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Deep Learning Technology: Sebastian Arnold, Betty van Aken, Paul Grundmann, Felix A. Gers and Alexander Löser. Learning Contextualized Document Representations for Healthcare Answer Retrieval. The Web Conference 2020 (WWW'20)
Funded by The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy; Grant: 01MD19013D, Smart-MD Project, Digital Technologies
Identification of the snake is important in planning treatment in certain areas of the world, but is not always possible. Ideally the dead snake would be brought in with the person, but in areas where snake bite is more common, local knowledge may be sufficient to recognize the snake. However, in regions where polyvalent antivenoms are available, such as North America, identification of snake is not a high priority item. Attempting to catch or kill the offending snake also puts one at risk for re-envenomation or creating a second person bitten, and generally is not recommended.
The three types of venomous snakes that cause the majority of major clinical problems are vipers, kraits, and cobras. Knowledge of what species are present locally can be crucial, as is knowledge of typical signs and symptoms of envenomation by each type of snake. A scoring system can be used to try to determine the biting snake based on clinical features, but these scoring systems are extremely specific to particular geographical areas.
It is not an easy task determining whether or not a bite by any species of snake is life-threatening. A bite by a North American copperhead on the ankle is usually a moderate injury to a healthy adult, but a bite to a child's abdomen or face by the same snake may be fatal. The outcome of all snakebites depends on a multitude of factors: the size, physical condition, and temperature of the snake, the age and physical condition of the person, the area and tissue bitten (e.g., foot, torso, vein or muscle), the amount of venom injected, the time it takes for the person to find treatment, and finally the quality of that treatment.
The Control of Vibration at Work Regulations 2005, created under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. is the legislation in the UK that governs exposure to vibration and assists with preventing HAVS occurring.
Good practice in industrial health and safety management requires that worker vibration exposure is assessed in terms of acceleration amplitude and duration. Using a tool that vibrates slightly for a long time can be as damaging as using a heavily vibrating tool for a short time. The duration of use of the tool is measured as trigger time, the period when the worker actually has their finger on the trigger to make the tool run, and is typically quoted in hours per day. Vibration amplitude is quoted in metres per second squared, and is measured by an accelerometer on the tool or given by the manufacturer. Amplitudes can vary significantly with tool design, condition and style of use, even for the same type of tool.
In the UK, Health and Safety Executive gives the example of a hammer drill which can vary from 6m/s² to 25m/s². HSE publishes a list of typically observed vibration levels for various tools, and graphs of how long each day a worker can be exposed to particular vibration levels. This makes managing the risk relatively straightforward. Tools are given an Exposure Action Value (EAV, the time which a tool can be used before action needs to be taken to reduce vibration exposure) and an Exposure Limit Value (ELV, the time after which a tool may not be used).
In the United States, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health published a similar database where values for sound power and vibrations for commonly found tools from large commercial vendors in the United States were surveyed. Further testing is underway for more and newer tools.
The effect of legislation in various countries on worker vibration limits has been to oblige equipment providers to develop better-designed, better-maintained tools, and for employers to train workers appropriately. It also drives tool designers to innovate to reduce vibration. Some examples are the easily manipulated mechanical arm (EMMA) and the suspension mechanism designed into chainsaws.
The number of cases in the US is not known, but a Hampshire veterinary practice reported on 24 March 2015 that there had been 103 suspected cases in the UK, including 52 deaths confirmed by postmortem examination.
Treatment is primarily symptomatic involving wound management of skin lesions and aggressive supportive therapy when renal compromise occurs. Some UK dogs with Alabama rot have been successfully treated since 2013. A webinar on Alabama rot by the Royal Veterinary College on 11 February 2015 was tutored by David Walker of Anderson Moores Veterinary Specialists.
A simpler system, known as re-active monitoring, may be used by, for example, monitoring rates of usage of consumable items. Such a system was introduced by Carl West at a fabrication workshop in Rotherham, England. In this system, the vibration levels of the angle grinding tools in use was measured, as was the average life of a grinding disk. Thus by recording numbers of grinding disks used, vibration exposure may be calculated.
In advanced societies, laundry detergents are based on "linear" alkylbenzenesulfonates. Branched alkybenzenesulfonates (below right), used in former times, were abandoned because they biodegrade too slowly.
Biodegradation is the disintegration of materials by bacteria, fungi, or other biological means.
The term is often used in relation to: biomedicine, waste management, ecology, and the bioremediation of the natural environment. It is now commonly associated with environmentally-friendly products, capable of decomposing back into natural elements.
