AIMS (i) To determine effect of Acanthamoeba cyst age, method of production, and (ii) to assay technique on the efficacy of multipurpose solutions (MPS) and hydrogen peroxide based contact lens disinfectants. (iii) To establish if MPS can remove mature cysts from contact lenses according to the ISO/DIS 14729 regimen test for microbe removal. METHODS Immature and mature cysts of A polyphaga we...

Recent outbreaks of salmonellosis associated with raw almonds have raised awareness of this food as a vector for foodborne illness. We performed a quantitative assessment of the risk of contracting salmonellosis from consumption of raw almonds, accounting for factors that become important after almonds reach the processor. We estimated the risk associated with the consumption of raw almonds and...

Sakaridis I., Soultos N., Batzios Ch., Ambrosiadis I., Koidis P. (2014): Lactic acid bacteria isolated from chicken carcasses with inhibitory activity against Salmonella spp. and Listeria monocytogenes. Czech J. Food Sci., 32: 61–68. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) isolated from poultry carcasses were added to BHI broth along with Salmonella spp. and Listeria monocytogenes in order to determine thei...

In their ground-breaking paper, Indyk and Woodruff (STOC 05) showed how to compute the k-th frequency moment Fk (for k > 2) in space O(poly-log(n,m) · n1− 2 k ), giving the first optimal result up to poly-logarithmic factors in n and m (here m is the length of the stream and n is the size of the domain.) The method of Indyk and Woodruff reduces the problem of Fk to the problem of computing heav...

We study the complexity of β-reduction for redexes of order 2, 3 and 4. The obtained results are: evaluation of boolean expressions can be reduced to β-reduction of order 2 and β-reduction of order 2 is in O(n log n), β-reduction of order 3 is complete for PTIME, and β-reduction of order 4 is complete for PSPACE.

Results:  UV-C Technology effectively reduces environmental contamination and should be considered when environmental transmission is significant.  The Optimum UV TM device achieved an overall 3.56-log10 reduction for MRSA in 5 minutes and an overall 2.78-log10 reduction for C. difficile spores in 10 minutes in typical patient rooms (not treated with UV reflective wall coating).  When the pa...

PURPOSE To compare the kinetics and speed of kill of Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae on exposure to three topical ophthalmic antibiotic solutions. MATERIALS AND METHODS Bacterial conjunctivitis isolates of S. pneumoniae and H. influenzae were exposed to 1:1000 dilutions of moxifloxacin 0.5%, tobramycin 0.3%, gentamicin 0.3%, and water (control). At 15, 30, 60, 120, and 180...

BACKGROUND In evaluating a photochemical treatment process for inactivating parvovirus B19, there lacked simple culture methods to measure infectivity. The recently developed enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISpot) infectivity assay uses late-stage erythropoietic progenitor cells and is labor intensive and time consuming. We evaluated a novel, efficient polymerase chain reaction (PCR) inhibition ass...