BACKGROUND We recently reported a more rapid waning of vaccine-induced humoral immunity (measles vaccine) in children with asthma. It is unknown if asthma affects susceptibility to vaccine-preventable diseases. OBJECTIVE To determine whether asthma is associated with an increased risk of vaccine-preventable disease, e.g., breakthrough varicella infection. METHODS This was a retrospective po...

BACKGROUND Lamivudine monotherapy is effective in suppressing hepatitis B virus (HBV) replication to undetectable levels by PCR, in ameliorating liver disease and to some extent in achieving HBsAg seroconversion. This study aimed at assessing the virological and biochemical responses as well as breakthrough in HBeAg-negative chronic HBV (CHB) Egyptian patients receiving lamivudine therapy. ME...

This article presents the novel breakthrough general purpose algorithm for very large-scale optimization problems. The novel algorithm is capable of achieving breakthrough speeds for very large-scale optimization on general purpose laptops and embedded systems. Application of the algorithm to the Griewank function was possible in up to 1 billion decision variables in double precision took only ...

Endocardial catheter mapping was performed in 18 patients with left bundle branch block (LBBB). Four patients had no organic heart disease (group I), six had cardiomyopathy (group II), and eight had coronary artery disease and previous infarction (group III). Twelve patients had one septal site of left ventricular endocardial breakthrough, while six had two left ventricular endocardial breakthr...

Three strains of Pseudomonas fluorescens with different motility rates and adsorption rate coefficients were injected into porous-medium reactors packed with l-mm-diameter glass spheres. Cell breakthrough, time to peak concentration, tailing, and cell recovery were measured at three interstitial pore velocities (higher than, lower than, and much lower than the maximal bacterial motility rate). ...

Trivalent and hexavalent chromium continuous biosorption was studied using residual brewer Saccharomyces cerevisiae immobilized in volcanic rock. The columns used in the process had a diameter of 4.5 cm and a length of 140 cm, working at an inlet flow rate of 15 mL/min. Breakthrough curves were used to study the yeast biosorption behavior in the process. The saturation time (ts) was 21 and 45 h...

We use Lattice Boltzmann models to simulate solute transport in porous media traversed by larger conduits and fit the resulting solute breakthrough curves with macroscopic Continuous Time Random Walk (CTRW) models. In this paper, the porous media are simulated using a real-numbered coefficient that partially damps the inertial components of the flow and, when the damping is large enough, leads ...

Cancer may soon become the leading disease-related cause of human death in many countries of the world. In the United States, cancer is projected to surpass cardiovascular disease as the major cause of death. Nevertheless, there is good news forthcoming with respect to emerging breakthrough drugs that demonstrate our increased understanding of cancer at the molecular level, a greater focus on m...

Many a science writer has fantasized about capping a story with the headline “Good News for Sick Mice!” One of the toughest struggles is deciding how to cover a story that has produced tantalizing, even amazing, results in laboratory animals but could well be a total bust by the time it gets to humans. That issue came up in early July, when Elan Pharmaceuticals, an Irish company with laboratori...