New Caledonia is an archipelago in the South Pacific with a high prevalence of acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease. Conducted in 2006, this study aimed at characterizing clinical manifestations and microbial features of isolates obtained from invasive Streptococcus pyogenes disease. Clinical and demographic data were collected prospectively. Isolates were biotyped, T typed, emm se...

Staphylococcal and streptococcal exotoxins, also known as superantigens, mediate a range of diseases including toxic shock syndrome, and they exacerbate skin, pulmonary and systemic infections caused by these organisms. When present in food sources they can cause enteric effects commonly known as food poisoning. A rapid, sensitive assay for the toxins would enable testing of clinical samples an...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Severe invasive infections caused by group A Streptococcus (GAS) are often associated with shock and organ failure. We describe epidemiological and disease related data from the national surveillance of invasive GAS infection in Denmark in addition to three fatal cases that occurred in Denmark in 2002 with gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms as the dominating preliminary sign...

Multi-objective optimization (MO) is a highly demanding research topic because many realworld optimization problems consist of contradictory criteria or objectives. Considering these competing objectives concurrently, a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) can be formulated as finding the best possible solutions that satisfy these objectives under different tradeoff situations. A family o...

In this paper, a multipath routing scheme is proposed for data transmission in a packet-switched network to improve the reliability of data delivery to multicast destinations, and to reduce network congestion. A multi-objective optimization model is presented that utilizes FEC (Forward Error Correction) across multiple multicast trees for transmitting packets toward the destinations. This model...

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...