Prognostic impact of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin interruption at the time of induction and consolidation.

Context: Intravesical Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is a cause of bladder and systemic toxicity that is difficult to prevent and is responsible for treatment drop out in bladder cancer patients. More recently, BCG shortage has become the main cause of incomplete treatment.

Aims: The aim of this study was to examine the impact on long-term prognosis of bladder cancer patients following discontinuation of BCG instillations.

Photonic bandgap fiber-based Surface Plasmon Resonance sensors.

The concept of photonic bandgap fiber-based surface plasmon resonance sensor operating with low refractive index analytes is developed. Plasmon wave on the surface of a thin metal film embedded into a fiber microstructure is excited by a leaky Gaussian-like core mode of a fiber. We demonstrate that by judicious design of the photonic crystal reflector, the effective refractive index of the core mode can be made considerably smaller than that of the core material, thus enabling efficient phase matching with a plasmon, high sensitivity, and high coupling efficiency from an external Gaussian source, at any wavelength of choice from the visible to near-IR.

[Use of the immunoenzyme test ELISA-NS3 to distinguish horses infected by African horsesickness virus from vaccinated horses].

A vaccination protocol involving three horses, with five repeated injections of inactivated serotype 4 African horse sickness virus, was undertaken to determine a possible threshold for the appearance of antibodies against the non-structural protein NS3. Using an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, with the recombinant NS3 protein as an antigen, the authors detected a response to NS3 as of the second injection for the first horse and after four injections for the second horse. No response to NS3 was detected for the third horse.

Clinical, virological and immune responses of normal and immunosuppressed donkeys (Equus asinus africanus) after inoculation with African horse sickness virus.

To elucidate the role that donkeys may play in African horse sickness virus (AHSV) persistence during inter-epizootic periods we looked for clinical signs of infection and studied the viraemia and neutralising antibody kinetics in 3 immunocompetent and 3 immunosuppressed donkeys inoculated with AHSV-4. None of the donkeys developed signs of AHS. However infectious AHSV was isolated from the blood of the immunocompetent donkeys for up to 17 days post infection (dpi) and viral antigens were detected for up to 28 dpi.

[Mycoplasma bovis infection: epidemiological and clinical survey of dairy cattle farms in Morocco].

An epidemiological survey of M bovis infection in dairy cattle was performed in 10 herds of the Gharb's region, by sampling the animals three times with a two-month interval, between November 1985 and May 1986. M bovis was isolated in six herds with calf enzootic bronchopneumonia with a total frequency of 39% during the first visit, then 25 and 13% after two and four months, respectively. The severity of the symptoms seems closely related to the age of the animals: the youngest being the most susceptible.