This paper examines the European Union’s (EU’s) economic relations with the Western Balkans (WB) in the light of the emerging debate on international public goods. The paper argues that the EU’s philanthropic approach to transition reforms in the WB is too discretionary to be efficient and/or equitable. We think that the concept of regional public goods (RPG) provides a good benchmark against w...

PURPOSE To assess the overall diagnostic accuracy of whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (WB-MRI) in detecting bone metastases with a meta-analysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS The MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cancerlit, and Cochrane Library databases were searched from January 1995 to September 2010 for studies evaluating the accuracy of WB-MRI in detecting bone metastases. Histopathologic analysis and/or c...

We evaluated two commercial human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV) Western blot (WB; immunoblot) kits, Cambridge Biotech Corp. (CBC) and Diagnostic Biotechnology Ltd. (DBL). Both methods employ HTLV type I (HTLV-I) viral lysate and rgp21. The DBL WB kit also distinguishes between HTLV-I and HTLV-II antibodies, using an HTLV-I-specific and an HTLV-II-specific recombinant. Fifty weakly reactive H...

Objectives: Ongoing ischemia, or even ischemia in progress, is regularly encountered in today’s patients amenable to cardiac surgery. We set out to assess the effect of ‘active resuscitation’ during cardioplegia with warm continuous retrograde blood cardioplegia (WB) in a protocol simulating a clinical situation. Methods: After 60 min with a regional ischemic injury to the left ventricle, 21 pi...

Background and Objective: Anesthesiologists need to be familiar with perioperative changes in blood volume (BV); however, there is no standard method for repeated evaluation of BV over a short interval of time. We evaluated BV in the operation room using repeatable estimation methods. Method: Eighty-five ASA physical status I-II patients scheduled to undergo endoscopic urosurgery using irrigati...

BACKGROUND Whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (WB-MRI) and angiography (WB-MRA) has become increasingly popular in population-based research. We evaluated retrospectively the frequency of potentially relevant incidental findings throughout the body. MATERIALS AND METHODS 22 highly health-conscious managers (18 men, mean age 47±9 years) underwent WB-MRI and WB-MRA between March 2012 and Sep...

Western blotting (WB; immunoblotting) is a widely used tool for the serodiagnosis of Lyme borreliosis (LB), but so far, no generally accepted criteria for performance and interpretation have been established in Europe. The current study was preceeded by a detailed analysis of WB with whole-cell lysates of three species of Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (U. Hauser, G. Lehnert, R. Lobentanzer, a...

As consumer demand for all-natural marinades increases, the need to replace phosphate with a natural product that can produce equivalent or improved yield in products such as but not limited to rotisserie chickens (whole birds without giblets) and boneless/skinless breast (BSB) is a challenge for processors. The objective of this study was to determine if using an all-natural nonphosphate blend...

BACKGROUND The disease course of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is often altered by existing or newly acquired coincident infections. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To assess the influence of pre-existing Wuchereria bancrofti infection on HIV progression, we performed a case-controlled treatment study of HIV positive individuals with (FIL+) or without (FIL-) W. bancrofti infection. Twenty...

Wucherria bancrofti (Wb) is the main causative agent of Filariasis. Lymphatic Filariasis (LF) is a disabling, disfiguring, and a poverty promoting disease which is caused by the parasitic filarial nematode worms. The identification of essential nematode genes has shown that independent phosphoglycerate mutase (iPGM) is an excellent drug target against parasitic nematodes. In this current study,...