Serum Carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA 19-9), a marker of malignant tumors, is generally slightly elevated in benign conditions. We report a 58 year old male with jaundice and elevated CA 19-9 levels (8,474 IU/ml). Radiological imaging of the liver, pancreas and extrahepatic biliary tree revealed neither malignancy, nor obstruction. The only remarkable finding was biopsy-proven nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). This presentation indicates that significantly high CA 19-9 levels could be associated with NASH

One of the major challenges to transformation in Africa is insecurity due to socio-religious upheavals. The level of insecurity in some countries in Africa is so high that it poses great threat to transformative bids in various facets of governance. Constant security reports in the audio-visual and print media are largely on the negative to the point that one is forced to assume that the experience is now the order of the day. The perpetrators of the evil act seem to be taking advantage of concentration of security vigilance on city-centres rather than local settings where the recruitment and training of the hoodlums seem to be carried out more. This implies that there is the need for an administrative procedure that will easily detect and nip the socio- religious upheavals in the bud. This paper therefore, proposes the indigenous administrative procedure of king and his counsellors in South-west Nigeria to transform the African societies to a more peaceful atmosphere. This is because the indigenous administrative virtues being proposed accounted for the enduring peaceful scenarios in the traditional African societies.

Most countries consider ISIS as one of the most dangerous terrorist organization in which operation has brought a major threat to national security and peace in many countries, as well to human, regional and global security and peace because of its ability to amass combatants, funding, and territory. In achieving its goals to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state as well as to impose its worldwide view of Islam extremism, it practices political and military tactics by the use of ruthless force on both Muslims and non-Muslims people. Ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS towards Non-Muslims can be considered a very serious crime and represents a part of terrorist actions which aims to force the scenario of dividing Iraq and creating a terrorist front in its occupied territories in Iraq. The rapid advance of ISIS in Iraq has completely changed the balance of power in the country. In addition, it threatens not only the integrity of the country, but also leads to redrawing of borders across wider regions.

Orodispersible tablets (ODT) of levocetirizine was prepared using natural polysaccharides ipomoea batatas starch, amorphophallus campanulatus starch and their modified form by direct compression method and evaluated for their superdisintegrant activity. Levocetirizine dihydrochloride was used as a model drug. The prepared formulations were compared with synthetic superdisintegrants such as crosspovidone and diluent Ludiflash for disintegration and other ODT parameters. FTIR study indicated no interaction between drug and excipients. Precompression parameters, studied for all the formulations were found to be satisfactory. Different concentrations of 2.5%, 5, 7.5% and 10% of modified and unmodified forms of both starches were studied for the improvement in the ODT parameters. The formulations LISN (10%), LISM (10%) (LIS-levocetirizine dihydrochloride+ ipomoea batatas starch; N-Natural; M-Modified) and LASN (10%), LASM (10%) (LAS-levocetirizine dihydrochloride+amorphophallus campanulatus starch; N-Natural; M-modified) of both the starches showed better DT than lower concentrations. Synthetic superdisintegrant crosspovidone was compared with formulations of natural superdisintegrants. The formulation containing crospovidone 5% concentration showed better DT of 32 seconds compared to natural superdisintegrants, and was used for further comparison of modified polysaccharides. The tablets prepared with Ludiflash as diluent without crospovidone, showed no significant difference in disintegration time. The formulation LASMLU (LAS-Levocetirizine dihydrochloride + amorphophallus campanulatus starch; M-Modified; Lu-Ludiflash) showed 95% of drug release compared to other formulations. The release profile of 10% of modified amorphophallus campanulatus starch LASM or Ludiflash (LASMLU) formulations did not show any significant difference in release profile. Hence in conclusion starch citrate, a new modified starch at 10% or at 5% concentration with crosspovidone with or without Ludiflash as diluent can be used as superdisintegrant for the preparation of orodispersible tablets

