Publications by authors named "Megan Carey"

Introduction: Non-typhoidal (NTS) serovars are the leading global cause of gastroenteritis and have established reservoirs in food animals.

Gap Statement: Due to a lack of surveillance, there is limited information on the distribution of NTS serovars in India.

Aim: Here, we investigated the epidemiology, sequence types, serovar distribution, phylogenetic relatedness, and antimicrobial resistance patterns of NTS in humans and animals across a large geographic area in Northern India.

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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a serious threat to the clinical management of typhoid fever. AMR in Salmonella Typhi (S. Typhi) is commonly associated with the H58 lineage, a lineage that arose comparatively recently before becoming globally disseminated.

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Article Synopsis
  • * The Pediatric Device Consortia (PDC) aims to conduct a scoping review to identify barriers and facilitators for clinical research infrastructure in pediatric medical devices by analyzing relevant healthcare literature across multiple databases.
  • * The study will include various published research types focused on pediatric populations, utilizing software for data management, with findings intended for dissemination through academic publications and conferences.
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Supervised learning depends on instructive signals that shape the output of neural circuits to support learned changes in behavior. Climbing fiber (CF) inputs to the cerebellar cortex represent one of the strongest candidates in the vertebrate brain for conveying neural instructive signals. However, recent studies have shown that Purkinje cell stimulation can also drive cerebellar learning and the relative importance of these two neuron types in providing instructive signals for cerebellum-dependent behaviors remains unresolved.

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Background: Typhoid Fever remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality in low-income settings. The Severe Typhoid in Africa programme was designed to address regional gaps in typhoid burden data and identify populations eligible for interventions using novel typhoid conjugate vaccines.

Methods: A hybrid design, hospital-based prospective surveillance with population-based health-care utilisation surveys, was implemented in six countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

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The olivo-cerebellar system plays an important role in vertebrate sensorimotor control. Here, we investigate sensory representations in the inferior olive (IO) of larval zebrafish and their spatial organization. Using single-cell labeling of genetically identified IO neurons, we find that they can be divided into at least two distinct groups based on their spatial location, dendritic morphology, and axonal projection patterns.

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The cerebellum.

Curr Biol

January 2024

The cerebellum, that stripey 'little brain', sits at the back of your head, under your visual cortex, and contains more than half of the neurons in your entire nervous system. The cerebellum is highly conserved across vertebrates, and its evolutionary expansion has tended to proceed in concert with expansion of cerebral cortex. The crystalline neuronal architecture of the cerebellar cortex was first described by Cajal a century ago, and its functional connectivity was elucidated in exquisite anatomical and physiological detail by the mid-20 century.

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Neurons coordinate their activity to produce an astonishing variety of motor behaviors. Our present understanding of motor control has grown rapidly thanks to new methods for recording and analyzing populations of many individual neurons over time. In contrast, current methods for recording the nervous system's actual motor output - the activation of muscle fibers by motor neurons - typically cannot detect the individual electrical events produced by muscle fibers during natural behaviors and scale poorly across species and muscle groups.

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Article Synopsis
  • Associative learning in delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) relies heavily on the cerebellum, raising questions about how cerebellar nuclei contribute to this learning process.
  • Research shows that stimulating mossy fiber inputs can act as a conditioned stimulus, effectively prompting well-timed conditioned responses in mice.
  • Structural changes in synaptic inputs occur during EBC, specifically in mossy fibers and inhibitory inputs, which enhance the processing abilities of cerebellar nuclei neurons, thereby supporting learning and adaptive responses.
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Since its emergence in 2016, extensively drug resistant (XDR) Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S. Typhi) has become the dominant cause of typhoid fever in Pakistan. The establishment of sustained XDR S.

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Invasive non-typhoidal disease (iNTS) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality globally, particularly as a cause of bloodstream infection in children and immunocompromised adults in sub-Saharan Africa. Vaccines to prevent non-typhoidal (NTS) would represent a valuable public health tool in this setting to avert cases and prevent expansion of antimicrobial resistance. Several NTS and combination typhoidal-NTS vaccine candidates are in early-stage development, although the pathway to licensure is unclear due to challenges in conducting large phase III field trials.

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Background: The Global Typhoid Genomics Consortium was established to bring together the typhoid research community to aggregate and analyse serovar Typhi (Typhi) genomic data to inform public health action. This analysis, which marks 22 years since the publication of the first Typhi genome, represents the largest Typhi genome sequence collection to date (n=13,000).

