Bars will reopen across Hong Kong on Friday after a month-long coronavirus shutdown, as Lan Kwai Fong venues prepare to slash prices and the nightlife hub’s founder predicts takings as low as half normal levels.More than 100 frontline workers have been tested for the virus as part of the Central party zone’s relaunch, which comes as the government eases social-distancing restrictions in response to the improving Covid-19 situation in the city.Pubs and bars will only be allowed to operate half…

China Evergrande’s weekend sale of its Emerald Bay flats in Tuen Mun has flopped for the third time in as many months, as Hong Kong’s homebuyers shunned its meagre discounts in anticipation of further price declines.The developer managed to find buyers for 41 flats, or 12 per cent of the 335 units on offer at 8:30pm, according to sales agents.In March, the developer sold 49 of 141 flats when it launched the project in the midst of the city’s coronavirus outbreak, at a time when social…

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities and revealed to what extent current economic models are not sustainable. It has also shown that most countries are not equipped to cope with a health crisis. The World Food Program is warning that the lives and livelihoods of 265 million people in low and middle-income countries will be […]

The post The Unseen Link Between Clean Cooking and the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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Coronavirus emergency erupted in Italy in late February, during Milan's Fashion Week, causing some designers to present their runway shows without audiences.

Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande collaborated for the timely song with a star-studded music video featuring contributions from people across the globe

The profile photo on the Kensington Royal Twitter and Instagram pages was changed to an image of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children

Britain plans to introduce a 14-day mandatory quarantine for most international arrivals, reports said Saturday, despite growing pressure on the government to relax virus lockdown measures.

To level the playing field in Asia and the Pacific, women-owned companies need financial backing to support their importing and exporting needs.

"Eight," the new single by singer IU and Suga, a member of boy band Bangtan Boys, also known as BTS, swept many global music charts shortly after its release on Wednesday."Eight" reached No. 1 on major music-streaming sites here including Melon. It also topped iTunes charts in some 59 countries.The ...

Rawalpindi : The Public Facilitation Centre of Rawalpindi Cantonment Board , during the last seven days, received 163 complaints regarding electricity, water supply and sanitation problems in the cantonment areas and resolved 90 of them.According to RCB spokesman, Qaiser Mehmood, the RCB’s...

Rawalpindi : Merchants while lauding decision of the government for relaxing coronavirus lockdown took a sigh of relief as Eid season is around the corner. For the last few weeks specifically following the advent of the holy month of Ramazan, there were reports that merchants were treating...

The Sindh High Court has directed the home department to decide the representation of a proscribed organisation’s activist against his 90 days’ detention under the Maintenance of Public Order within a week.The activist, Abdul Hameed Bugti, had been recently released in the Pakistan...

A language reclamation activist confronts linguistic imperialism and the dehumanisation of two South African first languages through digital inclusion advocacy.

Comprising 50% of our global employee population, engineers are behind many of HARMAN’s market-leading connected technologies and innovations. Our engineers work hard each and every day to connect the world through state-of-the-art products and...

When the nightclub in which she touted for business in southern Chile was shut down by the authorities as the new coronavirus spread, sex worker Camila Hormazabal was left without access to her sole...

Green seaweed fossils found in a billion-year-old rock are the oldest complex plants discovered, and may have given rise to plants that evolved to live on land

U.S. money market fund assets increased by $72.69 billion to $4.652 trillion in the week ended April 28, the Money Fund Report said on Wednesday.

U.S. money market fund assets increased by $37.80 billion to $4.690 trillion in the week ended May 5, the Money Fund Report said on Wednesday.

U.S.-based stock funds posted $10.8 billion in outflows in the week ended ON Wednesday, according to Lipper.

By understanding garlic's chemistry we can amp up its pungency in a fiery garlic sauce or tame it through gentle cooking to make mellow garlic confit, says Sam Wong

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday he aims to present plans next week to reopen the economy, as key sectors like carmaking look to begin business again after over a month of quarantine measures to curb the coronavirus outbreak.

Our top photos from the past week.

Our top photos from the past week.

Our top photos from the past week.

A robot that uses artificial intelligence to find and remove weeds could eventually be used as an alternative to chemical insecticides

Slow-moving underwater currents are leading to build ups of microplastics in biologically rich areas on the sea floor

Many countries are focusing coronavirus testing on people who have covid-19 symptoms. But regularly testing all essential workers would have more of an impact

As you may already know, we have rescheduled the SAS 2020 conference for November 18-21. However, we cannot just leave it all until November, that's why we invite you to SAS at Home, a series of webinars scheduled to kick off very soon, on the 28th-30th of April.

