aspects of Maritime Education