Treatment of Tuberculosis in Complex Emergencies in Developing Countries: A Scoping Review

Almost 172 million people live in complex emergencies globally resulting from political and/or economic instability. The provision and continuity of health care in complex emergencies remain a significant challenge. Health agencies are often hesitant to implement tuberculosis programmes in particular because its treatment requires a longer commitment than most acute diseases. However, not treating tuberculosis promptly increases mortality and untreated tuberculosis further increases the incidence of tuberculosis. Given that complex emergencies are increasing globally, there is an urgent need to analyse the available evidence to improve our understanding of how best to deliver tuberculosis programmes in such settings. Using a scoping review method, we selected and analysed fifteen studies on tuberculosis programmes in complex emergencies. We found that despite the challenges, tuberculosis programmes have been successful in complex emergencies. We identified seven cross-cutting factors that were found to be important: service providers and treatment regime, training and supervision, donor support, adherence, leadership and coordination, monitoring, and government and community support. In general, programmes showed greater creativity and flexibility to adapt to the local conditions and at times, it also meant diverting from the WHO guidelines. We identify areas of further research including the need to study the effectiveness of programmes that divert from the WHO guidelines and their implication on drug resistance

Regular obstructed categories and TQFT

A proposal of the concept of $n$-regular obstructed categories is given. The corresponding regularity conditions for mappings, morphisms and related structures in categories are considered. An n-regular TQFT is introduced. It is shown the connection of time reversibility with the regularity.Comment: 22 pages in Latex. To be published in J. Math. Phy

Light and Motion in SDSS Stripe 82: The Catalogues

We present a new public archive of light-motion curves in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Stripe 82, covering 99 deg in right ascension from RA = 20.7 h to 3.3 h and spanning 2.52 deg in declination from Dec = -1.26 to 1.26 deg, for a total sky area of ~249 sq deg. Stripe 82 has been repeatedly monitored in the u, g, r, i and z bands over a seven-year baseline. Objects are cross-matched between runs, taking into account the effects of any proper motion. The resulting catalogue contains almost 4 million light-motion curves of stellar objects and galaxies. The photometry are recalibrated to correct for varying photometric zeropoints, achieving ~20 mmag and ~30 mmag root-mean-square (RMS) accuracy down to 18 mag in the g, r, i and z bands for point sources and extended sources, respectively. The astrometry are recalibrated to correct for inherent systematic errors in the SDSS astrometric solutions, achieving ~32 mas and ~35 mas RMS accuracy down to 18 mag for point sources and extended sources, respectively. For each light-motion curve, 229 photometric and astrometric quantities are derived and stored in a higher-level catalogue. On the photometric side, these include mean exponential and PSF magnitudes along with uncertainties, RMS scatter, chi^2 per degree of freedom, various magnitude distribution percentiles, object type (stellar or galaxy), and eclipse, Stetson and Vidrih variability indices. On the astrometric side, these quantities include mean positions, proper motions as well as their uncertainties and chi^2 per degree of freedom. The here presented light-motion curve catalogue is complete down to r~21.5 and is at present the deepest large-area photometric and astrometric variability catalogue available.Comment: MNRAS accepte

New UltraCool and Halo White Dwarf Candidates in SDSS Stripe 82

A 2.5 x 100 degree region along the celestial equator (Stripe 82) has been imaged repeatedly from 1998 to 2005 by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A new catalogue of ~4 million light-motion curves, together with over 200 derived statistical quantities, for objects in Stripe 82 brighter than r~21.5 has been constructed by combining these data by Bramich et al. (2007). This catalogue is at present the deepest catalogue of its kind. Extracting the ~130000 objects with highest signal-to-noise ratio proper motions, we build a reduced proper motion diagram to illustrate the scientific promise of the catalogue. In this diagram disk and halo subdwarfs are well-separated from the cool white dwarf sequence. Our sample of 1049 cool white dwarf candidates includes at least 8 and possibly 21 new ultracool H-rich white dwarfs (T_eff < 4000K) and one new ultracool He-rich white dwarf candidate identified from their SDSS optical and UKIDSS infrared photometry. At least 10 new halo white dwarfs are also identified from their kinematics.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, published in MNRAS, minor text changes, final versio

Inverse monoids and immersions of 2-complexes

It is well known that under mild conditions on a connected topological space $\mathcal X$, connected covers of $\mathcal X$ may be classified via conjugacy classes of subgroups of the fundamental group of $\mathcal X$. In this paper, we extend these results to the study of immersions into 2-dimensional CW-complexes. An immersion $f : {\mathcal D} \rightarrow \mathcal C$ between CW-complexes is a cellular map such that each point $y \in {\mathcal D}$ has a neighborhood $U$ that is mapped homeomorphically onto $f(U)$ by $f$. In order to classify immersions into a 2-dimensional CW-complex $\mathcal C$, we need to replace the fundamental group of $\mathcal C$ by an appropriate inverse monoid. We show how conjugacy classes of the closed inverse submonoids of this inverse monoid may be used to classify connected immersions into the complex

Probing the Galactic Potential with Next-Generation Observations of Disk Stars

Near-future surveys promise a dramatic improvement in the number and precision of astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic measurements of stars in the Milky Way's disk. We examine the impact of such surveys on our understanding of the Galaxy by "observing" particle realizations of non-axisymmetric disk distributions orbiting in an axisymmetric halo with appropriate errors and then attempting to recover the underlying potential using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. We demonstrate that the azimuthally averaged gravitational force field in the Galactic plane--and hence, to a lesser extent, the Galactic mass distribution--can be tightly constrained over a large range of radii using a variety of types of surveys so long as the error distribution of the measurements of the parallax, proper motion and radial velocity are well-understood and the disk is surveyed globally. One advantage of our method is that the target stars can be selected non-randomly in real or apparent-magnitude space to ensure just such a global sample without biasing the results. Assuming we can always measure the line-of-sight velocity of a star with at least 1 km/s precision, we demonstrate that the force field can be determined to better than ~1% for Galactocentric radii in the range R=4-20 kpc We conclude that near-future surveys, like SIM Lite, Gaia, and VERA, will provide the first precise mapping of the gravitational force field in the region of the Galactic disk.Comment: 41 pages and 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Exploring the Local Milky Way: M Dwarfs as Tracers of Galactic Populations

We have assembled a spectroscopic sample of low-mass dwarfs observed as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey along one Galactic sightline, designed to investigate the observable properties of the thin and thick disks. This sample of ~7400 K and M stars also has measured ugriz photometry, proper motions, and radial velocities. We have computed UVW space motion distributions, and investigate their structure with respect to vertical distance from the Galactic Plane. We place constraints on the velocity dispersions of the thin and thick disks, using two-component Gaussian fits. We also compare these kinematic distributions to a leading Galactic model. Finally, we investigate other possible observable differences between the thin and thick disks, such as color, active fraction and metallicity.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, Accepted by A