Title: Leprosy May Pass Between Armadillos and People
Category: Health News
Created: 4/28/2011 11:01:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 4/28/2011 12:00:00 AM

Title: Study Finds Direct Link Between Obesity, Heart Disease
Category: Health News
Created: 5/2/2012 10:05:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/2/2012 12:00:00 AM

Title: No Link Found Between Playing Football in Hot Weather, Concussion Risk
Category: Health News
Created: 4/28/2014 4:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 4/29/2014 12:00:00 AM

Title: No Link Between Anti-Smoking Drugs, Mental Health Issues: Study
Category: Health News
Created: 4/22/2016 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 4/25/2016 12:00:00 AM

Title: The Surprising Benefits of Weekend Workouts
Category: Health News
Created: 5/3/2019 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/3/2019 12:00:00 AM

Title: AHA News: The Often-Overlooked Connection Between Sleep Troubles and Stroke
Category: Health News
Created: 5/2/2019 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/3/2019 12:00:00 AM

Title: A Surprising Way to Make a Sweet Treat Taste Even Sweeter
Category: Health News
Created: 4/24/2020 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 4/27/2020 12:00:00 AM

After a week seeing cancer patients with COVID-19 as the inpatient consult attending, Don Dizon finds himself more emotionally exhausted than he's ever been before.

Dr Harpreet Bajaj summarizes the known and unknown links between diabetes and COVID-19, focusing on three clinical questions.

Collaboration with publishers and funders to ensure the openness and preservation of the scientific record is one of PMC’s core principles. Open Access Week offers an opportunity to celebrate some of the recent outcomes of these collaborations:

• In July 2018, the PMC corpus of publicly accessible articles hit 5 million articles.
• In May 2018, the PMC Open Access Subset surpassed the 2 million article mark.
• The Author Manuscript Collection now includes more than 500,000 papers for text mining.
• The PMC and Research Funder Policy page underwent an update in September 2018 to increase transparency around funder support in PMC for publishers, authors, and the public.
• Funder policy support in PMC has been extended to the US Department of Homeland Security, in addition to several new US private research funders via the Health Research Alliance.

In FY2018 more than 200 new journals committed to archiving their complete contents in PMC, to be made publicly accessible in 12 months or less.

Purpose: Oral and craniofacial conditions or diseases can impact an individual's health and quality of life. The purpose of this study was to assess the perceived oral health related quality of life (OHRQoL) of children, and evaluate the reported level of agreement between caregivers and their children.Methods: Purposive sampling was used to recruit children ages 8-15, and their caregivers from a dental clinic in a pediatric hospital for this descriptive, cross-sectional study. A modified version of a validated measure, Child Oral Health Impact Profile-Short Form (COHIP-SF), was used for a 22-item questionnaire encompassing three subscales: oral health, functional well-being, and social emotional well-being. Two additional items were included to assess child/caregiver's level of agreement. A dental chart review was also conducted to assess the child's overbite, overjet, and decayed surfaces. Data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and examined for assumptions of normality and linearity.Results: Sixty child/caregiver pairs (n=120) participated in this study. Overbite, overjet and decayed surfaces were not found to be related to any OHRQoL variable, including child/caregiver ratings and overall agreement (p>.05). Average OHRQoL scores for caregivers found to be more positive those of their children (p=.02). Agreement between caregivers and the child's gender was shown to be significant (p=.01). Female child scores differed significantly from males with respect to their caregiver responses (p=.02). Caregivers rated a higher OHRQoL for female children, thus overestimating their female child's reported OHRQoL.Conclusions: The moderate level of agreement found between children and caregivers reinforces the importance of including the child, as well as the caregiver, when assessing OHRQoL.

ABSTRACT

Many HIV prevention strategies are currently under consideration where it is highly informative to know the study participants’ times of infection. These can be estimated using viral sequence data sampled early in infection. However, there are several scenarios that, if not addressed, can skew timing estimates. These include multiple transmitted/founder (TF) viruses, APOBEC (apolipoprotein B mRNA editing enzyme, catalytic polypeptide-like)-mediated mutational enrichment, and recombination. Here, we suggest a pipeline to identify these problems and resolve the biases that they introduce. We then compare two modeling strategies to obtain timing estimates from sequence data. The first, Poisson Fitter (PF), is based on a Poisson model of random accumulation of mutations relative to the TF virus (or viruses) that established the infection. The second uses a coalescence-based phylogenetic strategy as implemented in BEAST. The comparison is based on timing predictions using plasma viral RNA (cDNA) sequence data from 28 simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV)-infected animals for which the exact day of infection is known. In this particular setting, based on nucleotide sequences from samples obtained in early infection, the Poisson method yielded more accurate, more precise, and unbiased estimates for the time of infection than did the explored implementations of BEAST.

IMPORTANCE The inference of the time of infection is a critical parameter in testing the efficacy of clinical interventions in protecting against HIV-1 infection. For example, in clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of passively delivered antibodies (Abs) for preventing infections, accurate time of infection data are essential for discerning levels of the Abs required to confer protection, given the natural Ab decay rate in the human body. In such trials, genetic sequences from early in the infection are regularly sampled from study participants, generally prior to immune selection, when the viral population is still expanding and genetic diversity is low. In this particular setting of early viral growth, the Poisson method is superior to the alternative approach based on coalescent methods. This approach can also be applied in human vaccine trials, where accurate estimates of infection times help ascertain if vaccine-elicited immune protection wanes over time.

