Away from home, into the fields: Assessing the health of undocumented and indigenous farmworkers.

A large and growing literature argues that the agricultural labor market is stratified by ethnicity and legal status. However, other markers of distinction, such as indigeneity, may overlap with legal status to reveal additional health inequalities. Our study contributes to this scholarly dialogue by assessing the relation between indigeneity, legality, and health among immigrant-origin farmworkers from Latin America.

Long-term clinical outcomes of keratoplasty using gamma-irradiated corneal lenticules.

Objective: To report long-term clinical outcomes of gamma-irradiated corneal lenticules in partial and full-thickness keratoplasty.

Methods And Analysis: This multicentre, retrospective case series includes 23 patients who underwent surgery at three centres (India, Guatemala, and USA) between May 2009 and March 2018. The main outcome measures were epithelialization and retention for therapeutic keratoplasty and best spectacle-corrected visual acuity (BSCVA) for optical keratoplasty.

Laboratory validation of a clinical metagenomic sequencing assay for pathogen detection in cerebrospinal fluid.

Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) for pan-pathogen detection has been successfully tested in proof-of-concept case studies in patients with acute illness of unknown etiology but to date has been largely confined to research settings. Here, we developed and validated a clinical mNGS assay for diagnosis of infectious causes of meningitis and encephalitis from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in a licensed microbiology laboratory. A customized bioinformatics pipeline, SURPI+, was developed to rapidly analyze mNGS data, generate an automated summary of detected pathogens, and provide a graphical user interface for evaluating and interpreting results.

Upregulation of Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K Is Linked to Immunity and Inflammation in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension.

Background: Immune dysregulation has been linked to occlusive vascular remodeling in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) that is hereditary, idiopathic, or associated with other conditions. Circulating autoantibodies, lung perivascular lymphoid tissue, and elevated cytokines have been related to PAH pathogenesis but without a clear understanding of how these abnormalities are initiated, perpetuated, and connected in the progression of disease. We therefore set out to identify specific target antigens in PAH lung immune complexes as a starting point toward resolving these issues to better inform future application of immunomodulatory therapies.