BACKGROUND We assessed the impact of 12 years of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) use on pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage and serotype-specific invasive disease potential among Native Americans. METHODS Families were enrolled in a carriage study from 2006 to 2008; nasopharyngeal specimens and risk factor information were collected monthly for 7 visits. Pneumococcal carriage prevalenc...

This study examined the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant clones that belong to serotypes not included in the pneumococcal conjugate vaccines and that cause a significant percentage of acute otitis media (AOM) in children in southern Israel. During 1998-2001, 2467 pneumococcal isolates, obtained from middle-ear fluid of children <3 years old with AOM, were characterized by antimicrobial suscep...

BACKGROUND The long-term effects of selective pressure from conjugate pneumococcal vaccine on the serotype distribution and antimicrobial resistance of carriage and invasive isolates of Streptococcus pneumoniae are unknown. Early changes demonstrate a reduction in vaccine serotypes and an increase in nonvaccine serotypes (NVT) among both carriage and invasive isolates. Ongoing surveillance is n...

This paper presents our initial results in a new approach to vocal tract normalization (VTN). In experiments based on continuous automatic speech recognition (ASR) the VTN procedure is in general carried out in both training and test phase. In the training phase it is used to obtain speaker independent acoustic models of phones. In the test phase it is used to convert input observations into ob...

BACKGROUND Recently, we reported that urinary 8-hydroxy-2'-deoxyguanosine (U-8-OHdG), an oxidative stress marker, reflected inflammatory activity in cardiac sarcoidosis (CS). Here, we investigated whether U-8-OHdG levels were associated with ventricular tachycardia (VT) in patients with CS. METHODS AND RESULTS This prospective cohort study enrolled 62 consecutive patients with CS, of whom 36 ...

This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of a reduced-dose 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) primary series followed by a 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (23vPPS) booster on nasopharyngeal (NP) pneumococcal carriage. For this purpose, Fijian infants aged 6 weeks were randomized to receive 0, 1, 2, or 3 PCV doses. Within each group, half received 23vPPS at 12 mon...

We present an atomistic potential for BiFeO(3) based on the principles of bond-valence (BV) and bond-valence vector (BVV) conservation. The validity of this model potential is tested for both canonical ensemble (NVT) and isobaric-isothermal ensemble (NPT) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The model reproduces the ferroelectric-to-paraelectric phase transition in both NVT and NPT MD simulati...

Molecular dynamics simulations of liquid systems under planar elongational flow have mainly been performed in the NVT ensemble. However, in most material processing techniques and common experimental settings, at least one surface of the fluid is kept in contact with the atmosphere, thus maintaining the sample in the NpT ensemble. For this reason, an implementation of the Nose-Hoover integral-f...