Infection of dogs with canine influenza virus (CIV) is considered widespread throughout the United States following the first isolation of CIV in 2004. While vaccination against influenza A infection is a common and important practice for disease control, antiviral therapy can serve as a valuable adjunct in controlling the impact of the disease. In this study, we examined the antiviral activity of nitazoxanide (NTZ) and tizoxanide (TIZ) against three CIV isolates in vitro. NTZ and TIZ inhibited virus replication of all CIVs with 50% and 90% inhibitory concentrations ranging from 0.17 to 0.21 μM and from 0.60 to 0.76 μM, respectively. These results suggest that NTZ and TIZ are effective against CIV and may be useful for treatment of canine influenza in dogs but further investigation of the in vivo efficacy against CIV as well as the drug's potential for toxicity in dogs is needed.
Online fault diagnostic technologies are fast emerging for detection of incipient faults on tribological components to avoid catastrophic failure. Vibration analysis has long been used to detect machine faults, but is sensitive to relatively severe conditions only. Electrostatic monitoring is a newly developed approach with the potential to detect precursor processes that indicate contact distress and wear. Recently, at the University of Southampton, both vibration and electrostatic sensors were implemented on a bearing testing rig to evaluate their effectiveness in detecting bearing faults. The results indicate that both types of sensor are sensitive to bearing deterioration shortly before complete failure. However, univariate plots of signals from both types of sensor only exhibit significant change when entering the severe wear stage. Therefore, multivariate techniques for detecting wear severity of components at different running stages need investigating. In this study, an unsupervised training method, called mixture-model-based clustering, that utilizes the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is employed to develop further a wear detection technique. The choice and extraction of significant features from both vibration and electrostatic sensors are discussed as step one. The second step uses the clustering method to examine the behaviour of the extracted features during different running stages, and to quantify how good the sensors are at distinguishing wear severity. In the third step, a dynamic wear detection process is simulated. Clustering is applied to baseline data from a known healthy bearing and data from different wear stages to see if the data naturally group by wear condition. The result shows that the unsupervised clustering method is able not only to learn and detect wear conditions of the rolling element bearings with the developed statistical monitoring charts of occupation probability (OP) in the clusters and number of the trained clusters (NC), but also to obtain the advantage of detecting insignificant abnormalities that might be overlooked in the conventional plots.
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