Long-Term Limiting Illness in the United Kingdom: Before and After the Covid Lockdown.

The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of LTLI in the UK between the pre- and post-Covid years of, respectively, 2019 and 2022 paying attention to differences in the propensity to LTLI between different subgroups of the population in each of the two years and then examining whether the propensity to LTLI changed between the years, both in respect of overall change and in respect of the separate population subgroups. This was achieved using UK Labour Force Survey data for 2019 and 2022. In terms of the social gradient to health, persons in the Managerial/Professional classes had a significantly higher PP (predicted probability) of N-LTI (i.

A Short-Read Amplicon Sequencing Protocol and Bioinformatic Pipeline for Ecological Surveillance of Dipteran Disease Vectors.

Vector control remains an important strategy worldwide to prevent human infection with pathogens transmitted by arthropods. Vector control strategies rely on accurate identification of vector taxa along with vector-specific biological indicators such as feeding ecology, infection prevalence and insecticide resistance. Multiple 'DNA barcoding' protocols have been published over the past several decades to support these applications, generally relying on informal manual approaches such as BLAST to assign taxonomic identity to the resulting sequences.

Do Children's Brains Function Differently During Book Reading and Screen Time? A fNIRS Study.

Previous research suggests that book reading and screen time have contrasting effects on language and brain development. However, few studies have explicitly investigated whether children's brains function differently during these two activities. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain response in 28 typically developing preschool-aged children (36-72 months old) during two conditions-a book reading condition, in which children listened to a story read by a live experimenter while viewing words and pictures in a book, and a screen time condition, in which children listened to a story that was played via an audio recording while viewing words and pictures on a screen.

Prolonged immune response to tick-borne Ehrlichia chaffeensis infection using a genetically modified live vaccine.

Ehrlichia chaffeensis, a tick transmitted rickettsial bacterium, causes monocytic ehrlichiosis in humans and dogs. Earlier, we demonstrated that dogs immunized with a mutant strain of E. chaffeensis having a functional disruption in the gene encoding the phage head-to-tail connector protein serves as a modified live vaccine (MLAV) capable of inducing immunity against intravenous and tick-transmitted infection challenges within one month of vaccination.