A serological survey was conducted among Tuareg nomads to determine their level of immunity to measles. More than half (57.9%) of the children under 10 years of age did not have detectable antibodies to measles, suggesting that transmission of the disease is low in this mobile population. Mothers' reports of their children's history of measles were accurate (positive predictive value 93.9% for ...

The K Nearest Neighbors classification method assigns to an unclassified observation the class which obtains the best results after a voting criteria is applied among the observation’s K nearest, previously classified points. In a validation process the optimal K is selected for each database and all the cases are classified with this K value. However the optimal K for the database does not hav...

Guidelines recommend that clinical laboratories perform phenotypic tests (nitrocefin-based test and penicillin 10-U [P10] or 1-U [P1] zone edge tests) to detect penicillinase in Staphylococcus aureus isolates. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of blaZ encoding penicillinase and perform various phenotypic tests in S. aureus isolates from Japan. We prospectively collected 200 methicillin-...

Population-based surveillance of influenza routinely relies on administrative medical encounter databases and ICD-9 codes. However, an assessment of the ICD-9 codes used for the Department of Defense (DoD) influenza-like illness (ILI) case definition has not been conducted since 2007. As coding practices may have changed over time, this analysis was done to determine the sensitivity, specificit...

BACKGROUND The suitability of using clinical assessment to identify patients with podoconiosis in endemic communities has previously been demonstrated. In this study, we explored the feasibility and accuracy of using Community Health Implementers (CHIs) for the large scale clinical screening of the population for podoconiosis in North-west Cameroon. METHODS Before a regional podoconiosis mapp...

Metrics typically used to report the performance of an early warning score (EWS), such as the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve or C-statistic, are not useful for pre-implementation analyses. Because physiological deterioration has an extremely low prevalence of 0.02 per patient-day, these metrics can be misleading. We discuss the statistical reasoning behind this statement ...

Accurate free energy estimation is essential for RNA structure prediction. The widely used Turner's energy model works well for nested structures. For pseudoknotted RNAs, however, there is no effective rule for estimation of loop entropy and free energy. In this work we present a new free energy estimation method, termed the pseudoknot predictor in three-dimensional space (pk3D), which goes bey...

OBJECTIVE To identify exercise test variables that can improve the positive predictive value of exercise testing in women. DESIGN Cohort study. SETTING Regional cardiothoracic centre. SUBJECTS 1286 women and 1801 men referred by primary care physicians to a rapid access chest pain clinic, of whom 160 women and 406 men had ST depression of at least 1 mm during exercise testing. The results...

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) (currently Public Health England) implemented the Health Protection Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) to provide additional national epidemic intelligence for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games (the Games). We describe EBS and evaluate the system attributes. EBS aimed at identifying, assessing and reporting to the HPA Olympic Coordination Centre (OCC) p...

INTRODUCTION End-of-life decisions after stroke should be guided by accurate estimates of the patient's prognosis. We assessed the accuracy of physicians' estimates regarding mortality, functional outcome, and quality of life in patients with severe stroke. METHODS Treating physicians predicted mortality, functional outcome (modified Rankin scale (mRS)), and quality of life (visual analogue s...