LEARNING OBJECTIVESAfter completing this course, the reader will be able to:1. Describe the fears that patients experience regarding death and the dying process.2. List the most successful methods caregivers can use to empathize with the dying patient.3. Discuss the benefits to physicians who share the emotional journey with patients during end-of-life care.Access and take the CME test online and receive 1 hour of AMA PRA category 1 credit at CME.TheOncologist.com CME CME This material is protected by U.S.

The poultry industry has emerged as one of the largest and fastest growing public sectors in the developed and developing countries. Unfortunately, this industry is under a major threat from diseases that are viral (Newcastle disease, infectious bursal disease, influenza, hydropericardium syndrome), bacterial (colibacillosis, pasteurellosis, salmonellosis, mycoplasmosis), parasitic (coccidiosis, histoplasmosis) or nutritional (dyschondroplasia, osteoporosis). Among these diseases, hydropericardium syndrome (HPS) is one of the important emerging diseases occurring in the specific areas of the world where broilers (chickens) are reared under intensive conditions. HPS was first observed in 1987 at Angara Goth, an area near Karachi, Pakistan, where broilers are raised. Since then, HPS has been reported in many countries of the world. From these reported cases, an adenovirus that was either isolated from or visualized electron microscopically in the liver of affected broilers has been implicated in the syndrome. The syndrome has been reproduced by inoculation of isolated fowl adenovirus (FAdV) strains, and hence, the syndrome is also called infectious hydropericardium syndrome. To our knowledge, HPS has not been observed in humans, so it is not considered a zoonotic disease, but it is of economic importance and causes huge losses to the poultry industry. Efforts have been made to develop conventional vaccines against this disease, which were formulated from infected liver homogenate. Formalin-inactivated liver organ vaccines have failed to protect the poultry industry. Hence, there is a dire need to develop a suitable vaccine to combat this disease. Currently, recombinant vaccine candidates are being developed by using molecular biology and biotechnological approaches for the prevention and control of infectious diseases, including HPS. Therefore, it is suggested that the immunogenicity of these recombinant proteins should be evaluated for their use as subunit vaccines.

Newcastle disease (ND) is an important infectious disease of the poultry that is caused by virulent strains of Avian Paramyxovirus-1, which is a single strand non segmented negative sense RNA virus. The virus belongs to family Paramyxoviridae and it has 10 serotypes designated as APMV-1 to APMV-10. The Newcastle disease virus (NDV) is endemic in many countries of the world. The first outbreak of Newcastle disease was observed at Newcastle during 1926. Later, it was found in various parts of the world. NDV spreads mostly by the direct contact between healthy and diseased birds or also by the excretions of infected birds. This disease can vary in nature from mild to severe depending upon the type of the virus. NDV can infect both domestic and wild birds. This disease can have a devastating effect on poultry due to high morbidity and mortality rates. In unvaccinated chickens, the morbidity and mortality rates may reach up to 100% each, depending upon the virulence of the NDV. Live virus vaccines and killed oil based vaccines are used in many countries to prevent the disease in chickens. Despite the extensive use of vaccines, outbreaks are continuously occurring in various parts of the world resulting in huge losses since few years. Moreover, extensive use of vaccines has made the situation favorable for genetic modification of the pathogenic virus. Keeping these issues in mind, future challenges are highlighted in detail.

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Software defect prediction (SDP) in the initial period of the software development life cycle (SDLC) remains a critical and important assignment. SDP is essentially studied during few last decades as it leads to assure the quality of software systems. The quick forecast of defective or imperfect artifacts in software development may serve the development team to use the existing assets competently and more effectively to provide extraordinary software products in the given or narrow time. Previously, several canvassers have industrialized models for defect prediction utilizing machine learning (ML) and statistical techniques. ML methods are considered as an operative and operational approach to pinpoint the defective modules, in which moving parts through mining concealed patterns amid software metrics (attributes). ML techniques are also utilized by several researchers on healthcare datasets. This study utilizes different ML techniques software defect prediction using seven broadly used datasets. The ML techniques include the multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (J48), radial basis function (RBF), random forest (RF), hidden Markov model (HMM), credal decision tree (CDT), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), average one dependency estimator (A1DE), and Naïve Bayes (NB). The performance of each technique is evaluated using different measures, for instance, relative absolute error (RAE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), root relative squared error (RRSE), recall, and accuracy. The inclusive outcome shows the best performance of RF with 88.32% average accuracy and 2.96 rank value, second-best performance is achieved by SVM with 87.99% average accuracy and 3.83 rank values. Moreover, CDT also shows 87.88% average accuracy and 3.62 rank values, placed on the third position. The comprehensive outcomes of research can be utilized as a reference point for new research in the SDP domain, and therefore, any assertion concerning the enhancement in prediction over any new technique or model can be benchmarked and proved.

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Newcastle disease virus (NDV) is an infectious agent of a large variety of birds, including chicken, which poses a real threat to the agriculture industry. Matrix (M) proteins of NDV and many other viruses perform critical functions during viral assembly and budding from the host cell. M-proteins are well conserved and therefore are potential targets for antiviral therapies. To validate this, we expressed the NDV M-protein in its native form in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and in inclusion bodies in Escherichia coli. Proper refolding of the recombinant protein produced in E. coli was verified using circular dichroism and infrared spectroscopies and electron microscopy. Immunization of chickens with the NDV M-protein elicited significant serum antibody titers. However, the antibodies conferred little protection against the ND following lethal viral challenges. We conclude that the M-protein is not exposed on the surface of the host cell or the virus at any stage during its life cycle. We discuss how the conserved M-protein can further be exploited as an antiviral drug target.

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