IgE-Mediated Hypersensitivity in Two Pediatric Patients After Intraoperative Bacitracin Irrigation

Background: Bacitracin is a common topical antibiotic that is also used for tissue irrigation in the operative setting. While bacitracin is generally well tolerated, Twelve reports of anaphylaxis to intraoperative applications have been published, all in adults.Case presentation: Here, we present the first reported cases of intraoperative Immunoglobulin E-mediated hypersensitivity to bacitracin irrigation in the pediatric population. Both cases were corroborated by allergy testing. Case 1 is a 10 year old male who had surgery to remove an infected tissue expander placed in setting of trauma from motor vehicle accident. Case 2 is a 6 year old female with history of spina bifida who underwent vesicostomy recreation.Conclusions: Bacitracin should be considered a potential occult allergen in the perioperative setting in both adult and pediatric populations.

Recent Developments on gMicroMC: Transport Simulations of Proton and Heavy Ions and Concurrent Transport of Radicals and DNA

Mechanistic Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of radiation interaction with water and DNA is important for the understanding of biological responses induced by ionizing radiation. In our previous work, we employed the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-based parallel computing technique to develop a novel, highly efficient, and open-source MC simulation tool, gMicroMC, for simulating electron-induced DNA damages. In this work, we reported two new developments in gMicroMC: the transport simulation of protons and heavy ions and the concurrent transport of radicals in the presence of DNA. We modeled these transports based on electromagnetic interactions between charged particles and water molecules and the chemical reactions between radicals and DNA molecules. Various physical properties, such as Linear Energy Transfer (LET) and particle range, from our simulation agreed with data published by NIST or simulation results from other CPU-based MC packages. The simulation results of DNA damage under the concurrent transport of radicals and DNA agreed with those from nBio-Topas simulation in a comprehensive testing case. GPU parallel computing enabled high computational efficiency. It took 41 s to simultaneously transport 100 protons with an initial kinetic energy of 10 MeV in water and 470 s to transport 105 radicals up to 1 µs in the presence of DNA.

A Unique Allele Variant at STR Locus D2S1338 in a Paternity Testing Case

Background: The relationship testing through DNA profiling may undesirably be affected by the rare allele variants, tri-allelic pattern and null alleles. Therefore, it is vital to report such anomalies. We report a paternity testing in a sexual assault case studied at Punjab Forensic Science Agency, Lahore Pakistan showing a unique allele variant in mother and child. Methods: DNA was extracted from the buccal swabs of reference samples using organic extraction method and DNA profiling was done for 15 autosomal STRs and amelogenin using Identifiler Plus kit. Results: A novel out of marker range (OMR) allele variant between STR Loci D16S539 and D2S1338 was observed in the DNA profiles of victim (mother) as well as the child. At STR locus D2S1338 Twenty one different allele variant are listed at STRBase ranging from 11 to 28. The allele variant observed in this case study was appeared at less than marker range (< D2S1338) with a size of 297.50 bp. The novel variant OMR allele at D2S1338 was labeled as allele 13, when compared to the other allele in allelic ladder. Moreover, the PFSA DNA database was searched for this unique allelic variation and it was found that this was present in only two other samples of distinct cases. Conclusion: The overall frequency of this unique allele variant was 3 in 10,125 unrelated individuals with frequency of occurrence of 0.0296. According to our limited knowledge it is the first report of a novel OMR allele variant at D2S1338 in Pakistani Population.

Articulatory Strategies for Place Contrasts of Unreleased Final Stops on Preceding Vowels: Evidence from Ultrasound Imaging

This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on the preceding vowel is important to signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The gestural coordination of vowel-consonant sequences of monosyllabic words in Cantonese represents a testing case for having preserved phonemic contrasts of six unreleased final stops in a range of vowel contexts. Preliminary results from smoothing spline ANOVA and linear mixed-effect regression show that coarticulatory patterns depend on vowel height, that is, non-high vowels are undergoing gradual coarticulation whereas high vowels are phonologising the lingual properties of the unreleased final stops on the preceding vowels.

Implementasi Metode Case Based Reasoning Untuk Mendeteksi Kerusakan Televisi

The process of deteriorating television should indeed be done by an expert who is a television expert himself, but because television is a tool that is no longer common for people to know him, many people also have television in their respective homes. Even for television repairs, it is quite expensive, so some people who have televisions can do television maintenance at home. The lack of knowledge possessed by the community can lead to wrong handling of television maintenance / maintenance and this has a fatal impact. Hopefully the existence of this system can help the community in diagnosing the damage to their televisions. In that case they need not bother to call for repairmen or bring in a television repair shop. Here the authors provide solutions to solve the problems that often arise on television. In this study, it discusses how to care for television officers. The research objective is to analyze a desktop-based expert system program that contains the knowledge of an expert / doctor whose truth is believed to have the ability to be able to diagnose the disease from the symptoms of damage that has been damaged by television damage quickly and precisely. The stages of research carried out in this study include literature study, data collection, system design, system creation, system testing. Case Based Reasoning is a method used to build a knowledge-based system. The source of system knowledge is obtained by collecting the handling of cases by an expert / expert. Therefore, many problems in television damage are usually due to the negligence of the television owner himself. The first step in solving a problem is by first identifying the scope of the problem to be resolved, this also applies to any Artificial Intelligence (AI) programming. The results obtained in the study for the diagnosis of conjunctivitis were the value of old cases and new cases which obtained a high weight value, namely 1 from the third case

Protocol for rapid implementation of a SARS-CoV-2 sero-survey during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic – who, where, how?

IntroductionThe 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has had devastating consequences in the US, yet clinical research on its natural history and transmission outside hospitalized settings has faced tangible and intangible challenges due to uncertainty in testing, case ascertainment, and appropriate safety measures. To better understand temporal evolution of COVID-19 related serological and other immune responses during a pandemic, we designed and implemented a baseline cross-sectional study of asymptomatic community volunteers and first responders in metro-Atlanta before the predicted infection peak in 2020.MethodsWe recruited healthy community volunteers and first responders for health history, serology, and biobanking. Through an iterative process, we identified one location on our campus and one community location which were accessible, vacant, distant from COVID-19 testing sites, open for social distancing, private for informed consent, and operational for sanitation and ventilation. Research and cleaning supplies were obtained from other researchers and private online vendors due to shortages, and faculty directly participated in consenting and phlebotomy.ResultsA total of 369 participants completed the study visits over six full and three half days. Over half of Phase 1 (174/299, 58.2%) and Phase 2 (45/70, 64.3%) self-reported as healthcare workers, and there was a high percentage of participants reporting exposure to known COVID-19 cases (48.2% and 61.4%).ConclusionsRigorous prospective clinical research with informed consents and is possible during a pandemic. Effective recruitment for moderately large sample size is facilitated by direct faculty involvement, connections with the community, and non-financial support from colleagues and the institution.