During the past decade, there has been an increase in the number of patients with disseminated leishmaniasis (DL), which is characterized by a large number of acneiform and papular skin lesions, with very few or no parasites in the skin tissue. The present report describes 42 cases of DL identified between 1992 and 1998 in an area where Leishmania braziliensis transmission is endemic; 8 of the patients were prospectively diagnosed. In a contrast to localized cutaneous leishmaniasis (LCL), acquisition of DL was associated with age >19 years (P<.05), male sex (P<.05), and agricultural occupation (P<.001). Patients with DL presented with 10-300 lesions that were a mixture of acneiform, papular, nodular, and ulcerated types. Twelve (29%) of 42 patients had mucosal involvement. Patients with DL had lower levels of interferon-gamma (P<.05) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (P<.05) production, compared with patients with LCL. DL is an emerging clinical distinct form of leishmaniasis associated with agricultural activities and host immunological response.
The immunogenicity and protective efficacy of various antigen-adjuvant formulations derived either from the merozoite-surface protein-3 (MSP-3) or the glutamate-rich protein (GLURP) of Plasmodium falciparum were evaluated in Saimiri sciureus monkeys. These proteins were selected for immunogenicity studies based primarily on their capacity of inducing an antibody-dependent cellular inhibition effect on parasite growth. Some of the S. sciureus monkeys immunized with MSP-3 212À380 -AS02 or GLURP 27À500 -alum were able to fully or partially control parasitaemia upon an experimental P. falciparum [Falciparum Uganda Palo Alto (FUP-SP) strain] blood-stage infection, and this protection was related to the prechallenge antibody titres induced. The data are indicative that MSP-3 and GLURP can induce protective immunity against an experimental P. falciparum infection using adjuvants that are acceptable for human use and this should trigger further studies with those new antigens.
Human rating of predicted post-editing effort is a common activity and has been used to train confidence estimation models. However, the correlation between human ratings and actual post-editing effort is under-measured. Moreover, the impact of presenting effort indicators in a post-editing user interface on actual post-editing effort has hardly been researched. In this study, ratings of perceived post-editing effort are tested for correlations with actual temporal, technical and cognitive post-editing effort. In addition, the impact on post-editing effort of the presentation of post-editing effort indicators in the user interface is also tested. The language pair involved in this study is English-Brazilian Portuguese. Our findings, based on a small sample, suggest that there is little agreement between raters for predicted post-editing effort and that the correlations between actual post-editing effort and predicted effort are only moderate, and thus an inefficient basis for MT confidence estimation. Moreover, the presentation of post-editing effort indicators in the user interface appears not to impact on actual postediting effort.
The immunogenicity and efficacy of a hybrid recombinant protein derived from the N-terminal end of the glutamate-rich protein (GLURP) and the C-terminal portion of the merozoite surface protein 3 (MSP3) of Plasmodium falciparum was evaluated in Saimiri sciureus monkeys. The GLURP/MSP3 hybrid protein, expressed in Lactococcus lactis, was administered in association with alum, Montanide ISA720, or complete or incomplete Freund adjuvant (CFA/IFA) in groups of five animals each. The three formulations were shown to be immunogenic, but the one with alum was shown to be weak compared to the other two, particularly CFA/IFA, which provided very high antibody titers (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay titers of >3,000,000 and immunofluorescence antibody test titers of 6,400). After a challenge infection with P. falciparum FUP strain, all five monkeys from the GLURP/MSP3-alum group showed a rapid increase in parasitemia, reaching 10% and were treated early. The two monkeys with the highest antibody titers in group GLURP/MSP3-Montanide ISA720 had a delay in the course of parasitemia and were treated late due to a low hematocrit. In the GLURP/MSP3-CFA/IFA group, parasitemia remained below this threshold in four of the five animals and, after it reached a peak, parasitemia started to decrease and monkeys were treated late. When all animals were grouped according to the outcome, a statistically significant association between high antibody titers and partial protection was observed. The challenge infection boosted the antibody titers, and the importance of this event for vaccine efficacy in areas where this parasite is endemic is discussed. In conclusion, these data suggest that GLURP and MSP3 can induce protection against malaria infection if antibodies are induced at properly high titers.
This paper presents some aspects of a web application designed to store, annotate, and query translation process data. Examples sharing comparable and representative patterns that can be subject to storage, annotation, and querying have been selected to illustrate the structure of the application. The web application is an integral part of the Corpus on Process for the Analysis of Translations (CORPRAT) implemented at the Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation (LETRA) at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The paper examines the unfolding of translation units in time and proposes their operationalization on the basis of the translator’s focus of attention, identified as time intervals delimited by pauses in the translation process as registered by key-logging and/or eyetracking software. By annotating and querying translation units, the web application allows the translation process to be replayed as a moving picture whose sequentially ordered frames represent the screen output of a sequence of keyboard events. By querying larger sets of data, extracted from different case studies with different translators’ profiles, varied language combinations, and specific task constraints, the web application allows researchers to investigate the nature of the translation unit in process-oriented terms and identify patterns of text segmentation from a cognitive perspective.
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