The development of a Defense System against Coxsackievirus B5 Infection in Suckling Mice

There are many viruses that are able to infect the alimentary tract of man. Little is known, however, about the mechanism of infection itself or the pathophysiology of the gut during infection. 'The research reported here is concerned with the differences in susceptibility among suckling mice of various ages inoculated by the intraperitoneal and intragastric routes. Since the normal mode of entry of many viruses to the gut is via the oral route, Coxsackievirus B5, a human enterovirus which does attack this way, was utilized. It is a non-tumor producing RNA virus that has been shown to act similarly in the mouse and human. The virus was pooled in HeLa cell cultures and titered by a plaquing assay in the same cell cultures. CD-l mice, 10, 14, 18, and 22 days old , were infected either orally or intraperitoneally with 5.0 x 10^10 (10 day old animals) and 1.0 x10^9 plaque forming units per animal. Dissections were done at 1 and 3 days post infection with samples of the blood, heart, liver, and gut being taken from each animal. Each sample was titered individually and the data presented as an average of six samples. As a result of previous work, it is known that the gut of a newborn mouse isn't able to decrease the concentration of the infecting dose and therefore provides no defense against an enteric infection with Coxsackievirus B5. In contrat, mature mice are able to reduce the amount of viral dissemination across the gut as well as inhibit replication after absorption has occurred. The results of this study indicate that there is a double barrier system developing in suckling mice that is involved with and directly related to the gastrointestinal tract The first part of this defense is the inhibition of penetration of virus across the gut when the primary site of' infection is the intestinal mucosa. This mechanism develops sometime around 20 to 22 days after birth. At about 16-18 days of age, suckling mice that were challenged intragastrically are able to stop active replication and initiate clearance of virus from the systemic circulation. There are many factors that might contribute to the marked decrease in susceptibility with age of suckling mice. Some of these or possibly a combination of these factors might explain the defense mechanisms described above, but to date, the chemistry or mechanical functioning of the gastrointestinal barrier to enteric viral infection is unknown.

Does environmental quality influence health expenditures? empirical evidence from a panel of selected OECD countries

In this paper we examine the role of environmental quality in determining per capita health expenditures. We take a panel cointegration approach in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short-run and long-run impacts of environmental quality. Our empirical analysis is based on eight OECD countries, namely Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK for the period 1980–1999. We find that per capita health expenditure, per capita income, carbon monoxide emissions, sulphur oxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions are panel cointegrated. While short-run elasticities reveal that income and carbon monoxide emissions exert a statistically significant positive effect on health expenditures, in the long-run in addition to income and carbon monoxide, we find that sulphur oxide emissions have a statistically significant positive impact on health expenditures.

Brief report : The defense mechanisms of homophobic adolescent males : a descriptive discriminant analysis

The study examined the role of defense mechanisms in homophobic attitudes of older male adolescents aged 17e18 years. A cross-sectional survey collected data from final year high school students (N ¼ 86) attending an all male school in a regional centre in Victoria, Australia. The school was identified by teachers as having a problematic culture of homophobic intolerance. Participants were divided into homophobic and non-homophobic groups based on their scores on the Homophobia Scale Questionnaire. Discriminant analysis was conducted to identify the predictors that would best categorise students into those two groups on the basis of defense styles derived from the Defense Style Questionnaire-40 (DSQ-40). The strongest predictors of homophobia amongst defense styles were idealisation, denial, somatisation and devaluation accounting for 18.31%, 17.64%, 13.10% and 11.35% of the variance, respectively. Results generally supported the larger contribution of more immature defenses to higher levels of homophobia.

Multi-core security defense system (MSDS)

Today's security program developers are not only facing an uphill battle of developing and implementing. But now have to take into consideration, the emergence of next generation of multi-core system, and its effect on security application design. In our previous work, we developed a framework called bodyguard. The objective of this framework was to help security software developers, shift from their use of serialized paradigm, to a multi-core paradigm. Working within this paradigm, we developed a security bodyguard system called Farmer. This abstract framework placed particular applications into categories, like security or multi-media, which were ran on separate core processors within the multi-core system. With further analysis of the bodyguard paradigm, we found that this paradigm was suitable to be used in other computer science areas, such as spam filtering and multi-media. In this paper, we update our research work within the bodyguard paradigm, and showed a marked improvement of 110% speedup performance with an average cost of 1.5 ms.

