Since 1998 the serious public health problem in South East Asia of counterfeit artesunate, containing no or subtherapeutic amounts of the active antimalarial ingredient, has led to deaths from ...untreated malaria, reduced confidence in this vital drug, large economic losses for the legitimate manufacturers, and concerns that artemisinin resistance might be engendered.
With evidence of a deteriorating situation, a group of police, criminal analysts, chemists, palynologists, and health workers collaborated to determine the source of these counterfeits under the auspices of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) and the Western Pacific World Health Organization Regional Office. A total of 391 samples of genuine and counterfeit artesunate collected in Vietnam (75), Cambodia (48), Lao PDR (115), Myanmar (Burma) (137) and the Thai/Myanmar border (16), were available for analysis. Sixteen different fake hologram types were identified. High-performance liquid chromatography and/or mass spectrometry confirmed that all specimens thought to be counterfeit (195/391, 49.9%) on the basis of packaging contained no or small quantities of artesunate (up to 12 mg per tablet as opposed to approximately 50 mg per genuine tablet). Chemical analysis demonstrated a wide diversity of wrong active ingredients, including banned pharmaceuticals, such as metamizole, and safrole, a carcinogen, and raw material for manufacture of methylenedioxymethamphetamine ('ecstasy'). Evidence from chemical, mineralogical, biological, and packaging analysis suggested that at least some of the counterfeits were manufactured in southeast People's Republic of China. This evidence prompted the Chinese Government to act quickly against the criminal traders with arrests and seizures.
An international multi-disciplinary group obtained evidence that some of the counterfeit artesunate was manufactured in China, and this prompted a criminal investigation. International cross-disciplinary collaborations may be appropriate in the investigation of other serious counterfeit medicine public health problems elsewhere, but strengthening of international collaborations and forensic and drug regulatory authority capacity will be required.
The LHC@Home BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications. The ...traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated LHC@Home BOINC project. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated LHC@Home service. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining LHC@Home, numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. The main results are highlighted in this paper.
The newly developed 8-methoxy, non-fluorinated quinolones (NFQs) were studied to elucidate their enzyme inhibitory activity against wild-type and mutant GyrA (Ser-83→Trp) forms of Escherichia coli ...DNA gyrase. Using a DNA supercoiling inhibition assay, the NFQs were found to inhibit 50% (IC50) of the E. coli DNA gyrase activity in the 1.6–3.2 mg/L concentration range and were comparable to ciprofloxacin. However, against the GyrA (Ser-83→Trp) mutant, the NFQs were ~16-fold more potent than ciprofloxacin. Antibacterial potency of the NFQs was investigated using clinical isolates of E. coli and penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae (PRSP), including strains with reduced susceptibility to quinolones. Against 20 uncharacterized clinical isolates of E. coli, the MIC90s of the NFQs were in the 0.125–0.25 mg/L range while those of ciprofloxacin, trovafloxacin, gatifloxacin and clinafloxacin were in the 0.016–0.125 mg/L range. Against clinical isolates with characterized mutations in gyrA and parC, PGE9262932, an NFQ, was two- to eight-fold more potent than ciprofloxacin. Against 23 clinical isolates of PRSP, the NFQs (MIC90 0.031–0.125 mg/L) were more potent than ciprofloxacin, trovafloxacin, and gatifloxacin (MIC90 0.25–2.0 mg/L), and at least as potent as clinafloxacin (MIC90 0.125 mg/L). Against S. pneumoniae strains with gyrA and parC mutations, the NFQs (MIC 0.125–1.0 mg/L) were more potent than ciprofloxacin, trovafloxacin and gatifloxacin (MIC 4–32 mg/L), and comparable to clinafloxacin (MIC 0.5–1 mg/L).
SixTrack Version 5: Status and New Developments De Maria, R.; Andersson, J.; Berglyd Olsen, V.K. ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
11/2019, Letnik:
1350, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
SixTrack Version 5 is a major SixTrack release that introduces new features, with improved integration of the existing ones, and extensive code restructuring. New features include dynamic-memory ...management, scattering-routine integration, a new initial-condition module, and reviewed post-processing methods. Existing features like on-line aperture checking and Fluka-coupling are now enabled by default. Extensive performance regression tests have been developed and deployed as part of the new-release generation. The new features of the tracking environment developed for the massive numerical simulations will be discussed as well.
Tracking simulations remain the essential tool for evaluating how multipolar imperfections in ring magnets restrict the domain of stable phase-space motion. In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at ...CERN, particles circulate at the injection energy, when multipole errors are most significant, for more than 10^{7} turns, but systematic tracking studies are limited to a small fraction of this total time—even on modern computers. A considerable speedup is expected by replacing element-by-element tracking with the use of a symplectified one-turn map. We have applied this method to the realistic LHC lattice, version 6, and report here our results for various map orders, with special emphasis on precision and speed.
Despite increased access to higher education for previously underrepresented ethnic groups, the graduation rates of African Americans and Latinos in higher education pale in comparison to their ...Caucasian and Asian peers (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, 2010). In contrast, Asians are graduating at rates higher than Caucasians; however, the literature reveals the Asian student college experience as isolated and disconnected from the campus community (Bowman, 2010; Ying, 2001). In the next 40 years, people of color will become the majority within the American population (Passel & Cohn, 2008), yet few interventions seem to be resolving the apparent disparity in success across ethnic groups in higher education (McWhorter, 2005). Researchers have suggested that the psychological experiences of students may provide a new means for understanding why students persist to graduation (Bean & Eaton, 2002). Students' psychological processes have been explored in the literature as they relate to the academic, social, and emotional success of students; that is, the ways students thrive on campus (Schreiner, 2010c). Thriving students demonstrate high levels of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and academic well-being. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which student demographic characteristics, campus environmental characteristics, student spirituality, and psychological sense of community explain the variation in thriving among students of color. The Thriving Quotient, a reliable and valid instrument that measures thriving across five factors (Schreiner, McIntosh, Nelson, & Pothoven, 2009), was utilized to explore the pathways to thriving in a sample of 7,956 students attending 59 institutions. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), unique pathways to thriving for Caucasian, African American, Asian, and Latino students were explored in this study. A psychological sense of community emerged as the primary predictor of thriving among all student groups, and spirituality emerged as the largest single contributor to a sense of community among students of color, yet structural invariance across the four ethnic groups indicated that the pathways to thriving differ by ethnicity. Implications for practice are highlighted that can help students of color thrive in college.
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