Although often conflated, "biodegradable" is distinct in meaning from: "compostable". While biodegradable simply means "can be consumed by microorganisms", "compostable" makes the further specific demand that the object break down under composting conditions.
Organic material can be degraded aerobically (with oxygen) or anaerobically (without oxygen). Decomposition of biodegradable substances may include both biological and abiotic steps.
Biodegradable matter is generally organic material that provides a nutrient for microorganisms. These are so numerous and diverse that a huge range of compounds can be biodegraded, including hydrocarbons (oils), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pharmaceutical substances.
Microorganisms secrete biosurfactant, an extracellular surfactant, to enhance this process.
The conclusion of the Joint WHO/CISAT Scientific Committee for the Toxic Oil Syndrome from 2002, that oil was the cause for TOS, is based only on epidemiological evidence, since up to now, experimental studies performed in a variety of laboratory animals have failed to reproduce the symptoms of human TOS. None of the "in vivo" or "in vitro" studies performed with toxic-oil-specific components, such as fatty acid anilides, and esters of 3-(N-phenylamino)-1,2-propanediol (abbreviated as PAP), have provided evidence that these markers are causally involved in the pathogenesis of TOS.
Specifically, three possible causative agents of TOS are PAP (3-(N-phenylamino)-1,2-propanediol), the 1,2-dioleoyl ester of PAP (abbreviated OOPAP), and the 3-oleoyl ester of PAP (abbreviated OPAP). These three compounds are formed by means of similar chemical processes, and oil that contains one of the three substances is likely to contain the other two. Oil samples that are suspected to have been ingested by people who later developed TOS often contain all three of these contaminants (among other substances), but are most likely to contain OOPAP. However, when these three substances were given to laboratory animals, OOPAP was not acutely toxic, PAP was toxic only after injection, but not after oral administration, and OPAP was toxic only after injection of high doses. Therefore, none of these three substances is thought to cause TOS. Similar results were obtained after administration of fatty acid anilides.
The fact that the first cases of the syndrome were located in Madrid, near the U.S. military base in Torrejón de Ardoz, and the secrecy surrounding the huge investigations, spread the idea of a conspiracy. Several of those affected by the TOS claim they never consumed that oil. Although the oil was mainly sold on street markets, a considerable percentage of the patients was upper class. Another theory suggests the toxic reaction was triggered by organophosphate poisoning (e. g., from pesticide residues in tomatoes) and covered up by the Spanish government and the WHO.
Toxic oil syndrome or simply toxic syndrome (Spanish: "síndrome del aceite tóxico" or "síndrome tóxico") is a musculoskeletal disease most famous for a 1981 outbreak in Spain which killed over 600 people and was likely caused by contaminated colza oil. Its first appearance was as a lung disease, with unusual features; though the symptoms initially resembled a lung infection, antibiotics were ineffective. The disease appeared to be restricted to certain geographical localities, and several members of a family could be affected, even while their neighbours had no symptoms. Following the acute phase, a range of other chronic symptoms was apparent.
A remedy, which can work within hours, perhaps by countering constipation, is to feed green pea to affected fish. Fish surgeons can also adjust the buoyancy of the fish by placing a stone in the swim bladder or performing a partial removal of the bladder.
Flacherie (literally: "flaccidness") is a disease of silkworms, caused by silkworms eating infected or contaminated mulberry leaves. Flacherie infected silkworms look weak and can die from this disease. Silkworm larvae that are about to die from Flacherie are a dark brown.
There are two kinds of flacherie: essentially, infectious (viral) flacherie and noninfectious ("bouffee") flacherie. Both are technically a lethal diarrhea.
Bouffée flacherie is caused by heat waves ("bouffée" means "sudden heat spell" in French).
Viral flacherie is ultimately caused by infection with "Bombyx mori" infectious flacherie virus (BmIFV, Iflaviridae), "Bombyx mori" densovirus (BmDNV, Parvoviridae) or "Bombyx mori" cypovirus 1 (BmCPV-1, Reoviridae). This either alone or in combination with bacterial infection destroys the gut tissue. Bacterial pathogens contributing to infectious flaccherie are "Serratia marcescens", and species of "Streptococcus" and "Staphylococcus" in the form known as thatte roga.
Louis Pasteur, who began his studies on silkworm diseases in 1865, was the first one able to recognize that mortality due to viral flacherie was caused by infection. (Priority, however, was claimed by Antoine Béchamp.) Richard Gordon described the discovery: "The French silk industry was meanwhile plummeting from a 130 million to an 8 million francs annual income, because the silkworms had all caught "pébrine," black pepper disease…He [Pasteur] went south from Paris to Alais, and rewarded them by discovering the silkworm epidemic to be inflicted by some sort of living microbe…Pasteur threw in another disease, "flâcherie," silkworm diarrhoea. The cures for both were culling the insects which showed the peppery spots — the peasants bottled the silkworm moths in brandy, for display to the experts — and rigorous hygiene of the mulberry leaf."
