In-situ fluorescence spectroscopy is a more rapid and resilient indicator of faecal contamination risk in drinking water than faecal indicator organisms.

Faecal indicator organisms (FIOs) are limited in their ability to protect public health from the microbial contamination of drinking water because of their transience and time required to deliver a result. We evaluated alternative rapid, and potentially more resilient, approaches against a benchmark FIO of thermotolerant coliforms (TTCs) to characterise faecal contamination over 14 months at 40 groundwater sources in a Ugandan town. Rapid approaches included: in-situ tryptophan-like fluorescence (TLF), humic-like fluorescence (HLF), turbidity; sanitary inspections; and total bacterial cells by flow cytometry.

Microstructural differences in the thalamus and thalamic radiations in the congenitally deaf.

There is evidence of both crossmodal and intermodal plasticity in the deaf brain. Here, we investigated whether sub-cortical plasticity, specifically of the thalamus, contributed to this reorganisation. We contrasted diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging data from 13 congenitally deaf and 13 hearing participants, all of whom had learnt British Sign Language after 10 years of age.

Ocular pathology in multiple sclerosis: retinal atrophy and inflammation irrespective of disease duration.

There has been growing interest in the use of retinal imaging for tracking disease progression in multiple sclerosis. However, systematic and detailed pathological descriptions of retinal tissue in multiple sclerosis are lacking. Graded, histological evaluations on eyes from 82 patients with multiple sclerosis and 10 subjects with other neurological diseases, with immunohistochemistry on a subset, were performed and correlated with clinical and pathological findings.

Atypical reactive proliferation of endocervix: a common lesion associated with endometrial carcinoma and likely related to prior endometrial sampling.

We describe a common, but hitherto not well described, reactive change of the endocervical surface epithelium, commonly seen in association with endometrial carcinoma, and which we term 'atypical reactive proliferation'. This lesion, especially when florid, has the potential to be misinterpreted as a manifestation of a stage 2A endometrial cancer (endocervical glandular involvement). We examined the cervical sections in 80 consecutive hysterectomy specimens of endometrial cancer.