Morgan’s Canon is a specific restating of Occam’s Razor that dictates that any description of animal behavior should never call upon higher order psychological processes if the behavior could, fairly, be explained in terms of lower processes. Herein, the Canon is discussed both historically and in light of current research into animal behavior. A reconsideration of the principle of parsimony, t...

Circulating anodic antigen (CAA) testing is a powerful, increasingly-used tool for diagnosis of active schistosome infection. We sought to determine the feasibility and reliability of measuring CAA in blood spots collected on Whatman 903 protein saver cards, which are the predominant filter papers used worldwide for dried blood spot (DBS) research and clinical care. CAA was eluted from blood sp...

BACKGROUND Malaria control programs have achieved remarkable success during the past decade. Nonetheless, sensitive and affordable methods for active screening of malaria parasites in low-transmission settings remain urgently needed. METHODS We developed a molecular screening method, capture and ligation probe-PCR (CLIP-PCR), which achieved the sensitivity of reverse-transcription PCR but eli...

Sturge-Weber syndrome is characterized by the association of a trigeminal port-wine facial angioma with a pial venular angioma, usually ipsilateral to the facial nevus. However, a bilateral pial angioma may coexist with a unilateral facial nevus (1 ), and pial angioma may be present without any facial nevus (2] . The pial angioma is responsible for partial seizures, hemiplegia, and mental retar...

The multi-region hybridization assay (MHAbce) for genotyping HIV-1 subtypes B, C and circulating recombinant form (CRF01_AE) was evaluated on paired plasma and dried blood spots (DBS) collected from 68 HIV-1 infected individuals in Thailand. CRF01_AE was the predominant subtype identified using plasma samples (51/62) and DBS (24/27). There was no discordance in subtype designations between plas...

The Gen-Probe Aptima human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) RNA assay was adapted for the diagnosis of HIV infection in infants by using dried blood spots. The assay was 99% sensitive (128/129) and 100% specific (162/162). This may prove useful in resource-limited settings, since it precludes the need for a phlebotomist and maintenance of a cold chain.

AIMS To test the value of phosphatidylethanol (PEth) as a biomarker for alcohol consumption among injecting drug users (IDUs). METHODS As part of a longitudinal study of young IDUs, dried blood spots and self-reported alcohol by structured interview were collected at baseline. We compared self-reported alcohol use to detectable PEth (≥8 ng/ml) in the blood spots as well as the relationships b...

In this brief commentary on Professor Callen's article, I would like to offer a defmition of the logical structure ofthe notion of conditional relevance using two components of argument diagramming technology from argumentation theory. This definition will show how conditional relevance is not only important as a key notion in evidence law, but also represents a structure or pattern that is com...

Despite the importance of early diagnosis and treatment of HIV, only a small fraction of HIV-exposed infants in low- and middle-income countries are tested for the disease. The gold standard for early infant diagnosis, DNA PCR, requires resources that are unavailable in poor settings, and no point-of-care HIV DNA test is currently available. We have developed a device constructed of layers of p...

We describe a microassay for measuring galactose (Gal) and galactose 1-phosphate (Gal-1-P) in dried blood spots. After a coupled enzyme reaction involving galactose dehydrogenase (GADH, EC 1.1.1.48) and alkaline phosphatase (AP, EC 3.1.3.1) in a microplate well, NADH fluorescence is measured by a highly sensitive fluorometric microplate reader, capable of rapid measurement of fluorescence (2 mi...