BACKGROUND A substantial scale-up in public health response is needed to control the unprecedented Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic in west Africa. Current international commitments seek to expand intervention capacity in three areas: new EVD treatment centres, case ascertainment through contact tracing, and household protective kit allocation. We aimed to assess how these interventions could...

Flaviviruses assemble as fusion-incompetent immature particles and subsequently undergo conformational change leading to release of infectious virions. Flavivirus infections also produce combined 'mosaic' particles. Here, using cryo-electron tomography, we report that mosaic particles of dengue virus type 2 had glycoproteins organized into two regions of mature and immature structure. Furthermo...

This paper surveys methods for comparing treatments on a binary response when observations occur for several strata. A common application is multi-centre clinical trials, in which the strata refer to a sample of centres or sites of some type. Questions of interest include how one should summarize the difference between the treatments, how one should make inferential comparisons, how one should ...

Abstract Background In large multicentre trials in diverse settings, there is uncertainty about the need to adjust for centre variation design and analysis. A key distinction difference between outcome (independent of treatment) treatment effect. Through re-analysis CRASH-2 trial (2010), this study clarifies when how use multi-level models studies with binary outcomes. Methods randomised 20,127...

We determined the provision for dialysis treatment in Malaysia. There were 181 dialysis centres as at 1st June 1999 (161 Haemodialysis (HD) and 20 Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis (CAPD) centres), providing treatment for 5614 patients. This is equivalent to an estimated prevalence rate of 253 patients per million population (pmp) and new dialysis acceptance rate of 49 patients pmp. Dia...

Results Fifteen of 16 Paediatric Rheumatology centres responded to the survey. For initial treatment of patients with mild disease 13/15 centres report using a combination of steroids and methotrexate and 8/15 would also use IV methylprednisolone. For moderately severe disease all centres use steroids and methotrexate and 11/15 also use IV methylprednisolone. With severe weakness, ulceration or...

TB is a rare disease in many high-income countries, which leads to pressures for the pooling of expertise to larger centres [2]. This results in patients being treated in TB centres with higher case loads but greater distances for patients to travel. This study demonstrates that such merging has positive health benefits, as larger centres (load .26 cases?yr) had significantly higher completion ...