Methods: This is a meta-analysis of global genotype and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) determinants extracted from previously sequenced genome data and analysed using consistent methods implemented in open analysis platforms GenoTyphi and Pathogenwatch.

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Background: Toxocariasis, caused the by dog and cat roundworm, is one of the most common zoonotic helminth infections in the United States and can lead to severe lifelong morbidity in children. Although historical seroprevalence studies have identified a high frequency of toxocariasis regionally in the United States, there are few studies linking epidemiology and clinical disease in children. The study objective was to examine the contemporary epidemiology of pediatric toxocariasis within an endemic US region.

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A 20-year-old female with depression presented to the emergency department with chronic weight loss, weakness, fatigue, hair loss, rash, palpitations, and 2 weeks of cough. Initial history revealed that she had disordered eating habits with dietary restriction, experienced a 50-pound unintentional weight loss over 2 years despite reported adherence to nutritional supplementation, and had a normal gastrointestinal workup. On examination, she was markedly cachectic with a BMI of 10.

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Article Synopsis
  • The global response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic underscored the importance of sharing genomic data with standardized information for tracking new variants.
  • The text advocates for the importance of sharing genomic data specifically for Typhi (the bacteria that causes typhoid fever) and highlights available platforms that aid in this effort.
  • Key initiatives mentioned include the Africa CDC's Pathogen Genomics Initiative, SEQAFRICA, Typhi Pathogenwatch, TyphiNET, and the Global Typhoid Genomics Consortium, which support the analysis and visualization of Typhi genomic data in Africa and beyond.
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Typhoid fever is a serious disease that disproportionately impacts children in low-resource settings in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific. The prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant strains of Typhi continue to increase worldwide. Two safe, effective, and cost-effective typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCVs) are World Health Organization-prequalified for the prevention of typhoid fever in children as young as 6 months.

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Background: Interactions among genetic variants are rarely studied but may explain a part of the variability in patient outcomes.

Objectives: In this study, we aimed to identify 1 to 3 way interactions among SNPs from five Wnt protein interaction networks that predict the 5-year recurrence risk in a cohort of stage I-III colorectal cancer patients.

Methods: 423 patients recruited to the Newfoundland Familial Colorectal Cancer Registry were included.

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Neurons coordinate their activity to produce an astonishing variety of motor behaviors. Our present understanding of motor control has grown rapidly thanks to new methods for recording and analyzing populations of many individual neurons over time. In contrast, current methods for recording the nervous system's actual motor output - the activation of muscle fibers by motor neurons - typically cannot detect the individual electrical events produced by muscle fibers during natural behaviors and scale poorly across species and muscle groups.

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Background: The ability of the autonomic nervous system's stress response to impair aspects of cognitive flexibility is known. However, the ability to modulate the sympathetic response and improve these cognitive impairments via nonpharmacological intervention, such as paced breathing (PB), requires further investigation.

Objective: To better elucidate the effects of PB on cognition.

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SNP interactions may explain the variable outcome risk among colorectal cancer patients. Examining SNP interactions is challenging, especially with large datasets. Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR)-based programs may address this problem.

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Purpose Of Review: Momentum for achieving widespread control of typhoid fever has been growing over the past decade. Typhoid conjugate vaccines represent a potentially effective tool to reduce the burden of disease in the foreseeable future and new data have recently emerged to better frame their use-case.

Recent Findings: We describe how antibiotic resistance continues to pose a major challenge in the treatment of typhoid fever, as exemplified by the emergence of azithromycin resistance and the spread of Salmonella Typhi strains resistant to third-generation cephalosporins.

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Background: The aim of clinical peer review (PR) is to improve facility health care quality. However, prior authors have shown that PR may be biased, have rater reliability concerns, or be used for punitive reasons. It is important to determine whether facility PR processes are related to objective facility quality of care.

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Article Synopsis
  • Typhoid fever in Santiago, Chile saw a drastic reduction in cases from 128-220 per 100,000 people in the 1980s to less than 8 per 100,000 from the 1990s onwards due to targeted public health interventions.
  • Whole genome sequencing was used to compare the S. Typhi bacteria from the hyperendemic period of the 1980s to that of the nonendemic 2010s, revealing that the genotypes causing illness remained largely unchanged.
  • The persistence of certain historical genotypes suggests that chronic carriers from the 1980s may be responsible for the reoccurrence of the same strains, demonstrating a link between past and present typhoid cases
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