Serum-complement-mediated bactericidal antibody (SBA) remains the serologic hallmark of protection against meningococcal disease, despite experimental and epidemiologic data that SBA may underestimate immunity. We measured bactericidal activity against three strains of Neisseria meningitidis group B in sera from 48 healthy adults and in whole blood from 15 subjects. Blood was anticoagulated wit...

BACKGROUND Having a health worker with midwifery skills present at delivery is one of the key interventions to reduce maternal and newborn mortality. We sought to estimate the frequencies of (a) skilled birth attendant coverage, (b) institutional delivery, and (c) the combination of place of delivery and type of attendant, in LMICs. METHODS National surveys (DHS and MICS) performed in 80 LMIC...

Service based architecture (SBA) is a paradigm shift from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to microservices, combining their principles. Network virtualization enables the application of SBA in cellular systems. To better guide software design this virtualized system with SBA, paper presents perspective and positional approach using fundamental development principles for adapting Radio Acces...

We have analyzed in organotypic rat visual cortex cultures the way in which expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) mRNA depends on synaptically generated spontaneous bioelectric activity (SBA) as monitored by recordings of pyramidal cells. SBA was initially low, but from the fourth week onwards 83% of the neurons fired action potentials at 0.2-1.2 impulses/s in a well-balanced s...

BACKGROUND Recipients of serogroup-C glycoconjugate meningococcal vaccine (MCC) exhibit waning of serum bactericidal antibody (SBA) titers, but the rate of decline and the speed of their immunological memory in response to new meningococcal nasopharyngeal colonization are unknown. METHODS In a prospective challenge study, we measured persistence of SBA and anti-Neisseria meningitidis serogrou...

Increasingly, policymakers look to the small business sector as a potential engine of economic growth. Policies to promote small businesses include tax relief, direct subsidies, and indirect subsidies through government lending programs. Encouraging lending to small business is the primary policy objective of the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) loan-guarantee program. Using a panel data s...

Sparse Bundle Adjustment (SBA) is a method for simultaneously optimizing a set of camera poses and visible points. It exploits the sparse primary structure of the problem, where connections exist just between points and cameras. In this paper, we implement an efficient version of SBA for systems where the secondary structure (relations among cameras) is also sparse. The method, which we call Sp...

Suprapubic bladder aspiration (SBA) has proved to be a useful and safe method in avoiding contamination when urine samples are taken from children. The following complications have been reported: suprapubic haematoma (Nelson and Peters, 1965), haematuria (Lanier and Daeschner, 1971), and suprapubic abscess (Polnay et al., 1975). A 4i-month-old boy developed a suprapubic abscess after an unsucce...

Mesoporous silica, SBA-15 was successfully functionalized with quinoline moiety, and was applied as a matrix in the MALDI-TOF-MS analysis of small molecules. The modified SBA-15 material [SBA-15-8-(3-(triethoxysilyl)propoxy) quinoline, SBA-15-8QSi] was obtained by using calcined SBA-15 and 8-hydroxy quinoline. The structure of the functionalized mesoporous material was systemically characterize...

Mouse bone marrow and spleen cells agglutinated by soybean agglutinin (SBA) or peanut agglutinin (PNA) were previously shown to be enriched for spleen colony-forming cells (CFU-S) and sufficiently depleted of graft-versus-host reaction producing cells to allow hematologic reconstitution of lethally irradiated allogeneic recipient mice. A similar enrichment for cells capable of forming colonies ...