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Objectives This study measures the prevalence of risk factors among pregnant women and young children aged 12-24 months in a rural community in West Bengal, India. Methods Community health workers (CHWs) enrolled women and children into this 2015 cross-sectional study. Pregnant women were evaluated for underweight, anemia, and abnormal blood pressure. Children were evaluated for underweight, abnormal head and upper arm circumferences, and low scores from the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ). Data were collected on smartphones and tablets or by paper. Results More than half of the 279 women (59.9%) had a risk factor during pregnancy: 48.7% were anemic, 35.1% had low blood pressure, and 7.5% were underweight. Among the 366 children, 59.3% had a risk factor, including 24.0% with low ASQ scores and 49.7% who had abnormal anthropometric measures. Conclusions for Practice Vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women and young children, needed a greater connection to doctors in this rural community. This study demonstrated the feasibility of CHWs to listen to health concerns and connect underserved populations with health care services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staphylococcus aureus causes most infections of human skin and soft tissue and is a major infectious cause of mortality. Host defense mechanisms against S. aureus are incompletely understood. Interleukin 19 (IL-19), IL-20 and IL-24 signal through type I and type II IL-20 receptors and are associated with inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis. We found here that those cytokines promoted cutaneous infection with S. aureus in mice by downregulating IL-1β- and IL-17A-dependent pathways. We noted similar effects of those cytokines in human keratinocytes after exposure to S. aureus, and antibody blockade of the IL-20 receptor improved outcomes in infected mice. Our findings identify an immunosuppressive role for IL-19, IL-20 and IL-24 during infection that could be therapeutically targeted to alter susceptibility to infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on Staphylococcus aureus, an infectious agent that was first identified in 1880 by Alexander Ogston, a surgeon from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Treatment options for this infection was, for decades, limited to topical application of carbolic acid. In 1940s penicillin was introduced as an effective therapy, but then methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus soon appeared. In recent years, new strains of S. aureus have been recognized.

Cross-presentation is the pathway by which exogenous antigens are routed for presentation on MHC class I for activation of CD8+ T cells. This pathway is important for the development of CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses against tumors and infectious pathogens that do not directly infect APC. We review studies showing that certain Toll-like receptors mediate cross-presentation by dendritic cells, initiating cytosolic processing of antigen after inducing dendritic cell maturation. The implications of these studies for understanding CD8+ T cell activation and implementing novel vaccine strategies is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In intermittent dynamical systems, the distributions of local Lyapunov exponents are markedly non-Gaussian and tend to be asymmetric and fat-tailed. A comparative analysis of the different time-scales in intermittency provides a heuristic explanation for the origin of the exponential tails, for which we also obtain an analytic expression deriving from a more quantitative theory. Application is made to several examples of discrete dynamical systems displaying intermittent dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]