In an attempt to compare the epidemiology of severe S. pyogenes infection within Europe, prospective data were collected through the Strep-EURO programme. Surveillance of severe S. pyogenes infection diagnosed during 2003 and 2004 was undertaken in eleven countries across Europe using a standardised case definition and questionnaire. Patient data as well as bacterial isolates were collected and ch

OBJECTIVEWe sought to assess the association between maternal gestational physical activity and insulin action and body composition in early infancy.RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODSAt 28-32 weeks, gestation, pregnant women participating in an observational study in Sweden underwent assessments of height, weight, and body composition, an oral glucose tolerance test, and 10 days of objective physical act

BACKGROUND: Many Gram-positive pathogens aggregate and activate platelets in vitro and this has been proposed to contribute to virulence. Platelets can also form complexes with neutrophils but little is however known about platelet and platelet-neutrophil responses in bacterial infection. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We added isolates of Gram-positive bacteria from 38 patients with a bacteremi

Scand J Caring Sci; 2011 Online self-help tools for the relatives of persons with depression - a feasibility study Background: The Internet's potential as health care tool should be explored. Aim: One objective was to determine the feasibility of constructing a digitally based tool through an iterative design process in cooperation with potential users. The tool's purpose is to alleviate hardships

Developers, reviewers and users of human simulation tools claim that the use of these tools may reduce development time and development cost. However, before these benefits will be fully visible, there are some barriers to overcome. The aims of this case study are to identify which departments at Saab Automobile use some sort of human simulation tool today, and to identify the information flow and

During the past decades, scholars have attempted to reconstruct the history of a Johannine community through reading John's Gospel as a two-level drama. According to this understanding, the Gospel relates events that took place in the community after Jesus' earthly ministry, while these events are presented as a story about Jesus himself. The present essay evaluates this allegorical reading of the

Objective Nocturnal gastroesophageal reflux (nGER) has been associated with respiratory diseases. Our aim was to study a questionnaire method to identify nGER subjects with respiratory involvement in a general population. Material and methods A subgroup of Icelandic participants in the European Community Respiratory Health Survey III (ECRHS III) reporting symptoms of nGER (n = 48) as well as age a

The quantum theory of measurement has been with us since quantum mechanics (QM) was invented. It has recently been invigorated, partly due to the increasing interest in quantum information science. In this, partly pedagogical review, I attempt to give a self-contained overview of the basis of (non-relativistic) QM measurement theory expressed in density matrix formalism. I will not dwell on the ap

The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to examine how subjective experiences of engagement in patterns of daily occupations (gainful employment, domestic work, enjoyable and recreational occupations) were associated with perceived health among women of working age. The sample (n=488) was drawn from a longitudinal cohort study of women of working age in Gothenburg, Sweden. Participants we

Most text categorization methods use the vector space model in combination with a representation of documents based on bags of words. As its name indicates, bags of words ignore possible structures in the text and only take into account isolated, unrelated words. Although this limitation is widely acknowledged, most previous attempts to extend the bag-of-words model with more advanced approaches f

The World Health Organization (WHO) tuberculosis (TB) symptom screening instrument (WHO-TB) can identify human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected individuals at low risk of tuberculosis (TB); however, many patients report WHO-TB symptoms and require further TB investigations. We hypothesized that further clinical scoring could classify subjects with a positive WHO-TB screening result (WHO-TB(+)