Fancy goldfish are among the fish most commonly affected by this disorder. The disease may be caused by intestinal parasites or by constipation induced by high nitrate levels from over feeding.
HPV is spread by direct and indirect contact from an infected host. Avoiding direct contact with infected surfaces such as communal changing rooms and shower floors and benches, avoiding sharing of shoes and socks and avoiding contact with warts on other parts of the body and on the bodies of others may help reduce the spread of infection. Infection is less common among adults than children.
As all warts are contagious, precautions should be taken to avoid spreading them. Recommendations include:
- cover them with an adhesive bandage while swimming
- wear flip-flops when using communal showers
- should not share towels.
Plantar warts are not prevented by inoculation with HPV vaccines because the warts are caused by different strains of HPV. Gardasil protects against strains 6, 11, 16, and 18, and Cervarix protects against 16 and 18, whereas plantar warts are caused by strains 1, 2, 4, and 63.
Blight refers to a specific symptom affecting plants in response to infection by a pathogenic organism. It is a rapid and complete chlorosis, browning, then death of plant tissues such as leaves, branches, twigs, or floral organs. Accordingly, many diseases that primarily exhibit this symptom are called blights. Several notable examples are:
- Late blight of potato, caused by the water mold "Phytophthora infestans" (Mont.) de Bary, the disease which led to the Great Irish Famine
- Southern corn leaf blight, caused by the fungus "Cochliobolus heterostrophus" (Drechs.) Drechs, anamorph "Bipolaris maydis" (Nisikado & Miyake) Shoemaker, incited a severe loss of corn in the United States in 1970.
- Chestnut blight, caused by the fungus "Cryphonectria parasitica" (Murrill) Barr, has nearly completely eradicated mature American chestnuts in North America.
- Fire blight of pome fruits, caused by the bacterium "Erwinia amylovora" (Burrill) Winslow "et al.", is the most severe disease of pear and also is found in apple and raspberry, among others.
- Bacterial leaf blight of rice, caused by the bacterium "Xanthomonas oryzae" (Uyeda & Ishiyama) Dowson.
- Early blight of potato and tomato, caused by species of the ubiquitous fungal genus "Alternaria"
- Leaf blight of the grasses
On leaf tissue, symptoms of blight are the initial appearance of lesions which rapidly engulf surrounding tissue. However, leaf spot may, in advanced stages, expand to kill entire areas of leaf tissue and thus exhibit blight symptoms.
Blights are often named after their causative agent, for example Colletotrichum blight is named after the fungi "Colletotrichum capsici", and Phytophthora blight is named after the water mold "Phytophthora parasitica".
In pet rabbits, myxomatosis can be misdiagnosed as pasteurellosis, a bacterial infection which can be treated with antibiotics. By contrast, there is no treatment for rabbits suffering from myxomatosis, other than palliative care to ease the suffering of individual animals, and the treatment of secondary and opportunistic infections, in the hopes the treated animal will survive. In practice, the owner is often urged to euthanize the animal to end its suffering.
Yersinia pseudotuberculosis is a Gram-negative bacterium that causes Far East scarlet-like fever in humans, who occasionally get infected zoonotically, most often through the food-borne route. Animals are also infected by "Y. pseudotuberculosis". The bacterium is urease positive.
The Burmese Way to Socialism (; also known as the "Burmese Road to Socialism") refers to the ideology of the socialist government in Burma, from 1962 to 1988, when the 1962 coup d'état was led by Ne Win and the military to remove U Nu from power. More specifically, the "Burmese Way to Socialism" is an economic treatise written in April 1962 by the Revolutionary Council, shortly after the coup, as a blueprint for economic development, reducing foreign influence in Burma and increasing the role of the military.
The Burmese Way to Socialism has largely been described by scholars as being xenophobic, superstitious and an "abject failure" and as turning one of the most prosperous countries in Asia into one of the world's poorest. However, it may have served to increase domestic stability and keep Burma from being as entangled in the Cold War struggles that affected other Southeast Asian nations.
The Burmese Way to Socialism, by far, greatly increased poverty and isolation and has been described as "disastrous". Ne Win's later attempt to make the currency based in denominations divisible by 9, a number he considered auspicious, wiped out the savings of millions of Burmese. This resulted in the pro-democracy 8888 Uprising, which was violently halted by the military, which established the State Law and Order Restoration Council in 1988.
