Background. Infants aged <12 months are at high risk of hospitalization for influenza. Influenza vaccine is recommended for pregnant women and for most children; however, no vaccine is approved for ...infants aged !6 months. Effective approaches are needed to protect this vulnerable population. Vaccination of women during pregnancy may protect the infant through transfer of antibodies from the mother. Few studies have examined the effectiveness of this strategy, and those studies produced mixed results. Methods. In a matched case-control study, case patients were infants aged <12 months admitted to a large urban hospital in the northeastern United States because of laboratory-confirmed influenza from 2000 to 2009. For each case, we enrolled 1 or 2 control subjects who were infants who tested negative for influenza and matched cases by date of birth and date of hospitalization (within 4 weeks). Vaccine effectiveness was calculated on the basis of matched odds ratios and was adjusted for confounding. Results. The mothers of 2 (2.2%) of 91 case subjects and 31 (19.9%) of 156 control subjects aged <6 months, and 1 (4.6%) of 22 case subjects and 2 (5.6%) of 36 control subjects aged ⩾6 months, had received influenza vaccine during pregnancy. The effectiveness of influenza vaccine given to mothers during pregnancy in preventing hospitalization among their infants, adjusted for potential confounders, was 91.5% (95% confidence interval CI, 61.7%–98.1%; P = .001) for infants aged <6 months. The unadjusted effectiveness was 90.7% (95% CI, 59.9%–97.8%; P = .001). Conclusions. Influenza vaccine given to pregnant women is 91.5% effective in preventing hospitalization of their infants for influenza in the first 6 months of life.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
The bivalent (original and Omicron BA.4/BA.5) mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine was authorized to offer broader protection against COVID-19. We conducted a matched cohort study to evaluate the ...effectiveness of the bivalent vaccine in preventing hospitalization for COVID-19 (primary outcome) and medically attended SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospital death (secondary outcomes). Compared to individuals who did not receive bivalent mRNA vaccination but received ≥2 doses of any monovalent mRNA vaccine, the relative vaccine effectiveness (rVE) against hospitalization for COVID-19 was 70.3% (95% confidence interval, 64.0%–75.4%). rVE was consistent across subgroups and not modified by time since last monovalent dose or number of monovalent doses received. Protection was durable ≥3 months after the bivalent booster. rVE against SARS-CoV-2 infection requiring emergency department/urgent care and against COVID-19 hospital death was 55.0% (50.8%–58.8%) and 82.7% (63.7%–91.7%), respectively. The mRNA-1273 bivalent booster provides additional protection against hospitalization for COVID-19, medically attended SARS-CoV-2 infection, and COVID-19 hospital death.
Routine reaction to approaching disruptions in tokamaks is currently largely limited to machine protection by mitigating an ongoing disruption, which remains a basic requirement for ITER and DEMO 1. ...Nevertheless, a mitigated disruption still generates stress to the device. Additionally, in future fusion devices, high-performance discharge time itself will be very valuable. Instead of reacting only on generic features, occurring shortly before the disruption, the ultimate goal is to actively avoid approaching disruptions at an early stage, sustain the discharges whenever possible and restrict mitigated disruptions to major failures. Knowledge of the most relevant root causes and the corresponding chain of events leading to disruption, the disruption path, is a prerequisite. For each disruption path, physics-based sensors and adequate actuators must be defined and their limitations considered. Early reaction facilitates the efficiency of the actuators and enhances the probability of a full recovery. Thus, sensors that detect potential disruptions in time are to be identified. Once the entrance into a disruption path is detected, we propose a hierarchy of actions consisting of (I) recovery of the discharge to full performance or at least continuation with a less disruption-prone backup scenario, (II) complete avoidance of disruption to sustain the discharge or at least delay it for a controlled termination and, (III), only as last resort, a disruption mitigation. Based on the understanding of disruption paths, a hierarchical and path-specific handling strategy must be developed. Such schemes, testable in present devices, could serve as guidelines for ITER and DEMO operation. For some disruption paths, experiments have been performed at ASDEX Upgrade and TCV. Disruptions were provoked in TCV by impurity injection into ELMy H-mode discharges and in ASDEX Upgrade by forcing a density limit in H-mode discharges. The new approach proposed in this paper is discussed for these cases. For the H-mode density limit sensors used so far react too late. Thus a plasma-state boundary is proposed, that can serve as an adequate early sensor for avoiding density limit disruptions in H-modes and for recovery to full performance.
