During the treatment and at follow-up after one month, good tolerance and no side effects were observed. Conclusions The use of benralizumab seems to be feasible, rapid, and safe in treating acute exacerbation of severe eosinophilic asthma without the use of systemic corticosteroids.The Sequence Read Archive (SRA) is a large public repository that stores raw next-generation sequencing data from thousands of diverse scientific investigations. Despite its promise, reuse and re-analysis of SRA data has been challenged by the heterogeneity and poor quality of the metadata that describe its biological samples. Recently, the MetaSRA project standardized these metadata by annotating each sample with terms from biomedical ontologies. In this work, we present a pair of Jupyter notebook-based tools that utilize the MetaSRA for building structured datasets from the SRA in order to facilitate secondary analyses of the SRA’s human RNA-seq data. The first tool, called the Case-Control Finder, finds suitable case and control samples for a given disease or condition where the cases and controls are matched by tissue or cell type. The second tool, called the Series Finder, finds ordered sets of samples for the purpose of addressing biological questions pertaining to changes over a numerical property such as time. These tools were the result of a three-day-long NCBI Codeathon in March 2019 held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Introduction Since its introduction by the World Health Organization (WHO), the concept of burden of disease has been evolving. The current method uses life expectancy projected to 2050 and does not consider age-weighting and time-discounting. Our aim is to estimate the burden of disease due to hip, knee, and unspecified osteoarthritis using this new method in the Peruvian Social Health Insurance System (EsSalud) during 2016. Methods We followed the original 1994 WHO study and the current 2015 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) methods to estimate disability adjusted life years (DALY) due to osteoarthritis, categorized by sex, age, osteoarthritis type, and geographical area. We used disability weights employed by the Peruvian Ministry of Health, and the last update issued by WHO. Results Overall, EsSalud reported 17.9 new cases of osteoarthritis per 1000 patients per year. Annual incidence was 23.7/1000 among women, and 72.6/1000 in people above 60 years old. Incidence was 5.6/1000 for knee osteoarthritis and 1.1/1000 for hip. According to the 1994 WHO method, there were 399,884 DALYs or 36.6 DALYs/1000 patients per year due to osteoarthritis. 12.4 and 2.2 DALYs/1000 patients per-year were estimated for knee and hip osteoarthritis, respectively. Using the 2015 GBD method, there were 1,037,865 DALYs or 94.9 DALYs/1000 patients per year. 31.4 and 5.3 DALYs/1000 patients per year were calculated for knee and hip osteoarthritis, respectively. Conclusions In the Peruvian social health insurance subsystem, hip, knee, and unspecified osteoarthritis produced a high burden of disease, especially among women and patients over 60. The 2015 GBD methodology yields values almost three times higher than the original recommendations.Tegumental and excretory-secretory proteins are reported as diagnostic antigens for human opisthorchiasis. Rhophilin associated tail protein1-like (OvROPN1L) protein of Opisthorchis viverrini sperm tail showed potential as a diagnostic antigen. The OvROPN1L recombinant fragments were assayed for diagnostic antigenicity for human opisthorchiasis using indirect ELISA. The strongest antigenic region was a N-terminus peptide of M1 – P56. One synthetic peptide (P1, L3-Q13) of this region showed the highest antigenicity to opisthorchiasis. Sera from other parasitic infections including Strongyloides stercoralis, hookworm, Taenia spp, minute intestinal flukes, Paragonimus spp showed lower reactivity to P1. Peptide P1 is located in the disordered N-terminus of ROPN1L supporting its suitability as linear epitope. In the Platyhelminthes the N-terminal sequence of ROPN1L is diverging with taxonomic distance further suggesting that peptide P1 has potential as diagnostic tool in the genus Opisthorchis/Clonorchis. It should be further evaluated in combination with peptides derived from other O. Anacetrapib cost viverrini antigens to increase its diagnostic power.Chinese edible frogs, Hoplobatrachus rugulosus, were examined to estimate the potential risks of human gnathostomiasis and sparganosis in Myanmar. A total of 20 frogs were purchased in a local market of Yangon and examined with naked eyes and the artificial digestion method after skin peeling in June 2018 and June 2019. Larvae of gnathostomes and Spirometra (=spargana) were detected in 15 (75.0%) and 15 (75.0%) frogs with average intensities of 10.5 and 6.3 larvae per infected frog, respectively. Gnathostome larvae were 2.75-3.80 (av. 3.30) mm long and 0.29-0.36 (0.33) mm wide. They had a characteristic head bulb with 4 rows of hooklets, a muscular long esophagus, and 2 pairs of cervical sac. The mean number of hooklets were 41, 44, 47, and 50 on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th row, respectively. Collected spargana were actively moving, particularly with the scolex part, and have ivory-white color and variable in size. Conclusively, it has been first confirmed that Chinese edible frogs, H. rugulosus, are highly infected with larval gnathostomes and spargana in this study. Consuming these frogs is considered a potential risk of human gnathostomiasis and sparganosis in Myanmar.Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular protozoan parasite that can invade various organs in the host body, including the central nervous system. Chronic intracranial T. gondii is known to be associated with neuroprotection against neurodegenerative diseases through interaction with host brain cells in various ways. The present study investigated the neuroprotective effects of chronic T. gondii infection in mice with cerebral ischemia experimentally produced by middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) surgery. The neurobehavioral effects of cerebral ischemia were assessed by measurement of Garcia score and Rotarod behavior tests. The volume of brain ischemia was measured by triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining. The expression levels of related genes and proteins were determined. After cerebral ischemia, corrected infarction volume was significantly reduced in T. gondii infected mice, and their neurobehavioral function was significantly better than that of the uninfection control group. Chronic T. gondii infection induced the expression of hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha (HIF-1α) in the brain before MCAO.