ABSTRACT
Cyclone Hudah struck the northeastern coast of Madagascar in the spring of 2000. Over a 5-month period, 11 700 relief kits consisting of bottles of water disinfectant and foldable jerry cans were distributed to the affected population. Five months after the cyclone, a survey was conducted in 12 villages to determine the impact of these relief kits on water quality. Seventy-six percent of the surveyed households reported using jerry cans, and 65% reported using the disinfectant. Stored water in households using both products had significantly less microbiological contamination than stored water in other households. To improve the prospects for a sustainable intervention, the response plan for future disasters should incorporate a transition to recovery and development, including formative research into local customs, beliefs, and water handling habits, and funding support to initiate social marketing.
Subject(s)
Disasters , Disinfection , Health Promotion/methods , Water Purification/methods , Humans , Madagascar , Program Evaluation , Water Microbiology , Water Supply/standardsABSTRACT
Novel 9-functional heterocyclic coupled 7-deoxy-9-dihydropaclitaxel analogues 17 and 22-24 synthesized from a natural taxoid 5-cinnamoyltriacetyltaxicin-I (3) and their biological evaluation in tubulin assembly activity and cytotoxicity in vitro against several human tumor cell lines are first presented. The biologically tested results show that 17, 22 and 23 are inactive in tubulin assembly assay and have no more remarkable cytotoxicities against human tumor cell lines SK-OV3, WIDR and MCF-7, though 22 and 23 exhibit more potent cytotoxicity against human liver cancer and human esophagus cancer cell lines (BEL-7402 and ECa-109) than paclitaxel.
Subject(s)
Antineoplastic Agents, Phytogenic/chemical synthesis , Paclitaxel/analogs & derivatives , Taxoids , Antineoplastic Agents, Phytogenic/pharmacology , Drug Screening Assays, Antitumor , Humans , Microtubules/drug effects , Microtubules/metabolism , Nucleic Acid Synthesis Inhibitors/chemical synthesis , Nucleic Acid Synthesis Inhibitors/pharmacology , Paclitaxel/chemical synthesis , Paclitaxel/chemistry , Paclitaxel/pharmacology , Tubulin/drug effects , Tubulin/metabolism , Tumor Cells, CulturedABSTRACT
A distributed rule-based system for automatic speech recognition is described. Acoustic property extraction and feature hypothesization are performed by the application of sequences of operators. These sequences, called plans, are executed by cooperative expert programs. Experimental results on the automatic segmentation and recognition of phrases, made of connected letters and digits, are described and discussed.
