22 research outputs found
Obbligo di vaccinazione e riparto di competenze legislative. Nota a Corte Cost. n. 5 del 2018
No full textIl tema delle vaccinazioni è tornato al centro dell’attenzione negli ultimi anni, a seguito di un crescente dibattito nella società sulle conseguenze per la salute, soprattutto dei più piccoli. Come noto, anche sulla scia di slogan utilizzati da alcune forze politiche per contrastare, a loro dire, il ruolo delle multinazionali farmaceutiche, si è diffusa nell’opinione pubblica la convinzione – per vero, minoritaria – dell’esistenza di effetti dannosi delle vaccinazioni sulla salute umana. Tuttavia, si tratta di tesi prive di sostegno scientifico. La comunità medica, infatti, è da tempo impegnata a dimostrare l’importanza di ricorrere ad alcune tipologie di vaccinazioni, soprattutto a fini di profilassi su larga scala contro il diffondersi di epidemie dall’esito infausto per la salute
della popolazione. Lungo tale crinale si colloca il decreto legge n. 73 del 2017 (poi convertito con la legge n. 119 del 2017), con il quale è stato, tra l’altro, previsto l’obbligo di vaccinazione per gli studenti che frequentano i primi anni del ciclo scolastico. L’intervento normativo dello Stato è stato oggetto di impugnativa dinnanzi alla
Corte costituzionale da parte della Regione Veneto, ai sensi dell’art. 127 Cost. Il giudice delle leggi, con la sentenza in commento, ha rigettato il ricorso regionale, richiamando peraltro precedenti arresti in materia. Lo scritto, dopo un breve inquadramento del tema delle vaccinazioni obbligatorie, prende in esame la pronuncia della Corte, soprattutto con riguardo agli importanti profili attinenti al riparto costituzionale di competenze legislative tra lo Stato e le Regioni.In recent years, vaccination has, once again, sparked controversy stemming from a growing debate about its consequences on health, especially of children. Indeed, some give credit to the (scientifically unproven) opinion that vaccination negatively affects health. The controversy has not been limited to a cultural debate. The prevailing opinion and the official position of the relevant institutions is that there is no correlation between vaccination and harm to human health. However, given a recent decrease in the number of vaccinated people and minors, moral suasion has been trying to bring back a higher level of vaccination. Lastly, the government passed law decree 73/2017 in order to ensure a level of coverage sufficient to guarantee “the flock effect” by making vaccination mandatory for students in the first years of their education. The Veneto Region has challenged the law decree and subsequent law arguing, among others, the breach of regional competences. After a brief overview of some classical scholarly considerations, the author will discuss the position of the Veneto Region as argued before the Court, as well as the reasons the Court gives in its decision n. 5 of 2018 to dismiss the complaint
Interactions among low dose of methotrexate and drugs used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis
No full textMethotrexate (MTX) is a nonbiological disease-modifying antirheumatic drug that has shown both a good control of clinical disease and a good safety. Usually drug-drug interactions (DDIs) represent the most limiting factor during the clinical management of any disease, in particular when several drugs are coadministered to treat the same disease. In this paper, we report the interactions among MTX and the other drugs commonly used in the management of rheumatoid arthritis. Using Medline, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane libraries, and Reference lists, we searched for the articles published until June 30, 2012, and we reported the most common DDIs between MTX and antirheumatic drugs. In particular, clinically relevant DDIs have been described during the treatment with MTX and NSAIDs, for example, diclofenac, indomethacin, or COX-2 inhibitors, and between MTX and prednisone or immunosuppressant drugs (e.g., leflunomide and cyclosporine). Finally, an increase in the risk of infections has been recorded during the combination treatment with MTX plus antitumor necrosis factor-α agents. In conclusion, during the treatment with MTX, DDIs play an important role in both the development of ADRs and therapeutic failure. © 2013 Marinella Patanè et al
OBBLIGO DI VACCINAZIONE E RIPARTO DI COMPETENZE LEGISLATIVE. NOTA A CORTE COST. N. 5 DEL 2018
No full textIn recent years, vaccination has, once again, sparked controversy stemming from a growing debate about its consequences on health, especially of children. Indeed, some give credit to the (scientifically unproven) opinion that vaccination negatively affects health. The controversy has not been limited to a cultural debate. The prevailing opinion and the official position of the relevant institutions is that there is no correlation between vaccination and harm to human health. However, given a recent decrease in the number of vaccinated people and minors, moral suasion has been trying to bring back a higher level of vaccination. Lastly, the government passed law decree 73/2017 in order to ensure a level of coverage sufficient to guarantee “the flock effect” by making vaccination mandatory for students in the first years of their education. The Veneto Region has challenged the law decree and subsequent law arguing, among others, the breach of regional competences. After a brief overview of some classical scholarly considerations, the author will discuss the position of the Veneto Region as argued before the Court, as well as the reasons the Court gives in its decision n. 5 of 2018 to dismiss the complaint
“Ordinary” italians: The genocide of the jews of Italy, 1943-45
