Aqueous extracts of Mucuna pruriens seeds were tested for their activity on various pharmacological effects like lethality, phospholipase activity, edema forming activity, fibrinolytic activity and haemorrhagic activity of of cobra and krait venoms. The aqueous extract displayed a significant inhibitory effect on the lethality, phospholipase activity, edema forming activity, fibrinolytic activi...

Losing or leaving a job often means losing health insurance. Of all those who have lost private insurance and become uninsured, one-third have either left or lost a job in the recent past. Continuation of coverage subsidies under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) of 1985 mitigate only slightly this problem due to the high costs of the group coverage that must be purchas...

Constrained optimization of high-dimensional numerical problems plays an important role in many scientific and industrial applications. Function evaluations in many industrial applications are severely limited and no analytical information about objective function and constraint functions is available. For such expensive black-box optimization tasks, the constraint optimization algorithm COBRA ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the oral bacterial flora associated with two common local venomous snakes in Hong Kong, namely the Chinese cobra (Naja atra) and the bamboo pit viper (Trimeresurus albolabris). DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING A non-government organisation and a regional hospital in Hong Kong. SUBJECTS Thirty-two Chinese cobras and seven bamboo pit vipers. MAIN OUTCOME MEASUR...

plete suppression of coagulation ; absence of contraction of clot ; very rapid darkening of colour, so that the substance of the specimen soon appears black and the surface of a very deep lake tint; very rapid solution of the bodies of the erythrocytes, and consequent liberation of nuclei where such bodies are present, and the occurrence of various degrees of reduction in the respiratory proper...

BACKGROUND Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza viruses continue to spread via waterfowl, causing lethal infections in humans. Vaccines can prevent the morbidity and mortality associated with pandemic influenza isolates. Predicting the specific isolate that may emerge from the 10 different H5N1 clades is a tremendous challenge for vaccine design. METHODS In this study, we generated a synthe...

Some constituents of snake venom have been found to display a variety of biological activities. The antibacterial property of snake venom, in particular, has gathered increasing scientific interest due to antibiotic resistance. In the present study, king cobra venom was screened against three strains of Staphylococcus aureus [including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)], three ...

This paper summarizes the workplan of the COBRA project*. Thereby it emphasizes the work concerning our prototyping environment with special benefit for hardware/software codesign which we use as target architecture in COBRA. This architecture is very flexible, easy extensible, and provides a high gate capacity. It supports standard processor integration as well as processor emulation.