BACKGROUND The availability of sensitive assays for plasma HIV viral load and the trend toward earlier and more aggressive treatment of HIV infection has led to the inappropriate use of these assays as primary tools for the diagnosis of acute HIV infection. OBJECTIVE To describe limitations in the use of plasma viral load testing for the diagnosis of HIV infection. DESIGN Case series. SET...

One of the most important factors which impacts a new product development, including its testing, is duration of development activities. It is of great importance to reduce the time from the initial technical specification of the new product till the moment of launching its serial production. That task is mainly oriented to the development engineers who are under great pressure to satisfy marke...

BACKGROUND The high cost of commercial HIV-1 viral load tests for monitoring of patients on antiretroviral treatment limits their use in resource-constrained settings. Commercial genotypic antiretroviral resistance testing is even more costly, yet it provides important benefits. OBJECTIVES We sought to determine the sensitivity and negative predictive value of a qualitative PCR targeting part...

Actual applications of the energy absorbers showed that actual loads are not applied in the form of pure axial compression, pure bending or pure torsion. In reality, an energy absorber component may be subjected to combined loading of compression, bending and torsion. A number of previous articles have investigated the behavior of energy absorbers under oblique loading. In such cases, the obliq...

Building waste is a critical issue in current construction. Innovative design strategies are required to reduce the depletion of valuable materials and resources through providing flexible and versatile structures. This study focuses on the development of an industrial, flexible, and demountable wall panel construction system. The panel system consists of concrete blocks with steel connectors t...

BACKGROUND We examined linkage to care for patients with sexually transmitted infection who were diagnosed HIV-positive via the provider-initiated HIV testing and counselling (PITC) approach, as compared to the voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) approach, as little is known about the impact of expanded testing strategies on linkage to care. METHODS In a controlled trial on PITC (Cape Tow...

background: one of the methods used for joining metals together is welding, which can be carried out using different techniques such as electric spot welding. this study evaluated the effect of electric spot welding on the load defl ection rate of stainless steel and chromium-cobalt orthodontic wires. materials and methods: in this experimental-laboratory study, load defl ection rate of 0.016 ×...

OBJECTIVE Viral load testing is used in the HIV programme of Chiradzulu, Malawi, to confirm the diagnosis of immunological failure to prevent unnecessary switching to second-line therapy. Our objective was to quantify the benefit of this strategy for management of treatment failure in a large decentralized HIV programme in Africa. METHODS Retrospective analysis of monitoring data from adults ...

We are entering into a new era for treatment of HIV because of the development of the new class of drugs called protease inhibitors and secondly because of the development of the new technology called viral load testing. On June 3, the FDA granted approval to Roche Diagnostics for their viral load test, AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR test, more commonly known as RT-PCR, viral load or HIV RNA PCR. It is...

Evidence suggests that rational alternatives do not necessarily drive the choices made by real individuals in the privacy of their homes, Therefore, an understanding of the characteristics of the utility’s customer base, is useful to help design utility programs that target the customer’s ordinary daily practices. This paper summarizes the main results of a method to highlight familial habits b...