Disruption-generated runaway electron (RE) beams represent a severe threat for tokamak plasma-facing components in high current devices like ITER, thus motivating the search of mitigation techniques. ...The application of 3D fields might aid this purpose and recently was investigated also in the ASDEX Upgrade experiment by using the internal active saddle coils (termed B-coils). Resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs) with dominant toroidal mode number n = 1 have been applied by the B-coils, in a RE specific scenario, before and during disruptions, which are deliberately created via massive gas injection. The application of RMPs affects the electron temperature profile and seemingly changes the dynamics of the disruption; this results in a significantly reduced current and lifetime of the generated RE beam. A similar effect is observed also in the hard-x-ray (HXR) spectrum, associated to RE emission, characterized by a partial decrease of the energy content below 1 MeV when RMPs are applied. The strength of the observed effects strongly depends on the upper-to-lower B-coil phasing, i.e. on the poloidal spectrum of the applied RMPs, which has been reconstructed including the plasma response by the code MARS-F. A crude vacuum approximation fails in the interpretation of the experimental findings: despite the relatively low β ( < 0.5 % ) of these discharges, a modest amplification (factor of 2 ) of the edge kink response occurs, which has to be considered to explain the observed suppression effects.
Brazilian soybean cultivars (Glycine max Sambaíba and Tracajá) routinely grown in Amazonian areas were exposed to filtered air (FA) and filtered air enriched with ozone (40 and 80 ppb, 6 h/day for 5 ...days) to assess their level of tolerance to this pollutant by measuring changes in key biochemical, physiological, and morphological indicators of injury and in enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants. Sambaíba plants were more sensitive to ozone than Tracajá plants, as revealed by comparing indicator injury responses and antioxidant stimulations. Sambaíba exhibited higher visible leaf injury, higher stomatal conductance, and a severe decrease in the carbon assimilation rate. Higher ozone level (80 ppb) caused an increase in cell death in both cultivars. Levels of malondialdehyde and hydrogen peroxide also increased in Tracajá exposed under 80 ppb. Sambaíba plants exhibited decreases in ascorbate and glutathione levels and in enzymatic activities associated with these antioxidants. The higher tolerance of the Tracajá soybean appeared to be indicated by reduced physiological injuries and lower stomatal conductance, which might decrease the influx of ozone and enhance oxidation-reduction reactions involving catalase, ascorbate peroxidase, ascorbate, and glutathione, most likely stimulated by higher hydrogen peroxide.
Runaway electron generation and control Esposito, B; Boncagni, L; Buratti, P ...
Plasma physics and controlled fusion,
01/2017, Volume:
59, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We present an overview of FTU experiments on runaway electron (RE) generation and control carried out through a comprehensive set of real-time (RT) diagnostics/control systems and newly installed RE ...diagnostics. An RE imaging spectrometer system detects visible and infrared synchrotron radiation. A Cherenkov probe measures RE escaping the plasma. A gamma camera provides hard x-ray radial profiles from RE bremsstrahlung interactions in the plasma. Experiments on the onset and suppression of RE show that the threshold electric field for RE generation is larger than that expected according to a purely collisional theory, but consistent with an increase due to synchrotron radiation losses. This might imply a lower density to be targeted with massive gas injection for RE suppression in ITER. Experiments on active control of disruption-generated RE have been performed through feedback on poloidal coils by implementing an RT boundary-reconstruction algorithm evaluated on magnetic moments. The results indicate that the slow plasma current ramp-down and the simultaneous reduction of the reference plasma external radius are beneficial in dissipating the RE beam energy and population, leading to reduced RE interactions with plasma facing components. RE active control is therefore suggested as a possible alternative or complementary technique to massive gas injection.
