BACKGROUND There is increasing evidence that bird fanciers may develop airborne allergies to unusual allergens. OBJECTIVE To detect the allergen source in a bird fancier with a history of asthma associated with bird cage cleaning activities and with contact with a Brazil parrot. METHODS SPT with a large series of both airborne and food allergens were carried out. IgE reactivity to allergens...

The use of neonicotinoid seed treatments is a nearly ubiquitous practice in sunflower (Helianthus annuus) pest management. Sunflowers have a speciose pest complex, but also harbor a diverse and abundant community of beneficial, nontarget organisms which may be negatively affected by pest management practices. Here, we investigate how the foliar and subterranean arthropod pest communities in sun...

More people feed birds and other wildlife than hunt and fish combined. Despite its popularity, many bird-feeding traditions lack scientific data. We examined seed and feeder use by wild birds in the United States and Canada, and how seed use may change by season and geographic region. Between 2005 and 2008, 173 individuals from 38 states and 3 provinces in Canada made 20,077, 45-minute observat...

Oil massage of newborns has been practised for generations in the Indian sub-continent; however, oils may vary from potentially beneficial, e.g. sunflower seed oil, to potentially toxic, e.g. mustard oil. The study was carried out to gain insights into oil-massage practices and acceptability of skin barrier-enhancing emollients in young, preterm Bangladeshi neonates. Preterm infants of <33 week...

Natural oils are advocated and used throughout the world as part of neonatal skin care, but there is an absence of evidence to support this practice. The goal of the current study was to ascertain the effect of olive oil and sunflower seed oil on the biophysical properties of the skin. Nineteen adult volunteers with and without a history of atopic dermatitis were recruited into two randomized f...

Let n ≥ t ≥ 3. Suppose that F is a family of t-element subsets of [n] satisfying |F| > ( n t−1 )t−1 + o(nt−1). Our main result implies that there exists a t-element subset S of [n] such that {E ∩ S : E ∈ F} contains all 2-element subsets of S, and this is asymptotically sharp. When t = 3, we prove the same result whenever |F| > ⌊ (n−1)2 4 ⌋ , which is sharp for all n ≥ 3. Our proofs use the Erd...

Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) oil remains under-utilised albeit one of the major seed oils produced world-wide. Moreover, the high oleic sunflower varieties make the oil attractive for applications requiring high temperature processes and those targeting the C=C double bond functionality. Herein an overview of the recent developments in olefin metathesis of sunflower-based feedstocks is pres...

The purpose of the present study is to compare the tomato juice agar, a well known medium employed to observe ascospore formation, with niger seed agar, casein agar and sunflower seed agar, applied to a differentiation between C. dubliniensis and C. albicans. After 48 hours of incubation at 30 degrees C all 26 (100%) C. dubliniensis isolates tested produced chlamydospores on tomato juice agar a...