A Method of Planning Disaster Emergency Rescue Paths in Road-Free Environment.

The occurrence of natural disasters has caused great loss of lives and properties that affected many people. To improve the efficiency of the emergency rescue efforts, the problem of road planning for emergency workers, vehicles, and other mobile objects should be overcome. Due to the characteristics of the emergency planning for rescue paths, timely, effective, and rapid efforts should be taken into effect based on geographical data in the road-free environment. This paper analyzes trafficability, researches both access ability and traffic efficiency, and uses traffic efficiency concerning the road-free environment as an influential weight and timeliness to improve the A∗ algorithm, which realizes the rapid planning of the mobile objects' emergency rescue paths in the road-free environment, providing decision-making services for the rescue path planning of disaster emergencies in the environment of no road network. Finally, the experiments were carried out using available data for Shuozhou City, Shanxi Province. The results show that the research can provide a reference for the rescue path planning of disaster emergencies and has contributed to theoretical and applicable aspects of the research.

Moxifloxacin plus standard first-line therapy in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis: A meta-analysis.

The fluoroquinolone moxifloxacin has potent activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and has been recommended by the guidelines for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). Monotherapy is not recommended by the guidelines and only a few studies have evaluated the efficacy and safety of moxifloxacin plus standard first-line therapy in treating TB. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to further investigate the efficacy and safety of moxifloxacin plus standard therapy compared with standard therapy alone in treating patients with pulmonary TB. Medline, Cochrane, EMBASE and Google Scholar (until February 12, 2015) were searched for studies that evaluated the clinical efficacy and tolerability of moxifloxacin in the treatment of pulmonary TB. Rate of culture conversion and serious adverse events (SAEs) were assessed. Risk of bias and sensitivity analysis, using the leave-one-out approach, was used to assess the robustness of the findings. Six studies were included in the meta-analysis which covered 2056 patients with pulmonary TB. For all included studies, the drug regimens at least contained rifampicin and pyrazinamide and the length of treatment was at least eight weeks. The odds ratio (OR) for the negative culture rate for moxifloxacin plus first-line medications compared first-line medications alone (the control group) was 1.60 with 95% CI in 0.93-2.74 (P = 0.089), indicating the moxifloxacin plus first-line medications had no significantly greater rate of culture conversion compared with first-line medication alone. The odds ratio of SAEs for moxifloxacin plus first-line medications compared with first-line medications alone found no difference in rate of SAEs between treatment groups (OR = 0.94, P = 0.862). In conclusion, our meta-analysis suggests that there was a trend for the addition of moxifloxacin to standard first-line therapy for non-drug resistant TB resulted to increase the rate of culture conversion but this effect requires confirmation in more randomized control trials.

Association between toll-like receptors 9 (TLR9) gene polymorphism and risk of pulmonary tuberculosis: meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies indicated that the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TLR9 gene might be associated with Tuberculosis (TB) risk. However, the results are inconsistent and inconclusive. METHODS: 1745 articles from four databases were involved in our study. A meta-analysis on the associations between the seven polymorphisms and TB risk was carried out by comparison using different genetic models. RESULTS: In this systematic review 8 studies from seven English articles were analyzed. Our results showed that rs352139 is significantly associated with TB risk (AA vs. AG, OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.65-0.92, P = 0.004). In the ethnic subgroup analysis, Indonesians with AA genotype had a decreased susceptibility while Mexicans with GG allele had an increased risk. CONCLUSIONS: The meta-analysis indicated that rs352139 polymorphism might be associated with decreased TB risk in Indonesians whereas increased risk in Mexicans. Whether the observed association was due to causal effect needs to be further studied.

Inhibition of Autophagy by MiR-30A Induced by Mycobacteria tuberculosis as a Possible Mechanism of Immune Escape in Human Macrophages.

The regulatory mechanism of miRNA induction in response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection has not been clearly established. Autophagy has recently been identified as an effective way to control intracellular survival of MTB. In the present study, we demonstrate a novel role of miR-30A in the negative regulation of the autophagy-mediated anti-MTB response. We found that overexpression of miR-30A suppresses the elimination of intracellular MTB through the inhibition of autophagy. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between concentrations of miR-30A and beclin-1 in MTB positive patients and miR-30A expression decreased after anti-TB treatment. Our results indicate that miR-30A plays a key role in immune response against MTB and, therefore, may serve as a potential target for future treatments of tuberculosis infection.