Lymphatic filariasis is one of the neglected tropical diseases. It is estimated that 120 million people are currently infected in 73 countries where filariasis is endemic. Lymphatic filariasis is a leading cause of chronic disability worldwide, including of 15 million people who have lymphoedema (elephantiasis) and 25 million men who have hydrocoele.

The history of software engineering is marked by ever-rising levels of abstraction. The first programmers coded in binary; in short order, the field moved to assembly language, then 3GLs such as Fortran and Cobol, and now the effort involves more expressive traditional languages (such as C++ and Java) as well as domain-specific 4GLs. Development environments, originally command-line tools, inte...

For developing large and complex applications, industrial practice uses a combination of nonformal notations and methods. Different notations are used to specify the properties of different aspects of an application and these specifications are transformed into their corresponding implementations through the steps of a development process. The development process relies heavily on manual verifi...

System developers can often perceive managing QoS-requirements as complex, time consuming and abstract. As a result of not paying sufficient attention to QoS in the design phase, problems are discovered late in the development cycle, often not before the real system is set into operation. Thus, correcting QoS deficiencies often become very expensive and difficult to handle. One of the main reas...

4,4'-Methylenedianiline (MDA) is widely used in the manufacturing of polyurethane foam, epoxy resins, and polymers. Exposure to MDA induces liver damage in humans and rats. MDA undergoes N-acetylation catalyzed by N-acetyltransferase 1 (NAT1) and 2 (NAT2) in the liver. Both human and rat NAT2 are polymorphic, and human NAT2 genetic polymorphism modifies the frequency and/or severity of drug and...

Malondialdehyde (MDA) is an endogenous genotoxic product of enzymatic and oxygen radical-induced lipid peroxidation whose adducts are known to exist in DNA isolated from healthy human beings. To evaluate the mutagenic potential of MDA in human cells, we reacted MDA with pSP189 shuttle vector DNA and then transfected them into human fibroblasts for replication. MDA induced up to a 15-fold increa...

Little is known about the molecular pathways regulating poor differentiation and invasion of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). In the present study, we aimed to determine the role of MDA-9/Syntenin, a metastasis associated molecule in HNSCC tumorigenesis. Elevated MDA-9/Syntenin expression was evident in 67% (54/81) primary HNSCC tumors (p=0.001-0.002) and 69% (9/13) pre-neoplastic...

Loss of midbrain dopaminergic (mDA) neurons underlies the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Towards cell replacement, studies have focused on mechanisms underlying embryonic mDA production, as a rational basis for deriving mDA neurons from stem cells. We will review studies of β-catenin, an obligate component of the Wnt cascade that is critical to mDA specification and neurogenesis. mDA ne...

Mass drug administration (MDA) with antibiotics is a key component of the SAFE strategy for trachoma control. Guidelines recommend that where MDA is warranted the whole population be targeted with 80% considered the minimum acceptable coverage. In other countries, MDA is usually conducted by salaried Ministry of Health personnel (MOH). In Plateau State, Nigeria, the existing network of voluntee...

BACKGROUND Lymphatic filariasis is targeted for elimination in India through mass drug administration (MDA) with diethylcarbamazine (DEC) combined with albendazole (ABZ). For the strategy to be effective, >65% of those living in endemic areas must be covered by and compliant to MDA. Post the MDA 2011 campaign in the endemic district of Odisha, we conducted a survey to assess: (i) the filariasis...