Hundreds of millions of people of all ages suffer from chronic respiratory diseases which include asthma and respiratory allergies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, occupational lung diseases and pulmonary hypertension. More than 500 million patients live in developing countries or in deprived populations. Chronic respiratory diseases are increasing in prevalence. Although the cost of ina...

Mycoplasma gallisepticum, the most pathogenic mycoplasma in poultry, is able to glide over solid surfaces. Although this gliding motility was first observed in 1968, no specific protein has yet been shown to be involved in gliding. We examined M. gallisepticum strains and clonal variants for motility and found that the cytadherence proteins GapA and CrmA were required for gliding. Loss of GapA ...

Expression of nuclear genes that encode the A and B subunits of chloroplast glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPA and GAPB) of Arabidopsis is known to be regulated by light. We used a negative selection approach to isolate mutants that were defective in light-regulated expression of the GAPA gene. Two dominant mutants belonging to the same complementation group, uga1-1 and uga1-2, were...

SR1 is a dual-function sRNA that acts as a base-pairing regulatory RNA on the ahrC mRNA and as a peptide-encoding mRNA on the gapA operon. The SR1-encoded peptide SR1P binds GapA thereby stabilizing gapA mRNA. Under glycolytic conditions, SR1 transcription is repressed by CcpN and CcpA. A computer-based search identified 23 SR1 homologues in Bacillus, Geobacillus, Anoxybacillus and Brevibacillu...

This article describes an approach to assessing infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices using small-sample surveys which was developed jointly by VALID International; CONCERN Worldwide; Save the Children; the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation; the Niger National Institute of Statistics; the Ethiopian Health and Nutrition Research Institute (EHNRI); the Sudanese Federal Mini...

The paper traces the evolution and working of the Global Equity Gauge Alliance (GEGA) and its efforts to promote health equity. GEGA places health equity squarely within a larger framework of social justice, linking findings on socioeconomic and health inequalities with differentials in power, wealth, and prestige in society. The Alliance's 11 country-level partners, called Equity Gauges, share...

BACKGROUND Drug users' organizations have made progress in recent years in advocating for the health and human rights of people who use illicit drugs but have historically not emphasized the needs of people who drink alcohol. METHODS This paper reports on a qualitative participatory needs assessment with people who use illicit substances in British Columbia, Canada. We held workshops in 17 co...

A defensive alliance in a graph G = (V,E) is a set of vertices S ⊆ V satisfying the condition that for every vertex v ∈ S, the number of neighbors v has in S plus one (counting v) is at least as large as the number of neighbors it has in V − S. Because of such an alliance, the vertices in S, agreeing to mutually support each other, have the strength of numbers to be able to defend themselves fr...

members of the 67th world health assembly in 2014 were presented with a framework document to guide world health organization (who) engagement with non-state actors, a key part of who reform kick-started in 2011. according to this document, non-state actors include four distinct constituencies: i) nongovernmental organizations (ngos), ii) private sector entities; iii) philanthropic foundations;...