BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE Group A streptococcus (GAS) causes a wide array of human diseases. Epidemiological picture of streptococcal infection in India is not complete. Hence, disease burden due to GAS in 5-15 yr old school children in northern India was studied and emm typing of GAS isolates was carried out to help in designing prevention strategies. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was carrie...

Simplified methods of DNA extraction for amplification and sequencing for emm typing of group A streptococci (GAS) can save valuable time and cost in resource crunch situations. To evaluate this, we compared two methods of DNA extraction directly from colonies with the standard CDC cell lysate method for emm typing of 50 GAS strains isolated from children with pharyngitis and impetigo. For this...

We designed a study to investigate the molecular epidemiology of group A streptococcal (GAS) and group C and G streptococcal (GCS and GGS) disease in Fiji, a country which is known to have a high burden of streptococcal disease. Molecular typing of the N-terminal portion (emm typing) of the M protein was performed with 817 isolates (535 GAS and 282 GCS/GGS). We also performed genotyping of the ...

Diseases caused by Streptococcus pyogenes (Group A streptococcus, GAS) range from superficial infections such as pharyngitis and impetigo to potentially fatal rheumatic heart disease and invasive disease. Studies spanning emm-typing surveillance to population genomics are providing new insights into the epidemiology, pathogenesis, and biology of this organism. Such studies have demonstrated the...

In the literature, the Rival Penalized Competitive Learning (RPCL) algorithm (Xu et al. 1993) and its variants perform clustering analysis well without knowing the cluster number. However, such a penalization scheme is heuristically proposed without any theoretical guidance. In this paper, we propose a general penalized competitive learning approach named Expectation-MiniMax (EMM) Learning that...

In this study, 68 group A streptococcus (GAS) isolates associated with two outbreaks of acute glomerulonephritis (AGN) in China were analyzed by emm typing. A total of 11 different emm types were identified. Analysis of emm type distribution suggested that AGN outbreaks in two counties were caused by emm60.1- and emm63.0-type GAS. These two types were further characterized by pulsed-field gel e...

In this talk I present the results of an analysis of total and inelastic hadronic cross-sections for photon induced processes in the framework of an eikonalised minijet model(EMM). We fix the various input parameters to the EMM calculations by using the data on photoproduction cross-sections and then make predictions for σ(γγ → hadrons) using same values of the parameters. We then compare our p...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Endoscopic medial maxillectomy (EMM) has become the surgical procedure of choice for resection of maxillary sinus inverted papillomas (IPs). Traditionally, IPs pedicled on the anterior and/or lateral walls of the maxillary sinus have required an adjuvant Caldwell-Luc approach due to decreased visualization with transnasal endoscopy in these locations. The objective of the ...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Increasing resistance to erythromycin has been observed worldwide in group C and group G streptococci (GCS/GGS). The information available from India is scanty. The aim of the study was to identify erythromycin resistant GCS/GGS isolates in Chennai, south India, and to compare erythromycin resistant genotypes with emm types. METHODS One hundred and thirty one GCS/GGS i...

The Europe Media Monitor (EMM) is a fully-automatic system that analyses written online news by gathering articles in over 70 languages and by applying text analysis software for currently 21 languages, without using linguistic tools such as parsers, part-of-speech taggers or morphological analysers. In this paper, we describe the effort of adding to EMM Hungarian text mining tools for news gat...