The suitability of the FTA® elute card for the collection of slit skin smear (SSS) samples for PCR detection of Mycobacterium leprae was evaluated. A total of 192 SSS leprosy samples, of bacillary index (BI) 1 to 5, were collected from patients attending two skin clinics in Myanmar and preserved using both FTA® elute cards and 70% ethanol tubes. To compare the efficacy of PCR detection of DNA f...

The aim of this work is to develop a preconcentration procedure of Cd(2+), Zn(2+) and Cu(2+) in environmental waters using olive pomace (OP) prior to their determination by flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS). Raw OP as preconcentrating sorbent was found to have low permeability towards the passed water samples and thus long time was needed. Even reducing the vacuum pressure caused cart...

The study performs an empirical test to assess the impact of Pakistan-China Free trade agreement (FTA) on Pakistan, China, and World's exports under homogenous differentiated products. This employs modeling with Poisson specification Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood method for estimations. results show that effect FTA Non-FTA countries is greater in product as compared product. Therefore, one most imp...

BACKGROUND Non-attended appointments have impacts on the operations of dental clinics. These impacts vary from lost productivity, loss of income and loss of clinical teaching hours. METHODS Appointment data were analysed to assess the percentage of completed, failed to attend (FTA) and cancelled appointments at an Australian remote rural student dental clinic training facility. The demographi...

Collection and analysis of DNA, most commonly from blood or buccal cells, is becoming more common in epidemiologic studies. Buccal samples, which are painless to take and relatively easily collected, are often the preferred source. There are several buccal cell collection methods: swabs, brushes, mouthwash, and treated cards, such as FTA or IsoCode cards. Few studies have systematically compare...

Land plays a dominant role in the interannual variability of the global carbon cycle. The canonical warming and drying of the terrestrial tropics observed during El Niño events calls for the study of the role of precipitation and temperature on carbon cycle variability. Here we use a dynamic vegetation and terrestrial carbon model vegetationglobal-atmosphere-soil (VEGAS) to investigate the resp...

Safety is increasingly important for software based, critical systems. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a safety technique from engineering, developed for analyzing and assessing system safety by uncovering safety flaws and weaknesses of the system. The main drawback of this analysis technique is, that it is based on informal grounds, so safety flaws may be overlooked. This is an issue, where forma...

A total of 17 sphene and 45 zircon fission track ages (FTA) are reported from the Piedmont Province of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, the Reading Prong of New Jersey, and the Newark Basin of Pennsylvania. With the exception of one sphene sample, FTA fall within a relatively restricted age range: sphene 190-217 Ma (average 199 Ma) and zircon 143-218 Ma (average 184 Ma). Near concordance o...