BACKGROUND Community stakeholders express a range of opinions about supervised injection facilities (SIFs). We sought to identify reasons for ambivalence about SIFs amongst community stakeholders in two Canadian cities. FINDINGS We used purposive sampling methods to recruit various stakeholder representatives (n = 141) for key informant interviews or focus group discussions. Data were analyze...

A common strategy among intracellular bacterial pathogens is to enter into a vacuolar environment upon host cell invasion. One such pathogen, Salmonella enterica, resides within the Salmonella-containing vacuole (SCV) inside epithelial cells and macrophages. Salmonella hijacks the host endosomal system to establish this unique intracellular replicative niche, forming a highly complex and dynami...

We report here the use of plasmonic metal nanostructures in the form of silver island films (SiFs) to enhance the fluorescence emission of five different phycobiliproteins. Our findings clearly show that the phycobiliproteins display up to a 9-fold increase in fluorescence emission intensity, with a maximum 7-fold decrease in lifetime when they are assembled as a monolayer above SiFs, as compar...

Salmonella resides within host cells in a vacuole that it modifies through the action of virulence proteins called effectors. Here we examined the role of two related effectors, SopD and SopD2, in Salmonella pathogenesis. Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium) mutants lacking either sopD or sopD2 were attenuated for replication in the spleens of infected mice when competed aga...

Salmonella Typhimurium is a facultative intracellular pathogen that causes acute gastroenteritis in man. Intracellular Salmonella survive and replicate within a modified phagosome known as the Salmonella-containing vacuole (SCV). The onset of intracellular replication is accompanied by the appearance of membrane tubules, called Salmonella-induced filaments (Sifs), extending from the SCV. Sifs a...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to estimate awareness and opinions about supervised smoking facilities (SSFs) for smoking crack cocaine and other stimulants and make comparisons with awareness and opinions about supervised injection facilities (SIFs) in Ontario, Canada. METHODS We used data from a 2009 telephone survey of a representative adult sample. The survey asked about awarenes...

A large number of servers (e.g., CDN servers, datacenter servers) are placed in multiple geographical locations within different network domains. In order to minimize user perceived latency while ensuring high data availability, the server selection problem raises great challenges in modern Internet architecture. This paper presents SIFS, a novel server selection scheme for modern network parad...

In this letter we report the observation of angular-dependent Metal Enhanced Fluorescence (MEF) from fluorophores deposited onto silver island films (SiFs). When illuminated with laser light (473 nm) at angles of 45 and 90 degrees from the surface, SiFs scattered light at wide observation angles biased by the direction of the incident light. We observed angular-dependent MEF (10-fold) from FITC...

Sacral insufficiency fractures (SIFs) are a common cause of back pain in the elderly. SIFs mimic the symptoms of lumbar spine pathology and so are commonly missed or underdiagnosed. Here we present four cases of missed SIFs that were subsequently identified and treated. One patient was treated as mechanical lower back ache, another patient underwent root block and two patients underwent surgery...

BACKGROUND Although delineating the processes by which children appraise the family as a source of security from their collective experiences in the family subsystem has assumed center stage in many conceptualizations of child development, the dearth of measures of child adaptation in the family system has hindered empirical advances. Therefore, this study introduced and tested the psychometric...