Publications by authors named "P Schembri"

Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the stress and inflammatory responses of tourism carriage horses in Sicily by analyzing blood samples before and after a typical workday in the summer months of 2022.
  • Results showed an increase in certain red blood cell indices after work, but cortisol and protein levels remained stable, indicating the horses may be adapting to the workload.
  • However, higher stress levels were noted during July due to increased temperature and humidity, suggesting it is better to avoid working these horses during the hottest parts of the summer.
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Hepatitis E is considered an emerging foodborne disease in Europe. Several types of foods are implicated in the transmission of the hepatitis E virus (HEV) to humans, in particular, pork and wild boar products. We developed a parametric stochastic model to estimate the risk of foodborne exposure to HEV in the Italian population and to rank the relevance of pork products with and without liver (PL and PNL, respectively), leafy vegetables, shellfish and raw milk in HEV transmission.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A study of 585 pigs at 4 Italian abattoirs found 3.6% tested positive for HEV, with liver showing higher contamination than muscle tissue.
  • * High seroprevalence (76.8%) indicates widespread exposure to the virus among pigs, with phylogenetic analysis revealing circulation of HEV genotype 3c and a new subtype.
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Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an emerging causative agent of acute hepatitis worldwide. To provide insights into the epidemiology of HEV in Italy, a large-scale investigation was conducted into urban sewage over nine years (2011-2019), collecting 1374 sewage samples from 48 wastewater treatment plants located in all the 20 regions of Italy. Broadly reactive primers targeting the ORF1 and ORF2 regions were used for the detection and typing of HEV, followed by Sanger and next generation sequencing (NGS).

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In this paper, we investigate the effect, in terms of amplitude and latency, of the P300 component in a separate active and passive task response condition. This work is based on the P300 speller BCI (oddball) paradigm and the xDAWN algorithm, with five healthy subjects; while using a noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) based on low fidelity electroencephalographic (EEG) equipment. Our results suggest that an active task yielded a larger P300 peak amplitude while there was no discriminable difference in the peak latency.

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