Negative myths and misconceptions about family planning (F.P.) are a barrier to modern contraceptive use. Myths and misconceptions about methods can spread through informal communication via social networks and lead to continued negative perceptions. To date, much of the research on contraceptive myths and misconceptions has focused on individual level attitudes and contraceptive use. Family planning is the planning of when to have children and use of birth control and other techniques to implement these plans. The reason for not using any family planning methods are lack of knowledge and education, religious belief and fear of side effects. Family planning counseling needs to be universally included into routine antenatal activities. Besides improving formal female education is certain to raise the existing knowledge and also to dispel the prevailing misinformation and misperception about family planning methods. There is also need to review the national family planning program with particular emphasis on contraceptive needs of adolescents to improve accessibility and availability of all family planning services. The aim of this study is to review the myths and beliefs of people regarding contraceptive methods

In situ gel is a novel ophthalmic dosage form, which persists as solution form at room temperature but undergoes gel transformation when instilled into ophthalmic cavity, thus enhancing the patient compliance. In this present study ion activated in situ ophthalmic gel of Moxifloxacin hydrochloride and Ketorolac tromethamine combination are prepared by using gelrite (0.1-0.25% w/v) as gelling agent and carboxy methyl tamarind kernel powder(0.2-0.45% w/v) as viscosity enhancing agent and rate controlling polymer, Benzalkonium chloride in suitable proportion was used as preservative. The compatability study between drug and polymer was done by FTIR and DSC. The formulations were sterilized by autoclaving at 1210 C at 15 PSI at 20 min. The formulations passed various evaluation parameters like visual appearance, clarity, pH, gelling capacity, drug content and in vitro diffusion studies, antimicrobial study, stability study. The drug release pattern was analysed by derivative spectroscopy using ZCP method. The release pattern of the best formulation indicated that both the drug showed sustained release pattern for a period of 12 hours thus enhancing the contact time of drug with ocular tissues and reducing the nasolacrimal drainage. From this present work it can be concluded that In situ ophthalmic gel is an alternative to convention drug delivery system

In this paper, motor imagery EEG signals are preprocessed, using the state-of-the-art measurement and control software LabVIEW. Firstly, the elliptic filter is used for digital band-pass filtering. Then the soft-thresholding approach is adopted for wavelet denoising to enable programming with the BCI Competition 2005 dataset. The experimental results show that the method not only saves a lot of time in development and debugging, but also provides a good foundation for implementing a BCI system.

Quality of Care and patient satisfaction are major challenges faced by the healthcare sector in Jordan. This paper aims to comparative study of the factors affecting service quality on the Patient Satisfaction from patient‟s perspectives in Jordan. Cross Sectional Survey. The study sample consisted of (200) respondents divided between King Hussein Medical Centre Hospital and Al-Bashir Hospital. The collected data were analyzed using the SPSS package. The study results revealed that quality of care has an impact on patient satisfaction. Moreover the results indicated that patients are satisfied with quality of care in the two hospitals. The study recommended that the two hospitals have to set up criteria for their quality provided for patients, and they are requested to provide sufficient number of qualifies medical staff to deal with the increased number of patients.

The study aimed at assessing the drivers of growth of women-owned micro enterprises in Meru Municipality, Kenya. The study employed descriptive research design. Self administered questionnaires were used to collect data from the respondents. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data. Analyzed data was presented in the form of frequency tables, pie charts, bar graphs and percentages. The study concluded that, there is need for women entrepreneurs to participate in entrepreneurship trainings and beneficial associations. The study recommended that: Private sectors and NGOs in collaboration with the government should be encouraged to come up with programs of inculcating women entrepreneurship culture through business conferences, exhibitions, foreign tours. Such forums will act as learning centres for women entrepreneurs.

Data clustering has been considered as the most important raw data analysis method used in data mining technology. To extract the unknown valuable information from the large volume of data for so many real time applications are used in data classification. Most of the clustering techniques proved their efficiency in many applications such as decision making systems, medical sciences, earth sciences etc. Partition based clustering is one of the main approach in clustering. There are various algorithms of data clustering, every algorithm has its own advantages and disadvantages. This work reports the results of classification performance of three such widely used algorithms namely K-means (KM), Fuzzy c-means and Possibilistic Fuzzy c-Means (PFCM) clustering algorithms. To analyze these algorithms two known data sets from UCI machine learning repository are taken. From the repository the efficiency of clustering output is compared with the classification performance, percentage of correctness and no. of iterations taken to converge objective function. The experimental results prove that PFCM produces poor results compared to FCM and Kmeans algorithm yields more accurate results than the FCM and PFCM algorithms for liver data.