Multi-core Defense System (MSDS) for protecting computer infrastructure against DDoS attacks

Distributed Denial of Service attacks is one of the most challenging areas to deal with in Security. Not only do security managers have to deal with flood and vulnerability attacks. They also have to consider whether they are from legitimate or malicious attackers. In our previous work we developed a framework called bodyguard, which is to help security software developers from the current serialized paradigm, to a multi-core paradigm. In this paper, we update our research work by moving our bodyguard paradigm, into our new Ubiquitous Multi-Core Framework. From this shift, we show a marked improvement from our previous result of 20% to 110% speedup performance with an average cost of 1.5 ms. We also conducted a second series of experiments, which we trained up Neural Network, and tested it against actual DDoS attack traffic. From these experiments, we were able to achieve an average of 93.36%, of this attack traffic.

Examining structural breaks and growth rates in international health expenditures

Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in examining health expenditures. In this paper, we study the behaviour of health expenditures in the G3 countries (USA, the UK, and Japan) and three European countries (the UK, Switzerland and Spain) over the period 1960–2000 from a different perspective, in that we examine: (1) whether there is a common structural break in health expenditures across the G3 and European countries; (2) whether structural breaks have slowed down health expenditure growth rates in these countries or vice versa. Our main findings are that: (1) health expenditures share a common break in both bivariate and trivariate cases, and structural breaks and break intervals suggest that either one or a combination of events (second oil price shock, the 1987 stock market crash and/or recessions) have contributed to the commonality of break in health expenditures in the G3, while the oil price shocks have been instrumental in the commonality of breaks for the European countries; (2) except for the UK, structural breaks have slowed down growth rates in health expenditures for the USA, Japan, Switzerland and Spain.

Modelling the relationship between defense spending and economic growth for the Fiji Islands

The goal of this paper is to examine the nexus between GDP and military expenditure. We model this relationship within a multivariate framework by including exports in the model. We use the recently developed bounds testing approach to cointegration and find that there is a long run relationship among the variables when GDP is the endogenous variable. Normalizing on GDP and using four different estimators, we find that in the long run both military expenditure and exports have a positive impact on GDP. Finally, using the Granger causality test, we find that there is evidence for military expenditure Granger causing exports and exports Granger causing GDP, implying that military expenditure indirectly Granger causes GDP in the short run. In the long run, we find that both military expenditure and exports Granger cause GDP for Fiji. Our findings are consistent with the Keynesian school of thought, leading us to derive some policy implications.

Heterotrimeric G proteins-mediated resistance to necrotrophic pathogens includes mechanisms independent of salicylic acid-, jasmonic acid/ethylene- and abscisic acid-mediated defense signaling

Heterotrimeric G proteins are involved in the defense response against necrotrophic fungi in Arabidopsis. In order to elucidate the resistance mechanisms involving heterotrimeric G proteins, we analyzed the effects of the Gβ (subunit deficiency in the mutant agb1-2 on pathogenesis-related gene expression, as well as the genetic interaction between agb1-2 and a number of mutants of established defense pathways. Gβ-mediated signaling suppresses the induction of salicylic acid (SA)-, jasmonic acid (JA)-, ethylene (ET)- and abscisic acid (ABA)-dependent genes during the initial phase of the infection with Fusarium oxysporum (up to 48 h after inoculation). However, at a later phase it enhances JA/ET-dependent genes such as PDF1.2 and PR4. Quantification of the Fusarium wilt symptoms revealed that Gβ- and SA-deficient mutants were more susceptible than wild-type plants, whereas JA- and ET-insensitive and ABA-deficient mutants demonstrated various levels of resistance. Analysis of the double mutants showed that the Gβ-mediated resistance to F. oxysporum and Alternaria brassicicola was mostly independent of all of the previously mentioned pathways. However, the progressive decay of agb1-2 mutants was compensated by coi1-21 and jin1-9 mutations, suggesting that at this stage of F. oxysporum infection Gβ acts upstream of COI1 and ATMYC2 in JA signaling.

Are health expenditures and GDP characterized by asymmetric behaviour? Evidence from 11 OECD countries

In this article, we examine whether per-capita health expenditures and per-capita GDP for 11 OECD countries can be characterized by asymmetric behaviour. We achieve this goal by using the nonparametric Triples test suggested by Randles et al. (1980). We examine two forms of asymmetries, namely deepness and steepness. Our main finding is that for 6 out of 11 countries, namely for the USA, the UK, Japan, Spain, Finland and Iceland, either per-capita health expenditures or per-capita GDP are characterized by asymmetric behaviour. This finding to some extent casts doubt on those studies that model the relationship between health and GDP using unit-root and cointegration tests that assume symmetric disturbances.