BACKGROUND: The epidemiology of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection has been studied in many countries. However, little is known about HCV infection in Lithuania, a Baltic country, that was part of the former Soviet Union. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to determine and evaluate the etiology of acute viral hepatitis, the risk factors for acquiring HCV in comparison to hepatitis B virus (HBV),

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Background: Several countries are discussing new legislation on the ban of smoking in public places, and on the acceptable levels of traffic-related air pollutants. It is therefore useful to estimate the burden of disease associated with indoor and outdoor air pollution. Methods: We have estimated exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) and to air pollution in never smokers and ex-smokers in

Background. To evaluate the relationship between age and poor ovarian response to pregnancy and cancellation rate after IVF stimulation. Methods. Poor ovarian response was defined as 37 years, who were poor responders, had a significantly lower pregnancy rate per OPU (3.0%) compared to normal to high responders in the same age group (22.1%, p < 0.05). Also, 43.6% of women > 37 years, who were cla

The present work is a contribution to the study of Christian Arabic literature. An apologetic treatise on the unity and trinity of God incorrectly attributed to Yahya ibn Adi (d. 974) is edited for the very first time and provided with a comprehensive word index. The edition is based on six manuscripts found in Egypt. Four of these manuscripts have so far not been known to scholarly research. The

Turbulent premixed natural gas - air flame velocities have been measured in a stationary axi-symmetric burner using LDA. The flame was stabilized by letting the flow retard toward a stagnation plate downstream of the burner exit. Turbulence was generated by letting the flow pass through a plate with drilled holes. Three different hole diameters were used, 3, 6 and 10 mm, in order to achieve differ

The process simulator ASPEN PLUS was used for simulation of an ethanol production process based on enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic materials. Various process configurations were studied to increase the overall yield of ethanol and to reduce the energy consumption in the process. An increased utilization of the pentosan fraction was achieved by a complex recycling of streams in the process.

The role of various material fire properties in the model of fire growth developed by Magnusson and Karlsson [l] is examined in the context of the dimensionless variables containing them. It is shown that their successful representation of their calculations by power law (one for fires which do not flashover and one for those which do) permits one to devise weighting factors for the rate of heat r

Rhizotrons provide valuable information about plant root production, but measurements are usually made in units of root length per unit surface area of observation window surface. These measurement units are not easily comparable to above-ground plant growth. To address this deficiency, several techniques have been developed to convert rhizotron measurement units into root mass production per unit

The affinity of metal chelates for amino acids, such as histidine, is widely used in purifying proteins, most notably through six-histidine `tails'. We have found that metal affinity interactions can also be applied to separation of single-stranded nucleic acids through interactions involving exposed purines. Here we describe a metal affinity precipitation method to resolve RNA from linear and pla

Models of Parkinson's disease (PD) based on selective neuronal death have been used to study pathogenic mechanisms underlying nigral cell death and in some instances to develop symptomatic therapies. For validation of putative neuroprotectants, a model is desirable in which the events leading to neurodegeneration replicate those occurring in the disease. We developed a human in vitro model of PD b

This study describes the integrated sympathetic/metabolic control of capillary pressure (Pc) and filtration in cat skeletal muscle as studied during graded exercise and superimposed graded (2, 6 and 16 Hz) vasoconstrictor nerve excitation. The applied technique permitted simultaneous analysis of the underlying changes of resistance in the whole vascular bed (RT) and in its large-bore arterial resi

A novel gel structure called the "plum-pudding" gel was described by us previously. I The gel was composed of randomly dispersed microgel particles ("plums") in a conventional hydrogel network. Depending on the preparation conditions, the microgels can be incorporated into the gel as expanded networks or dense collapsed globules. Where the microgel particles exist as collapsed globules, they have

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