0000000000212337
AUTHOR
S Mancuso
Language, Law and Food
The language of law has been traditionally characterized by an extreme technicism and the use of a specific jargon whose comprehension is considered a prerogative of legal professionals. The situation is gradually changing. There is a general trend to make law more understandable to non-lawyers and to the normal people in general. This implies the use of a different, more colloquial, kind of language, that could be more familiar to ordinary people. On the other side, food today is no longer what humans eat to calm hunger, but has become an object of research, elaborations, and contaminations, an expression of the different world cultures and a social phenomenon. The links between food and l…
Rules-based HIV-1 genotypic resistance interpretation systems predict 8 week and 24 week virological antiretroviral treatment outcome and benefit from drug potency weighting
Objectives: To test retrospectively the ability of four freely available rules-based expert systems to predict short- and medium-term virological outcome following an antiretroviral treatment switch in pre-treated HIV-1 patients. Methods: The HIV-1 genotype interpretation systems (GISs) HIVdb, ANRS, Rega and AntiRetroScan were tested for their accuracy in predicting response to highly active antiretroviral therapy using 8 week (n = 765) and 24 week (n = 634) follow-up standardized treatment change episodes extracted from the Italian Antiretroviral Resistance Cohort Analysis (ARCA) database. A genotypic sensitivity score (GSS) was derived for each genotype-treatment pair for the different GI…
Detection of drug resistance mutations at low plasma HIV-1 RNA load in a European multicentre cohort study
Background and objectives: Guidelines indicate a plasma HIV-1 RNA load of 500-1000 copies/mL as the minimal threshold for antiretroviral drug resistance testing. Resistance testing at lower viral load levels may be useful to guide timely treatment switches, although data on the clinical utility of this remain limited. We report here the influence of viral load levels on the probability of detecting drug resistance mutations (DRMs) and other mutations by routine genotypic testing in a large multicentre European cohort, with a focus on tests performed at a viral load <1000 copies/mL. Methods: A total of 16511 HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and protease sequences from 11492 treatment-experienced …
Cooperazione Europa-Africa: aspetti storici e prospettive di sviluppo
Il saggio esamina il modello di cooperazione tra Europa ed Africa comparandolo con gli altri esistenti. Individua i punti di forza e di debolezza del modello e suggerisce ipotesi per un suo miglioramento
A novel methodology for large-scale phylogeny partition
Understanding the determinants of virus transmission is a fundamental step for effective design of screening and intervention strategies to control viral epidemics. Phylogenetic analysis can be a valid approach for the identification of transmission chains, and very-large data sets can be analysed through parallel computation. Here we propose and validate a new methodology for the partition of large-scale phylogenies and the inference of transmission clusters. This approach, on the basis of a depth-first search algorithm, conjugates the evaluation of node reliability, tree topology and patristic distance analysis. The method has been applied to identify transmission clusters of a phylogeny …
The integration of informal business law in the OHADA framework. Methodological reflections
OHADA represents today a successful example of legal integration that offers a modern and reliable legal environment regarding business law in those countries that have joined it. However, such a modern integrated system of business law appears to be unsuited to the informal business sector that still represents a vital segment of the economy in most of the African countries. The paper discusses the attempts that have been made to integrate the informal business sector in the OHADA framework, trying to understand the reasons why they have been substantially unsuccessful and suggests a possible way forward to make such integration possible.
Declining Prevalence of HIV-1 Drug Resistance in Antiretroviral Treatment-exposed Individuals in Western Europe
HIV-1 drug resistance represents a major obstacle to infection and disease control. This retrospective study analyzes trends and determinants of resistance in antiretroviral treatment (ART)-exposed individuals across 7 countries in Europe. Of 20 323 cases, 80% carried at least one resistance mutation: these declined from 81% in 1997 to 71% in 2008. Predicted extensive 3-class resistance was rare (3.2% considering the cumulative genotype) and peaked at 4.5% in 2005, decreasing thereafter. The proportion of cases exhausting available drug options dropped from 32% in 2000 to 1% in 2008. Reduced risk of resistance over calendar years was confirmed by multivariable analysis. © 2013 The Author.
Antiretroviral genotypic resistance in plasma RNA and whole blood DNA in HIV-1 infected patients failing HAART
The extent to which HIV-1 proviral DNA mutations cause clinically relevant antiretroviral resistance is still controversial. Paired plasma HIV-1 RNA and whole blood DNA were compared in patients failing HAART to investigate if the additional knowledge of archived mutations could improve the selection of potentially active drugs. Seventy-three HIV-1-infected patients with first/second HAART failure were studied before starting a new regimen based on RNA genotyping. Follow-up data after a 12-week therapy were available. DNA genotyping was retrospectively performed on stored whole blood samples and mutational profiles were compared to those from RNA. The mean number of IAS pol mutations was si…
Low Rate of Virological Failure and Maintenance of Susceptibility to HIV-1 Protease Inhibitors with First-Line Lopinavir/Ritonavir-Based Antiretroviral Treatment in Clinical Practice
Protease inhibitor (PI)-resistant HIV-1 has hardly ever been detected at failed boosted PI-based first-line antiretroviral regimens in clinical trials. However, this phenomenon has not been investigated in clinical practice. To address this gap, data from patients starting a first-line lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/rtv)-based therapy with available baseline HIV-1 RNA load, a viral genotype and follow-up viral load after 3 and 6 months of treatment were extracted from the Italian Antiretroviral Resistance Cohort Analysis (ARCA) observational database. Based on survival analysis, 39 (7.1%) and 43 (7.8%) of the 548 examined patient cases had an HIV-1 RNA >500 and >50 copies/ml, respectively, after …
No pol mutation is associated independently with the lack of immune recovery in patients infected with HIV and failing antiretroviral therapy
An investigation was undertaken to determine whether specific pol mutations hinder long-term immune recovery regardless of virological response. In total, 826 patients with >50 HIV RNA copies/ml, who underwent genotypic resistance testing between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2003 after >3 years of antiretroviral treatment, and were followed up for >3 years after genotypic resistance testing, were analyzed retrospectively. The outcome of the study was the lack of immune recovery after >3 years of follow-up, defined as a slope by linear regression 50 copies/ml divided by the number of HIV RNA measurements during follow-up. Logistic regression was used for univariable and multivariable analy…