Publications by authors named "C Mees"

More and more events, such as the summer music festivals, are considering the possibilities for implementing on-site testing of psychoactive drugs in the context of prevention and harm reduction. Although the on-site identification is already implemented by plenty of drug checking services, the required rapid quantitative dosing of the composition of illicit substances is still a missing aspect for a successful harm reduction strategy at events. In this paper, an approach is presented to identify white powders as amphetamine, cocaine, ketamine or others and to estimate the purity of the amphetamine, cocaine and ketamine samples using spectroscopic techniques hyphenated with partial least squares (PLS) modelling.

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The threats of substandard and falsified (SF) antimicrobials, posed to public health, include serious adverse drug effects, treatment failures and even development of antimicrobial resistance. Next to these issues, it has no doubt that efficient methods for on-site screening are required to avoid that SF antimicrobials reach the patient or even infiltrate the legal supply chain. This study aims to develop a fast on-site screening method for SF antimicrobials using spectroscopic techniques (mid infrared, benchtop near infrared, portable near infrared and Raman spectroscopy) combined with chemometrics.

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Objectives: Epinephrine injection is the therapy of first choice in post sphincterotomy bleeding (PSB), but may not be efficient in all cases and can cause postprocedural myocardial infarction. Plastic stent insertion (PSI) may be a better treatment. The aim of this retrospective study was to compare epinephrine injection with PSI with respect to efficacy and safety.

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Abundant literature has been devoted to coffee beans (green or roasted) chemical description but relatively few studies have been devoted to coffee leaves. Given the fact that coffee leaves are used for food and medicinal consumption, it was of interest to develop a rapid screening method in order to identify coffee leaves taxa. Investigation by Fourier - Transform near infrared spectroscopy (FT-NIRS) was performed on nine Coffea taxa leaves harvested over one year in a tropical greenhouse of the Botanic Garden Meise (Belgium).

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