ABSTRACT
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major health crisis globally. Migratory birds could be a potential source for antibiotic resistant (ABR) bacteria. Not much is known about their role in the transmission of ABR in Bangladesh. In this study, a total of 66 freshly dropped fecal materials of migratory birds were analyzed. Bacterial isolation and identification were based on cultural properties, biochemical tests, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The disk diffusion method was employed to evaluate antibiogram profiles. By PCR, out of 66 samples, the detection rate of Enterococcus spp. (60.61%; 95% confidence interval: 48.55-71.50%) was found significantly higher than Salmonella spp. (21.21%; 95% CI: 13.08-32.51%) and Vibrio spp. (39.40%; 95% CI: 28.50-51.45%). Enterococcus isolates were frequently found resistant (100-40%) to ampicillin, streptomycin, meropenem, erythromycin, and gentamicin; Salmonella isolates were frequently resistant (72-43%) to chloramphenicol, tetracycline, ampicillin, streptomycin, and erythromycin; and Vibrio spp. isolates were frequently resistant (77-31%) to vancomycin, ampicillin, erythromycin, tetracycline, and streptomycin. In addition, 60% (95% CI: 44.60-73.65%) Enterococcus spp., 85.71% (95% CI: 60.06-97.46%) Salmonella spp., and 76.92% (95% CI: 57.95-88.97%) Vibrio spp. isolates were multi-drug resistant (MDR) in nature. Three isolates (one from each bacterium) were found resistant against six classes of antibiotics. The bivariate analysis revealed strong associations (both positive and negative) between several antibiotic pairs which were resistant to isolated organisms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in detecting MDR Enterococcus spp., Salmonella spp., and Vibrio spp. from migratory birds travelling to Bangladesh. Frequent detection of MDR bacteria from migratory birds travelling to Bangladesh suggests that these birds have the potential to carry and spread ABR bacteria and could implicate potential risks to public health. We recommend that these birds should be kept under an AMR surveillance program to minimize the potential risk of contamination of the environment with ABR as well as to reduce their hazardous impacts on health.
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes an encryption-based image watermarking scheme using a combination of second-level discrete wavelet transform (2DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) with an auto extraction feature. The 2DWT has been selected based on the analysis of the trade-off between imperceptibility of the watermark and embedding capacity at various levels of decomposition. DCT operation is applied to the selected area to gather the image coefficients into a single vector using a zig-zig operation. We have utilized the same random bit sequence as the watermark and seed for the embedding zone coefficient. The quality of the reconstructed image was measured according to bit correction rate, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and similarity index. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is highly robust under different types of image-processing attacks. Several image attacks, e.g., JPEG compression, filtering, noise addition, cropping, sharpening, and bit-plane removal, were examined on watermarked images, and the results of our proposed method outstripped existing methods, especially in terms of the bit correction ratio (100%), which is a measure of bit restoration. The results were also highly satisfactory in terms of the quality of the reconstructed image, which demonstrated high imperceptibility in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR ≥ 40 dB) and structural similarity (SSIM ≥ 0.9) under different image attacks.
ABSTRACT
An 81-year-old patient presented with fever and lethargy for 3 weeks. There were no other signs or symptoms of infection. Detailed history revealed a fall onto his right flank, prior to the start of fever. All microbiological, autoimmune and oncological investigations were negative. CT scan of chest, abdomen and pelvis showed haemorrhage in a previously diagnosed simple adrenal cyst. The cyst was non-functioning. The patient continued to spike fever in the following 4 weeks, otherwise remained stable. The patient was managed conservatively as haemoglobin level was stable. Repeated scan showed signs of improvement. He was discharged after 5 weeks. He remained afebrile and asymptomatic at the planned endocrinology outpatient follow-up after 8 weeks.
