Achieving a malaria-free world presents exciting scientific challenges as well as overwhelming health, equity, and economic benefits. WHO and countries are setting ambitious goals for reducing the ...burden and eliminating malaria through the "Global Technical Strategy" and 21 countries are aiming to eliminate malaria by 2020. The commitment to achieve these targets should be celebrated. However, the need for innovation to achieve these goals, sustain elimination, and free the world of malaria is greater than ever. Over 180 experts across multiple disciplines are engaged in the Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA) Refresh process to address problems that need to be solved. The result is a research and development agenda to accelerate malaria elimination and, in the longer term, transform the malaria community's ability to eradicate it globally.
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Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The interruption of malaria transmission worldwide is one of the greatest challenges for international health and development communities. The current expert view suggests that, by aggressively ...scaling up control with currently available tools and strategies, much greater gains could be achieved against malaria, including elimination from a number of countries and regions; however, even with maximal effort we will fall short of global eradication. The Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA) complements the current research agenda--primarily directed towards reducing morbidity and mortality--with one that aims to identify key knowledge gaps and define the strategies and tools that will result in reducing the basic reproduction rate to less than 1, with the ultimate aim of eradication of the parasite from the human population. Sustained commitment from local communities, civil society, policy leaders, and the scientific community, together with a massive effort to build a strong base of researchers from the endemic areas will be critical factors in the success of this new agenda.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC) is crucial for recognizing visual patterns, and previous evidence suggests that there may be different subregions within the vOTC involved in the rapid ...identification of word forms. Here, we characterize vOTC reading circuitry using a multimodal approach combining functional, structural, and quantitative MRI and behavioral data. Two main word-responsive vOTC areas emerged: a posterior area involved in visual feature extraction, structurally connected to the intraparietal sulcus via the vertical occipital fasciculus; and an anterior area involved in integrating information with other regions of the language network, structurally connected to the angular gyrus via the posterior arcuate fasciculus. Furthermore, functional activation in these vOTC regions predicted reading behavior outside of the scanner. Differences in the microarchitectonic properties of gray-matter cells in these segregated areas were also observed, in line with earlier cytoarchitectonic evidence. These findings advance our understanding of the vOTC circuitry by linking functional responses to anatomical structure, revealing the pathways of distinct reading-related processes.
Encouraged by the early success of using dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) against malaria, the World Health Organization (WHO) embarked on the Global Malaria Eradication Program (GMEP) in ...1955. Fourteen years later, the campaign was discontinued when it was recognised that eradication was not achievable with the available means in many areas, although the long-term goal remained unchanged. During the GMEP, malaria was permanently eliminated from many regions. In other areas, however, substantial gains were lost in resurgences, sometimes of epidemic proportions. During the 1970s and 1980s, because of economic and financial crises, international support for malaria control declined rapidly, but in the past decade, following increasing demands from endemic countries and promising results from scaling up of control activities, interest in malaria elimination and the long-term goal of eradication has received international political and financial support. In 2007, there was a renewed call for malaria eradication and a consultative process to define a research and development agenda for malaria eradication (malERA) was established. Lessons learned from the GMEP (1955-1969) highlight the fact that no single strategy can be applicable everywhere and that a long-term commitment with a flexible strategy that includes community involvement, integration with health systems, and the development of agile surveillance systems is needed.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The human thalamus is a brain structure that comprises numerous, highly specific nuclei. Since these nuclei are known to have different functions and to be connected to different areas of the ...cerebral cortex, it is of great interest for the neuroimaging community to study their volume, shape and connectivity in vivo with MRI. In this study, we present a probabilistic atlas of the thalamic nuclei built using ex vivo brain MRI scans and histological data, as well as the application of the atlas to in vivo MRI segmentation. The atlas was built using manual delineation of 26 thalamic nuclei on the serial histology of 12 whole thalami from six autopsy samples, combined with manual segmentations of the whole thalamus and surrounding structures (caudate, putamen, hippocampus, etc.) made on in vivo brain MR data from 39 subjects. The 3D structure of the histological data and corresponding manual segmentations was recovered using the ex vivo MRI as reference frame, and stacks of blockface photographs acquired during the sectioning as intermediate target. The atlas, which was encoded as an adaptive tetrahedral mesh, shows a good agreement with previous histological studies of the thalamus in terms of volumes of representative nuclei. When applied to segmentation of in vivo scans using Bayesian inference, the atlas shows excellent test-retest reliability, robustness to changes in input MRI contrast, and ability to detect differential thalamic effects in subjects with Alzheimer's disease. The probabilistic atlas and companion segmentation tool are publicly available as part of the neuroimaging package FreeSurfer.
