Mutual blood donation is safer at small blood collection stations in China.

BACKGROUND: The assumption that the level of safety of voluntary non-remunerated donors is significantly higher than that of family replacement donors is supported by global data without stratifying for first-time or repeat volunteer, or according to age, but the viral marker prevalence between replacement donors and first-time voluntary non-remunerated donors is similar. MATERIALS AND METHODS: From 2006 to 2013, replacement and voluntary donors were respectively recruited by the hospitals and the Center Blood Station in Zhaoqing, Guangdong, according to the existing procedures, and all the donors were screened for hepatitis B virus (HBV) surface antigen (HBsAg), antibodies against hepatitis C virus (anti-HCV), human immunodeficiency virus (anti-HIV) (1 + 2) and Treponema pallidum (anti-TP) by the enzyme immunoassays (EIAs), and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) in the Center Blood Station by kinetic analysis method. The risk factors related to blood safety were analyzed by Binary logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: Between 252,202 volunteers and 2771 replacement donors, the prevalences of ALT > 40 U/L and anti-HIV (4.88% and 0.01% vs 4.44% and 0.07%, respectively) were not significantly different. The prevalences of HBsAg, anti-HCV and anti-syphilis in replacement group were higher than those in voluntary group, which were related to donor's sex, age and donation time. Overall prevalence of serological markers was higher in male replacement donors than in female, and in replacement donor over 30 years than in those below 30 years, but the positive prevalence in repeated replacement donors was lower than that in first-time replacement donors. CONCLUSIONS: With appropriate intervention measures, such as pre-donor screening and other donor selection policy, replacement donors and voluntary donors provide a similar level of viral safety. Our donor selection policy in future should focus on retaining both young replacement and young voluntary donors as repeat donors and promoting the donation proportion of females, which will improve blood safety.

A new approach to integrate Internet-of-things and software-as-a-service model for logistic systems: a case study.

Cloud computing is changing the ways software is developed and managed in enterprises, which is changing the way of doing business in that dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are regarded as services over the Internet. Traditional manufacturing systems such as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) are often developed case by case. However, effective collaboration between different systems, platforms, programming languages, and interfaces has been suggested by researchers. In cloud-computing-based systems, distributed resources are encapsulated into cloud services and centrally managed, which allows high automation, flexibility, fast provision, and ease of integration at low cost. The integration between physical resources and cloud services can be improved by combining Internet of things (IoT) technology and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology. This study proposes a new approach for developing cloud-based manufacturing systems based on a four-layer SaaS model. There are three main contributions of this paper: (1) enterprises can develop their own cloud-based logistic management information systems based on the approach proposed in this paper; (2) a case study based on literature reviews with experimental results is proposed to verify that the system performance is remarkable; (3) challenges encountered and feedback collected from T Company in the case study are discussed in this paper for the purpose of enterprise deployment.

Development and evaluation of a double antibody sandwich ELISA for the detection of human sDC-SIGN.

sDC-SIGN is the soluble form of dendritic cell-specific intercellular adhesion molecule-3-grabbing non-integrin (DC-SIGN, CD209), which is a molecule involved with pathogen recognition and immune regulation. However, there is no commercially available ELISA kit for detecting human sDC-SIGN, and the normal range of this molecule is unknown. Here, we describe an ELISA for detecting human sDC-SIGN with high specificity. First, sDC-SIGN protein was expressed and purified. Monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies were then raised against the purified protein and subsequently characterized. A sandwich ELISA was developed using polyclonal antibodies specific for sDC-SIGN for capture and a biotin-labeled monoclonal antibody specific for sDC-SIGN for detection of protein. This method has sensitivity up to 0.2 ng/ml. Using this ELISA, we found that the concentration of sDC-SIGN in sera of healthy volunteers ranges from 0-319 ng/ml with a mean concentration of 27.14 ng/ml. Interestingly, the concentration of sDC-SIGN in sera from patients with cancer or chronic hepatitis B virus (CHB) infection was lower than that of health controls. The mean concentrations of sDC-SIGN in cancer patients and chronic hepatitis B virus infection patients were 3.2 ng/ml and 3.8 ng/ml, respectively. We developed a sandwich ELISA for detecting human sDC-SIGN and demonstrated its use by assessing sera concentrations of sDC-SIGN in patients with cancer and chronic CHB infection compared to that of healthy controls.

Note: Development of a high resolution six-degrees-of-freedom optical vibrometer for precision stage.

A high resolution six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) optical vibrometer is proposed. 6-DOF vibrations can be simultaneously measured using the proposed optical vibrometer, which reduces measurement time and number. The performance of the proposed vibrometer is verified by experiments. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed optical vibrometer is ±30 nm∕200 nm and ±0.04 arcsec∕0.1 arcsec at 1000 Hz.