Serological monitoring is a feature of surveillance programmes for the detection of the circulation of notifiable low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) viruses in commercial poultry holdings. Commercial multispecies nucleoprotein (NP) enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) have been replacing the haemagglutination inhibition (HI) test as pre-screening tools. Few comparative studies have be...

BACKGROUND The prevalence of schistosomiasis remains a key public health issue in China. Jiangling County in Hubei Province is a typical lake and marshland endemic area. The pattern analysis of schistosomiasis prevalence in Jiangling County is of significant importance for promoting schistosomiasis surveillance and control in the similar endemic areas. METHODS The dataset was constructed base...

Since Darwin, the nature of the relationship between evolution and domestication has been debated. Evolution offers different mechanisms of selection that lead to adaptation and may end in the origin of new species as defined by the biological species concept. Domestication has given rise to numerous breeds in almost every domesticated species, including chickens. At the same time, so-called ar...

Background Since the domestication of the red jungle fowls ( Gallus gallus ; dating back to ∼10 000 B.P.) in Asia, domestic chickens ( Gallus gallus domesticus ) have been subjected to the combined effects of natural selection and human-driven artificial selection; this has resulted in marked phenotypic diversity in a number of traits, including behavior, body composition, egg production, and s...

We all remember the empty faces of students seated in rows, intermittently taking notes, and trying to retain disjointed facts. This old lecture style seems as antiquated as a 19th century clockwork mechanism; familiar and charming, but erratic and no longer adequate. The orderly structure of industrial age mechanisms and the repetitiveness of the assembly line are giving way to the all-at-once...

The development of technology coupled with the idea of global village is driving a trend that is advancing development of under developed nations through transfer of technology. To date, the transfer has mostly been in the form of finished products such as equipment being sold to developing nations. The designs for the pieces of equipment were initially inspired by technological needs in temper...

A substantial sampling among domestic human campylobacter cases, chicken process lots, and cattle at slaughter was performed during the seasonal peak of human infections. Campylobacter jejuni isolates (n = 419) were subtyped using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis with SmaI, and isolates representing overlapping types (n = 212) were further subtyped using KpnI for restriction. The SmaI/KpnI prof...