The Socialist coup led by Ne Win and the Revolutionary Council (RC) in 1962 was done under the pretext of economic, religious and political crises in the country, particularly the issue of federalism and the right of Burmese states to secede from the Union.
A number of treatments have been found to be effective. A 2012 review of different treatments for skin warts in otherwise healthy people concluded modest benefit from salicylic acid and cryotherapy appears similar to salicylic acid.
Aphantasia is the suggested name for a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot visualize imagery. The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880, but has remained largely unstudied since. Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study conducted by a team led by Prof. Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter, which also coined the term "aphantasia". Research on the subject is still scarce, but further studies are planned.
During the 1980s, dentist Hal Huggins, sparking severe controversy, spawned biological dentistry, which claims that conventional tooth extraction routinely leaves within the tooth socket the periodontal ligament that often becomes gangrenous, then, forming a jawbone "cavitation" seeping infectious and toxic material. Sometimes forming elsewhere in bones after injury or ischemia, jawbone cavitations are recognized as foci also in osteopathy and in alternative medicine, but conventional dentists generally conclude them to be nonexistent. Although the International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology claims that the scientific evidence establishing the existence of jawbone cavitations is overwhelming, and even published in textbooks, the diagnosis and related treatment remain controversial, and allegations of quackery persist.
Huggins and many biological dentists also espouse Weston Price's findings on endodontically treated teeth routinely being foci of infection, although these dentists have been accused of quackery. Conventional belief is that microorganisms within inaccessible regions of a tooth's roots are rendered harmless once entrapped by the filling material, although little evidence supports this. A H Rogers in 1976 and E H Ehrmann in 1977 had dismissed any relation between endodontics and focal infection. At dentist George Meinig's 1994 book, "Root Canal Cover-Up Exposed", discussing researches of Rosenow and of Price, some dentistry scholars reasserted that the claims were evaluated and disproved by the 1940s. Yet Meinig was but one of at least three authors who in the early 1990s independently renewed the concern.
Boyd Haley and Curt Pendergrass found especially high levels of bacterial toxins in root-filled teeth. Although such possibility appears especially likely amid compromised immunity—as in individuals cirrhotic, asplenic, elderly, rheumatoid arthritic, or using steroid drugs—there remained a lack of carefully controlled studies definitely establishing adverse systemic effects. Conversely, some if few studies have investigated effects of systemic disease on root-canal therapy's outcomes, which tend to worsen with poor glycemic control, perhaps via impaired immune response, a factor largely ignored until recently, but now recognized as important. Still, even by 2010, "the potential association between systemic health and root canal therapy has been strongly disputed by dental governing bodies and there remains little evidence to substantiate the claims".
The traditional root-filling material is gutta-percha, whereas a new material, Biocalex, drew initial optimism even in alternative dentistry, but Biocalex-filled teeth were later reported by Boyd Haley to likewise seep toxic byproducts of anaerobic bacterial metabolism. Seeking to sterilize the tooth interior, some dentists, both alternative and conventional, have applied laser technology. Although endodontic therapy can fail and eventually often does, dentistry scholars maintain that it "can" be performed without creating focal infections. And even by 2010, molecular methods had rendered no consensus reports of bacteremia traced to asymptomatic endodontic infection. In any event, the predominant view is that shunning endodonthic therapy or routinely extracting endodontically treated teeth to treat or prevent systemic diseases remains unscientific and misguided.
After its discovery in 1896 in imported rabbits in Uruguay, a relatively harmless strain of the disease spread quickly throughout the wild rabbit populations in South America.
Lucio's phenomenon is treated by anti-leprosy therapy (dapsone, rifampin, and clofazimine), optimal wound care, and treatment for bacteremia including antibiotics. In severe cases exchange transfusion may be helpful.
Aphantasia is similar to invisible disabilities such as face blindness, word blindness, and tone deafness, though aphantasia itself has not been associated with any functional deficits.
Necrophilia, also known as necrophilism, necrolagnia, necrocoitus, necrochlesis, and thanatophilia, is a sexual attraction or sexual act involving corpses. It is classified as a paraphilia by the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association.
Rosman and Resnick (1989) reviewed information from 34 cases of necrophilia describing the individuals' motivations for their behaviors: these individuals reported the desire to possess a non-resisting and non-rejecting partner (68%), reunions with a romantic partner (21%), sexual attraction to corpses (15%), comfort or overcoming feelings of isolation (15%), or seeking self-esteem by expressing power over a homicide victim (12%).