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•A probabilistic atlas of the human thalamus (26 nuclei) derived from histology.•3D histology reconstruction assisted by ex vivo MRI and blockface photographs.•Companion Bayesian method segments the nuclei from in vivo scans of any MRI contrast.•Method has excellent test-retest reliability and detects differential effects in AD.•The method is publicly available as part of FreeSurfer.
The past decade witnessed unprecedented efforts to control malaria, including renewed political and financial commitment and increased availability of both old and new strategies and tools. However, ...malaria still represents a major health burden, particularly in Africa. Important challenges such as the fragility of many health systems, the rise of insecticide and drug resistance, and particularly the expected decline both in funding and in the coverage of key interventions if they are not replaced as needed, urgently need to be addressed. Further research and development is also becoming increasingly crucial. Among other needs, common methodologies for estimating and tracking the malaria burden, new strategies to measure transmission, better understanding of immunity, and increased knowledge of the mechanisms and effects of resistance to drugs and insecticides stand out. The ongoing efforts in research and development for new antimalarial drugs, more sensitive point-of-care rapid diagnostic tests and new insecticides need further innovation and substantial strengthening. Clearly, efforts should focus not only on Plasmodium falciparum but also and increasingly on Plasmodium vivax, the neglected human malaria parasite. Addressing these challenges in a comprehensive and timely way will allow us to sustain the gains made so far and make further progress in control and progressive elimination.
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Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Since 2000, millions of malaria deaths, especially among young children, have been averted in malaria-endemic countries with the unprecedented global investment in the fight against the disease.1 The ...malaria targets of the Millennium Development Goals for 2015 were achieved. Remarkably, this progress was reached by the imperfect application of imperfect tools. However, these gains may also have led to complacency about the worrying developments in recent years.
Aim
Previous population genetic and phylogeographical studies have shown how generation time and dispersal affect population divergence in the presence of a vicariant barrier. More recently, ...speciation genomic studies have revealed that selection and recombination can be equally impactful. Here, we test how the interaction of these factors shapes the divergence expected in response to an ephemeral barrier and compare these results to empirical literature using the Baja California peninsula as a test case.
Location
Global.
Taxon
Diploid eukaryotes.
Methods
We forward simulated population genomic data with CDMetaPOP and SLiM by varying dispersal rate, mutation rate, generation time, selection pressure and recombination in the presence and then removal of a physical barrier. We tested which factors affect the divergence signal (measured as FST). We compared simulation results to empirical literature that included 147 records of generation times and 78 divergence estimates from population genomic studies.
Results
Population differentiation not only occurred due to the presence of a barrier under lower dispersal abilities but also emerged as a result of low dispersal among structured populations without a barrier. Divergent selection strengthened differentiation, which is supported by empirical data. Barrier removal quickly eroded the divergence signal (~500 generations) for high‐dispersing species, but low dispersal species retained divergence after gene flow resumed. In the empirical data, generation times varied by four orders of magnitude and dispersal by three orders of magnitude.
Main Conclusions
Divergence can arise without vicariant barriers, it may not produce a tight co‐divergence peak in absolute time, and co‐divergence may not imply a common cause of divergence. Deeper integration of geologic, climatic and genomic data (i.e. geogenomics) may help clarify origins of divergence in physically complex settings.
...the south of Mozambique has historically experienced unsuccessful malaria control and elimination attempts using mainly IRS in the 1960s during the Global Malaria Eradication Program, and in the ...2000s in the context of the Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative (LSDI) that aimed to eliminate malaria in South Africa and Eswatini 6. IPTp, intermittent preventive treatment for pregnant women; IRS, indoor residual spraying; LLIN, long-lasting insecticidal net; MDA, mass drug administration; NMCP, National Malaria Control Program; rfMDA, reactive focal mass drug administration. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003227.g001 Interventions and study procedures Programmatic interventions: Malaria case management in Magude consisted of the standard of care provided by the national health system, which relied on passive detection and testing with a histidine-rich protein 2 (HRP2)-based rapid diagnostic test (RDT) of all patients presenting with a fever (axillary temperature ≥37.5°C or reported fever in the previous 24 hours) at the HFs or to CHWs (or “Agente Polivalente Elemental,” APE in Portuguese), and on treating the confirmed positives with artemether-lumefantrine. The data submitted weekly included total number of outpatient visits, RDTs performed or slides read using microscopy, positive slides or RDTs, and cases treated, stratified by <5 and ≥5 years old (including malaria cases among pregnant women tested in the outpatient ward).
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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