The neutron detection system for characterization of emissivity in ITER Tokamak during DD and DT experiments poses serious challenges to the performance of the diagnostic control and data acquisition ...system (CDAcq). The ongoing design of the ITER radial neutron camera (RNC) diagnostic is composed by 26 lines of sight (LOS) for complete plasma inspection. The CDAcq system aims at meeting the ITER requirements of delivering the measurement of the real-time neutron emissivity profile with time resolution and control cycle time of 10 ms at peak event rate of 2 MEvents/s per LOS. This measurement demands the generation of the neutron spectra for each LOS with neutron/gamma discrimination and pile-up rejection. The neutron spectra can be totally processed in the host CPU or it can use the processed data coming from the system field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The number of neutron counts extracted from the spectra is then used to calculate the neutron emissivity profile using an inversion algorithm. Moreover, it is required that the event-based raw data acquired are made available to the ITER data network without local data storage for postprocessing. The data production for the 2 MEvents/s rate can go up to a maximum data throughput of 0.5 GB/s per channel, fostering the evaluation of real-time data compression techniques in RNC. To meet the demands of the project, a CDAcq prototype has been used to design and test a high-performance distributed software architecture taking advantage of multicore CPU technology capable of coping with the requirements. This submission depicts the design of the real-time architecture, the spectra algorithms (pulse height analysis, neutron/gamma discrimination, and pile-up correction), and the inversion algorithm to calculate the emissivity profile. Preliminary tests to evaluate the systems performance with the synthetic data are presented.
Neutrons and
γ
-rays produce light pulses with different shapes when interacting with organic scintillators. This property is commonly used to distinguish between neutrons (n) and
γ
-rays (
γ
) in ...mixed n/
γ
fields as those encountered in radiation physics experiments. Although analog electronic pulse shape discrimination (PSD) modules have been successfully used for many years, they do not allow data reprocessing and are limited in count rate capability (typically up to 200
kHz). The performance of a n/
γ
digital pulse shape discrimination (DPSD) system by means of a commercial 12-bit 200 MSamples/s transient recorder card is investigated here. Three organic scintillators have been studied: stilbene, NE213 and anthracene. The charge comparison method has been used to obtain simultaneous n/
γ
discrimination
and pulse height analysis. The importance of DPSD for high-intensity radiation field measurements and its advantages with respect to analog PSD are discussed. Based on post-experiment simulations with acquired data, the requirements for fast digitizers to provide DPSD with organic scintillators are also analyzed.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
The emergence of Omicron variants coincided with declining vaccine-induced protection against SARS-CoV-2. Two bivalent mRNA vaccines, mRNA-1273.222 (Moderna) and BNT162b2 Bivalent (Pfizer-BioNTech), ...were developed to provide greater protection against the predominate circulating variants by including mRNA that encodes both the ancestral (original) strain and BA.4/BA.5. We estimated their relative vaccine effectiveness (rVE) in preventing COVID-19-related outcomes in the US using a nationwide dataset linking primary care electronic health records and pharmacy/medical claims data. The study population (aged ≥18 years) received either vaccine between 31 August 2022 and 28 February 2023. We used propensity score weighting to adjust for baseline differences between groups. We estimated the rVE against COVID-19-related hospitalizations (primary outcome) and outpatient visits (secondary) for 1,034,538 mRNA-1273.222 and 1,670,666 BNT162b2 Bivalent vaccine recipients, with an adjusted rVE of 9.8% (95% confidence interval: 2.6-16.4%) and 5.1% (95% CI: 3.2-6.9%), respectively, for mRNA-1273.222 versus BNT162b2 Bivalent. The incremental relative effectiveness was greater among adults ≥ 65; the rVE against COVID-19-related hospitalizations and outpatient visits in these patients was 13.5% (95% CI: 5.5-20.8%) and 10.7% (8.2-13.1%), respectively. Overall, we found greater effectiveness of mRNA-1273.222 compared with the BNT162b2 Bivalent vaccine in preventing COVID-19-related hospitalizations and outpatient visits, with increased benefits in older adults.
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