BACKGROUND Public-private partnerships are felt to be necessary for tuberculosis (TB) control in some developing countries. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the potential of a collaboration between the National TB Programme (NTP) and private pharmacies in Bolivia, the country with the highest TB incidence in Latin America. METHODS We contacted the local Pharmacists' Association in the city of Cochaba...

BACKGROUND Several measures have been implemented at international level to ensure that there is a greater focus on sex differences in health research. This study evaluates the effect of various formal incentives that were introduced by a Dutch financer of health research to encourage applicants to include sex differences in research proposals. METHODS We sampled 213 health research proposals...

This study investigated the stability of the discharge identity of inspiratory decrementing (I-Dec) and augmenting (I-Aug) neurons in the caudal (cVRC) and rostral (rVRC) ventral respiratory column during repetitive fictive cough in the cat. Inspiratory neurons in the cVRC (n = 23) and rVRC (n = 17) were recorded with microelectrodes. Fictive cough was elicited by mechanical stimulation of the ...

BACKGROUND CONTEXT Acute cough is a very common symptom presentation among children in primary care and is usually due to respiratory infection, yet its cost is unknown. An estimate of the cost to healthcare providers and parents would aid budgetary decision-making, and provide an insight into the need for interventions to reduce the burden. PURPOSE To estimate the cost per child per episo...

Simple representations of KLR algebras can be used to realize the infinity crystal for the corresponding symmetrizable Kac-Moody algebra. It was recently shown that, in finite and affine types, certain sub-categories of “cuspidal” representations realize crystals for sub-Kac-Moody algebras. Here we put that observation on a firmer categorical footing by exhibiting a corresponding functor betwee...

The unexpected and fascinating emergence of hyperbolic Coxeter groups and Lorentzian Kac-Moody algebras in the investigation of gravitational theories in the vicinity of a cosmological singularity is briefly reviewed. Some open questions raised by this intriguing result, and some attempts to answer them, are outlined. Dedicated to Claudio Bunster on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To appear ...

Let X be the Dynkin diagram of a symmetrizable Kac-Moody algebra, and X0 a subgraph with all vertices of degree 1 or 2. Using the crystal structure on the components of quiver varieties for X , we show that if we expand X by extending X0, the branching multiplicities and tensor product multiplicities stabilize, provided the weights involved satisfy a condition which we call “depth” and are supp...

Moody’s KMV method is a popular commercial implementation of the structural credit risk model pioneered by Merton (1974). It is an algorithm for estimating the unobserved asset value and the unknown parameters required for implementing such a model. This estimation method has found its way to the recent academic literature, but it has not yet been formally analyzed to assess its statistical pro...

Compactification can control chaotic Mixmaster behavior in gravitational systems with p–form matter: we consider this in light of the connection between supergravity models and Kac–Moody algebras. We show that different compactifications define “mutations” of the algebras associated with the noncompact theories. We list the algebras obtained in this way, and find novel examples of wall systems ...