Meta-analyses of Culex blood-meals indicates strong regional effect on feeding patterns.

Understanding host utilization by mosquito vectors is essential to assess the risk of vector-borne diseases. Many studies have investigated the feeding patterns of Culex mosquitoes by molecular analysis of blood-meals from field collected mosquitoes. However, these individual small-scale studies only provide a limited understanding of the complex host-vector interactions when considered in isolation.

Enhanced enzymatic electrochemical detection of an organophosphate Pesticide: Achieving Wide linearity and femtomolar detection via gold nanoparticles growth within polypyrrole films.

The indiscriminate use of pesticides in agriculture demands the development of devices capable of monitoring contaminations in food supplies, in the environment and biological fluids. Simplicity, easy handling, high sensitivities, and low limits-of-detection (LOD) and quantification are some of the required properties for these devices. In this work, we evaluated the effect of incorporating gold nanoparticles into indigo carmine-doped polypyrrole during the electropolymerization of films for use as an acetylcholinesterase (AChE) enzyme-based biosensor.

Clinical Predictors of Major Intrathoracic Injury in Pediatric Blunt Trauma.

Objectives: Blunt trauma in pediatric patients accounts for a significant proportion of pediatric death from traumatic injury. Currently, there are no clinical decision-making tools available to guide imaging choice in the evaluation of pediatric patients with blunt thoracic trauma (BTT). This study aimed to analyze the rates of missed major intrathoracic injuries on chest x-ray (CXR) and identify clinical risk factors associated with major intrathoracic injuries to formulate a clinical decision-making tool for computed tomography (CT) use in pediatric patients with BTT.

The virome of the invasive Asian bush mosquito in Europe.

The Asian bush mosquito is rapidly invading North America and Europe. Due to its potential to transmit multiple pathogenic arthropod-borne (arbo)viruses including Zika virus, West Nile virus, and chikungunya virus, it is important to understand the biology of this vector mosquito in more detail. In addition to arboviruses, mosquitoes can also carry insect-specific viruses that are receiving increasing attention due to their potential effects on host physiology and arbovirus transmission.

Effect of glacial acetic acid treatment of liquid-based cytology collections on performance of Cervista HPV HR for detection of high-risk human papillomavirus.

Inadequate cervical cytological analysis can be facilitated by glacial acetic acid (GAA) treatment of primary liquid-based collections to remove mucus, erythrocytes, inflammatory cells, and cellular debris. In the context of a commercial human papillomavirus (HPV) hybridization assay performed on 465 tandem specimens with and without GAA treatment, we show that GAA treatment significantly reduces genomic DNA content (P < 0.0001) and creates an increased potential for indeterminate and false-negative results.