BACKGROUND Cough is a common symptom for which patients often seek medical advice and consume vast amounts of drugs. It is a real challenge for both the physician and the clinical researcher to evaluate a cough's clinical importance and its precise response to treatment. OBJECTIVES This systematic literature review has the following objectives: first, to make an inventory of the validated too...

Aerosol particles expelled during human coughs are a potential pathway for infectious disease transmission. However, the importance of airborne transmission is unclear for many diseases. To better understand the role of cough aerosol particles in the spread of disease and the efficacy of different types of protective measures, we constructed a cough aerosol simulator that produces a humanlike c...

It has been conjectured that the classical dynamics of M theory is equivalent to a null geodesic motion in the infinite-dimensional coset space E10/K(E10), where K(E10) is the maximal compact subgroup of the hyperbolic Kac-Moody group E10. We here provide further evidence for this conjecture by showing that the leading higher order corrections, quartic in the curvature and related three-form de...

We described in [7] a monoid b G acting on the integrable highest weight modules of a symmetrizable Kac-Moody algebra. It has similar structural properties as a reductive algebraic monoid with unit group a Kac-Moody group G. Now we find natural extensions of the action of the Kac-Moody group G on its building Ω to actions of the monoid b G on Ω. These extensions are partly motivated by represen...

BACKGROUND Since the publication of the 2006 American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) cough guidelines, a variety of tools has been developed or further refined for assessing cough. The purpose of the present committee was to evaluate instruments used by investigators performing clinical research on chronic cough. The specific aims were to (1) assess the performance of tools designed to mea...

Pertussis is a contagious respiratory disease which mainly affects young children and can be fatal if left untreated. The World Health Organization estimates 16 million pertussis cases annually worldwide resulting in over 200,000 deaths. It is prevalent mainly in developing countries where it is difficult to diagnose due to the lack of healthcare facilities and medical professionals. Hence, a l...

BACKGROUND Improving childhood tuberculosis (TB) evaluation and care is a global priority, but data on performance at community health centers in TB endemic regions are sparse. OBJECTIVE To describe the current practices and quality of TB evaluation for children with cough ≥2 weeks' duration presenting to community health centers in Uganda. METHODS Cross-sectional analysis of children (<15 ...