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Effect of xanthosoma biomass in vegetable oil industry effluent by coag-flocculation process has been undertaken at room temperature. The coag-flocculation activity and kinetic parameters of xanthosoma biomass in vegetable oil industry effluent were determined at varying; dosages, settling time and pH. The coag-flocculation behaviour of xanthosoma biomass was evaluated using standard Jar test method. The maximum kinetic parameters determined were recorded at K of 3x10-5L/mg, pH of 6, t1∕2=33.33 min while the minimum values are recorded at K of 1 x10-5, pH of 10, t1∕2 = 80min. Regression analysis was used to ascertain the accuracy of the fit to the postulated kinetic model. However, it was concluded that the second order kinetic model described the reaction most adequately with highest regression coefficient (R2) of 0.9869, pH of 6 at 2g dosage. The maximum turbidity removal efficiency (E) was recorded at 83 for dosage, time and pH indicating that xanthosoma biomass is a potential coagulant for effective wastewater treatment.

This study sought to determine whether the academic self-concepts of children come from teacher appraisal or their own cognitive abilities. Longitudinal data from the Millennium Cohort Study were used to answer this question by testing the internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model for English children aged 5, 7, and 11 years and of ethnic minority, disadvantaged, and advantaged backgrounds. The I/E model predicts that high verbal achievement leads to a high verbal self-concept but a low mathematical self-concept, and high mathematics achievement leads to a high mathematical self-concept but a low verbal self-concept. The results of structural equation modelling revealed that the I/E model was generally supported, but teacher assessment had greater effects on self-concept than did cognitive ability. Teacher assessment and cognitive ability measured in children at the age of 7 years predicted child self-concepts at 11 years old. Teacher assessment was less influenced by the type of measurement used but more influenced by the cultural backgrounds of the children than cognitive ability. The implications of these results are discussed herein.

Abstract: Diabetes is one of the largest health emergencies of the 21st century. In future there will not only be increase in the incidence and prevalence of diabetes but also there will be an increase in economic burden, disability and life years lost due to disease. Microalbuminuria is used as predictor for early micro and macrovascular changes in diabetes. The objectives were to find out the prevalence of microalbuminuria among type II diabetes mellitus patients in urban Chidambaram and to find out the association between albuminuria and age, sex, duration of diabetes.A descriptive cross sectional study was carried out in the urban field practice area of urban health centre between October 2015 and July 2016, among 200 study participants who had type II diabetes mellitus. The prevalence of microalbuminuria among the study participants was 41.5%. All the three risk factors age, sex and duration of diabetes mellitus were found to have significant association with occurrence of albuminuria. As the age increased the probability of being microalbuminuric also increased (P<0.05). Males had 2.9 times the risk of being microalbuminuric than the females. As the duration of diabetes mellitus increased the chance of being microalbuminuric also increased (P<0.05).Life style modifications and other measures which can postpone the age of onset of type II diabetes mellitus can aid in decreasing the mean duration of diabetes mellitus with age.Studies with analytical designs should be performed in the same area for deeper understanding of the role of risk factors for the occurrence of microalbuminuria in the indigenous population.

Abstract: Young snails of Achatina achatina (Linné, 1750) of 0.33 ± 0.23 g of average live weight and 9.1 ± 0.06 mm average length of shell were subjected to two types of diet. Two diets contained wild and cultivated plants (R1 and R2) and four diets concentrated in flour forms (R3, R4, R5 and RT) of respectively variable calcium content (12.02%, 14.03%, 16.01% and 06.82%). The objective is to compare the organoleptic qualities of the snails’ flesh emanating of the two types of food. The flesh of the concentrated diet are more tender (6.05), juicier (6.32) with an average aftertaste (5.8) while those of the vegetable diet are aromatized with an average of 6. The optimum calcium rates inducing the best tenderness (6.06), juiciness (6) are of 12.02% and of aftertaste (5.9) is diet containing 14.03% of calcium while the flavour (6.6) was obtained a rate of 0.24%.