ABSTRACT

Intracellular bacterial pathogens remodel cellular functions during their infectious cycle via the coordinated actions of effector molecules delivered through dedicated secretion systems. While the function of many individual effectors is known, how they interact to promote pathogenesis is rarely understood. The zoonotic bacterium Brucella abortus, the causative agent of brucellosis, delivers effector proteins via its VirB type IV secretion system (T4SS) which mediate biogenesis of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-derived replicative Brucella-containing vacuole (rBCV). Here, we show that T4SS effectors BspB and RicA display epistatic interactions in Brucella replication. Defects in rBCV biogenesis and Brucella replication caused by deletion of bspB were dependent on the host GTPase Rab2a and suppressed by the deletion of ricA, indicating a role of Rab2-binding effector RicA in these phenotypic defects. Rab2a requirements for rBCV biogenesis and Brucella intracellular replication were abolished upon deletion of both bspB and ricA, demonstrating that the functional interaction of these effectors engages Rab2-dependent transport in the Brucella intracellular cycle. Expression of RicA impaired host secretion and caused Golgi fragmentation. While BspB-mediated changes in ER-to-Golgi transport were independent of RicA and Rab2a, BspB-driven alterations in Golgi vesicular traffic also involved RicA and Rab2a, defining BspB and RicA’s functional interplay at the Golgi interface. Altogether, these findings support a model where RicA modulation of Rab2a functions impairs Brucella replication but is compensated by BspB-mediated remodeling of Golgi apparatus-associated vesicular transport, revealing an epistatic interaction between these T4SS effectors.

IMPORTANCE Bacterial pathogens with an intracellular lifestyle modulate many host cellular processes to promote their infectious cycle. They do so by delivering effector proteins into host cells via dedicated secretion systems that target specific host functions. While the roles of many individual effectors are known, how their modes of action are coordinated is rarely understood. Here, we show that the zoonotic bacterium Brucella abortus delivers the BspB effector that mitigates the negative effect on bacterial replication that the RicA effector exerts via modulation of the host small GTPase Rab2. These findings provide an example of functional integration between bacterial effectors that promotes proliferation of pathogens.

ABSTRACT

The human gut microbiota (HGM) has far-reaching impacts on human health and nutrition, which are fueled primarily by the metabolism of otherwise indigestible complex carbohydrates commonly known as dietary fiber. However, the molecular basis of the ability of individual taxa of the HGM to address specific dietary glycan structures remains largely unclear. In particular, the utilization of β(1,3)-glucans, which are widespread in the human diet as yeast, seaweed, and plant cell walls, had not previously been resolved. Through a systems-based approach, here we show that the symbiont Bacteroides uniformis deploys a single, exemplar polysaccharide utilization locus (PUL) to access yeast β(1,3)-glucan, brown seaweed β(1,3)-glucan (laminarin), and cereal mixed-linkage β(1,3)/β(1,4)-glucan. Combined biochemical, enzymatic, and structural analysis of PUL-encoded glycoside hydrolases (GHs) and surface glycan-binding proteins (SGBPs) illuminates a concerted molecular system by which B. uniformis recognizes and saccharifies these distinct β-glucans. Strikingly, the functional characterization of homologous β(1,3)-glucan utilization loci (1,3GUL) in other Bacteroides further demonstrated that the ability of individual taxa to utilize β(1,3)-glucan variants and/or β(1,3)/β(1,4)-glucans arises combinatorially from the individual specificities of SGBPs and GHs at the cell surface, which feed corresponding signals to periplasmic hybrid two-component sensors (HTCSs) via TonB-dependent transporters (TBDTs). These data reveal the importance of cooperativity in the adaptive evolution of GH and SGBP cohorts to address individual polysaccharide structures. We anticipate that this fine-grained knowledge of PUL function will inform metabolic network analysis and proactive manipulation of the HGM. Indeed, a survey of 2,441 public human metagenomes revealed the international, yet individual-specific, distribution of each 1,3GUL.

IMPORTANCE Bacteroidetes are a dominant phylum of the human gut microbiota (HGM) that target otherwise indigestible dietary fiber with an arsenal of polysaccharide utilization loci (PULs), each of which is dedicated to the utilization of a specific complex carbohydrate. Here, we provide novel insight into this paradigm through functional characterization of homologous PULs from three autochthonous Bacteroides species, which target the family of dietary β(1,3)-glucans. Through detailed biochemical and protein structural analysis, we observed an unexpected diversity in the substrate specificity of PUL glycosidases and glycan-binding proteins with regard to β(1,3)-glucan linkage and branching patterns. In combination, these individual enzyme and protein specificities support taxon-specific growth on individual β(1,3)-glucans. This detailed metabolic insight, together with a comprehensive survey of individual 1,3GULs across human populations, further expands the fundamental roadmap of the HGM, with potential application to the future development of microbial intervention therapies.