Rabies in a Dog Imported from Azerbaijan - Pennsylvania, 2021.

On June 16, 2021, rabies virus infection was confirmed in a dog included in a shipment of rescue animals imported into the United States from Azerbaijan. A multistate investigation was conducted to prevent secondary rabies cases, avoid reintroduction of a dog-maintained rabies virus variant (DMRVV), identify persons who might have been exposed and would be recommended to receive rabies postexposure prophylaxis, and investigate the cause of importation control failures. Results of a prospective serologic monitoring (PSM) protocol suggested that seven of 32 (22%) animals from the same shipment as the dog with confirmed rabies virus infection and who had available titer results after rabies vaccine booster had not been adequately vaccinated against rabies before importation. A requirement for rabies vaccination certificates alone will not adequately identify improper vaccination practices or fraudulent paperwork and are insufficient as a stand-alone rabies importation prevention measure. Serologic titers before importation would mitigate the risk for importing DMRVV.

A Case Report of Anesthesia-induced Diffuse Alveolar Hemorrhage Presenting to the Emergency Department.

Introduction: The inhaled anesthetic sevoflurane is an uncommon etiology of diffuse alveolar hemorrhage (DAH). As DAH typically presents in the inpatient, postoperative setting, it has been infrequently reported in the anesthesiology literature and, to our knowledge, has not been reported in the emergency medicine literature to date. Case Report: We describe the presentation of a young, healthy male in respiratory distress to a busy urban emergency department (ED) after an outpatient surgical procedure. We highlight the etiology of post-anesthesia DAH and the acute management of this rare diagnosis in the ED. Conclusion: With outpatient surgical centers becoming an increasingly popular option for lower risk procedures, emergency physicians would benefit from understanding this presentation and its pathophysiology.

An Autocrine Negative Feedback Loop Inhibits Dictyostelium discoideum Proliferation through Pathways Including IP3/Ca2.

Little is known about how eukaryotic cells can sense their number or spatial density and stop proliferating when the local density reaches a set value. We previously found that Dictyostelium discoideum accumulates extracellular polyphosphate to inhibit its proliferation, and this requires the G protein-coupled receptor GrlD and the small GTPase RasC. Here, we show that cells lacking the G protein component Gß, the Ras guanine nucleotide exchange factor GefA, phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN), phospholipase C (PLC), inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) receptor-like protein A (IplA), polyphosphate kinase 1 (Ppk1), or the TOR complex 2 component PiaA have significantly reduced sensitivity to polyphosphate-induced proliferation inhibition. Polyphosphate upregulates IP3, and this requires GrlD, GefA, PTEN, PLC, and PiaA. Polyphosphate also upregulates cytosolic Ca2+, and this requires GrlD, Gß, GefA, RasC, PLC, IplA, Ppk1, and PiaA. Together, these data suggest that polyphosphate uses signal transduction pathways including IP3/Ca2+ to inhibit the proliferation of D. discoideum. IMPORTANCE Many mammalian tissues such as the liver have the remarkable ability to regulate their size and have their cells stop proliferating when the tissue reaches the correct size. One possible mechanism involves the cells secreting a signal that they all sense, and a high level of the signal tells the cells that there are enough of them and to stop proliferating. Although regulating such mechanisms could be useful to regulate tissue size to control cancer or birth defects, little is known about such systems. Here, we use a microbial system to study such a mechanism, and we find that key elements of the mechanism have similarities to human proteins. This then suggests the possibility that we may eventually be able to regulate the proliferation of selected cell types in humans and animals.

Annotating Putative D. discoideum Proteins Using I-TASSER.

Using Gene Ontology annotation in any aspect or using any evidence code, we found that approximately 14% percent of predicted D. discoideum proteins have no GO annotations and no obvious similarity to any annotated protein across diverse organisms. We have been systematically examining these unannotated protein sequences using software that predicts a protein structure and then compares the predicted structure to known structures.