No full textThis essay is based on the author’s recent book dedicated to the role of Italians in deporting their Jewish compatriots to the Nazi death camps: Simon Levis Sullam, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, trans. Oona Smyth and Claudia Patane (Princeton, 2018). Members of the Republican Fascist Party, police, the military, and ordinary citizens were responsible for the arrest of about 20 percent of Italian Jews in 1943-1945. The author argues that their participation in the Holocaust was driven not so much by anti-Semitism as by a combination of several profound crises that stirred up severe moral panic: Italy’s having lost in the world war, the escalation of the civil war with antifascists, the country’s split into two, and the German occupation of the northern part of Italy.This essay is based on the author’s recent book dedicated to the role of Italians in deporting their Jewish compatriots to the Nazi death camps: Simon Levis Sullam, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, trans. Oona Smyth and Claudia Patane (Princeton, 2018). Members of the Republican Fascist Party, police, the military, and ordinary citizens were responsible for the arrest of about 20 percent of Italian Jews in 1943-1945. The author argues that their participation in the Holocaust was driven not so much by anti-Semitism as by a combination of several profound crises that stirred up severe moral panic: Italy’s having lost in the world war, the escalation of the civil war with antifascists, the country’s split into two, and the German occupation of the northern part of Italy
Individual fairness guarantees for neural networks
No full textWe consider the problem of certifying the individual fairness (IF) of feed-forward neural networks (NNs). In particular, we work with the epsilon-delta-IF formulation, which, given a NN and a similarity metric learnt from data, requires that the output difference between any pair of epsilon-similar individuals is bounded by a maximum decision tolerance delta >= 0. Working with a range of metrics, including the Mahalanobis distance, we propose a method to overapproximate the resulting optimisation problem using piecewise-linear functions to lower and upper bound the NN's non-linearities globally over the input space. We encode this computation as the solution of a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming problem and demonstrate that it can be used to compute IF guarantees on four datasets widely used for fairness benchmarking. We show how this formulation can be used to encourage models' fairness at training time by modifying the NN loss, and empirically confirm our approach yields NNs that are orders of magnitude fairer than state-of-the-art methods
Biochemical, transcriptomic and proteomic analyses of digestion in the scorpion Tityus serrulatus: Insights into function and evolution of digestion in an ancient arthropod
No full textScorpions are among the oldest terrestrial arthropods and they have passed through small morphological changes during their evolutionary history on land. They are efficient predators capable of capturing and consuming large preys and due to envenomation these animals can become a human health challenge. Understanding the physiology of scorpions can not only lead to evolutionary insights but also is a crucial step in the development of control strategies. However, the digestive process in scorpions has been scarcely studied. In this work, we describe the combinatory use of next generation sequencing, proteomic analysis and biochemical assays in order to investigate the digestive process in the yellow scorpion Tityus serrulatus, mainly focusing in the initial protein digestion. The transcriptome generated database allowed the quantitative identification by mass spectrometry of different enzymes and proteins involved in digestion. All the results suggested that cysteine cathepsins play an important role in protein digestion. Two digestive cysteine cathepsins were isolated and characterized presenting acidic characteristics (pH optima and stability), zymogen conversion to the mature form after acidic activation and a cross-class inhibition by pepstatin. A more elucidative picture of the molecular mechanism of digestion in a scorpion was proposed based on our results from Tityus serrulatus. The midgut and midgut glands (MMG) are composed by secretory and digestive cells. In fasting animals, the secretory granules are ready for the next predation event, containing enzymes needed for alkaline extra-oral digestion which will compose the digestive fluid, such as trypsins, astacins and chitinase. The digestive vacuoles are filled with an acidic proteolytic cocktail to the intracellular digestion composed by cathepsins L, B, F, D and legumain. Other proteins as lipases, carbohydrases, ctenitoxins and a chitolectin with a perithrophin domain were also detected. Evolutionarily, a large gene duplication of cathepsin L occurred in Arachnida with the sequences from ticks being completely divergent from other arachnids probably due to the particular selective pressures over this group.BiotechnologyApplied Science
Design and characterization of effective solar cells
No full text\ua9 2021, The Author(s). We propose a two-stage multi-objective optimization framework for full scheme solar cell structure design and characterization, cost minimization and quantum efficiency maximization. We evaluated structures of 15 different cell designs simulated by varying material types and photodiode doping strategies. At first, non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) produced Pareto-optimal-solutions sets for respective cell designs. Then, on investigating quantum efficiencies of all cell designs produced by NSGA-II, we applied a new multi-objective optimization algorithm II (OptIA-II) to discover the Pareto fronts of select (three) best cell designs. Our designed OptIA-II algorithm improved the quantum efficiencies of all select cell designs and reduced their fabrication costs. We observed that the cell design comprising an optimally doped zinc-oxide-based transparent conductive oxide (TCO) layer and rough silver back reflector (BR) offered a quantum efficiency (Qe) of 0.6031. Overall, this paper provides a full characterization of cell structure designs. It derives relationship between quantum efficiency, Qe of a cell with its TCO layer’s doping methods and TCO and BR layer’s material types. Our solar cells design characterization enables us to perform a cost-benefit analysis of solar cells usage in real-world applications
Ultrasonographic diagnosis of fetal seizures: a case report and review of the literature*
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