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Oropouche virus (OROV) is responsible for outbreaks of Oropouche fever in parts of South America. We recently identified and isolated OROV from a febrile Ecuadorian patient, however, a previously published qRT-PCR assay did not detect OROV in the patient sample. A primer mismatch to the Ecuadorian OROV lineage was identified from metagenomic sequencing data. We report the optimisation of an qRT-PCR assay for the Ecuadorian OROV lineage, which subsequently identified a further five cases in a cohort of 196 febrile patients. We isolated OROV via cell culture and developed an algorithmically-designed primer set for whole-genome amplification of the virus. Metagenomic sequencing of the patient samples provided OROV genome coverage ranging from 68-99%. The additional cases formed a single phylogenetic cluster together with the initial case. OROV should be considered as a differential diagnosis for Ecuadorian patients with febrile illness to avoid mis-diagnosis with other circulating pathogens.

Industrial design has grown in Australia from a series of unnamed activities clustered about an emerging 19th century manufacturing industry into a recognised profession. This transformation largely occurred because of the emergence of specific design education and the support offered by professional design associations. Designers working for the early Australian manufacturing industry were given technical education in the areas of engineering, draughtsmanship and foundry work from 1827 onwards in Mechanics' Institutes. It was from this technical base that the early "designers" working for industry sprang. Technical Schools, Schools of Art and Schools of Mines and Industries all offered training for the designer before industrial design was finally offered as a course of study at tertiary level after WWII. Concurrent with this, professional associations arose to support the emerging industrial design industry in Australia. Nineteenth-century precursors to "modern" design education--Mechanics' Institutes, Technical Schools, Schools of Art, Schools of Mines and Industries, Junior Technical Schools, Apprenticeships and Secondary School design education--will be surveyed. As with many countries, WWII was a catalysing time for Australian industry as the country geared up production. At the conclusion of hostilities, Australia's first specific Industrial Design course at tertiary level was born. The purpose of this paper is to show how industrial design activity in Australia has become a profession. An early British lead in both design education and professional design associations was soon broadened to include other international models, as the Australian design industry and Australian society generally, looked to countries other than the "mother land". This paper argues industrial design activity was expanded in every way by the experience of mass-production of goods for the war effort, by new immigrants arriving in this country who often had skills lacking locally, and by the new opportunities offered by the post-war reconstruction programmes. Industrial design was formalised as a profession by industrial design education at tertiary level and the assistance offered to industrial designers by professional associations.

Performance on many decision-making tasks is underpinned by metacognitive monitoring, cognitive abilities, and executive functioning. Fatigue-inducing conditions, such as sleep loss, compromise these factors, leading to decline in decision performance. Using a 40-hr sleep deprivation protocol, we examined these factors and the resulting decision performance. Thirteen Australian Army male volunteers (aged 20-30 years) were tested at multiple time points on psychomotor vigilance, inhibitory control, task switching, working memory, short-term memory, fluid intelligence, and decision accuracy and confidence in a medical diagnosis-making test. Assessment took place in the morning and night over two consecutive days, during which participants were kept awake. Consistent with previous work, cognitive performance declined after a night without sleep. Extending previous findings, self-regulation and self-monitoring suffered significantly greater declines immediately after the sleepless night. These results indicate that the known decline in complex decision-making performance under fatigue-inducing conditions might be facilitated by metacognitive rather than cognitive mechanisms.

Current methods for testing water for faecal contamination rely on the culture of faecal indicator bacteria (FIB; Escherichia coli and Enterococci) that take 24-48 h, which leads to delays in taking proactive measures and poses a risk to public health. More rapid methods are therefore required. Here, we have tested a rapid, portable assay (Bacterisk) that detects the bacterial biomarker endotoxin in 30 min to quantify the bacterial biomass present, to evaluate 159 coastal water samples and to compare the results with the traditional culture of FIB. There was a significant correlation between the Bacterisk data given in endotoxin risk (ER) units and FIB culture that could accurately distinguish between poor and sufficient or good quality bathing water using the EU bathing directive values. Receiver operating characteristic analysis was used to determine the optimal ER threshold for coastal water samples, and the area under the curve was 0.9176 with a p-value of,0.0001. The optimal threshold was 7,300 ER units with a sensitivity of 95.45% and a specificity of 83.48%. In conclusion, we have shown that the Bacterisk assay provides a rapid and easy-to-use in situ method to assess bathing water quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]