Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) is a group of bacteria that causes gastrointestinal illness and occasionally causes large foodborne outbreaks. It represents a major public health concern due to its ability to cause severe illness which can sometimes be fatal. This study was undertaken as part of a rapid investigation into a national foodborne outbreak of STEC O145. On 22 May 2024, United Kingdom (UK) public health agencies and laboratories identified an increase in stool specimens submissions and patients testing positive for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC). Whole genome sequencing (WGS) identified serotype O145:H28 stx2a/eae belonging to the same five single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) single linkage cluster as the causative agent. By 3 July 2024, 288 cases had been linked to the cluster. Most cases were adults (87%) and females (57%), 49% were hospitalized with a further 10% attending emergency care. Descriptive epidemiology and analytical studies were conducted which identified consumption of nationally distributed pre-packed sandwiches as a common food exposure. The implicated food business operators voluntarily recalled ready-to-eat sandwiches and wraps containing lettuce on 14 June 2024.

While clozapine has risks, relative risk of fatality is overestimated. The UK pharmacovigilance programme is efficient, but comparisons with other drugs can mislead because of reporting variations. Clozapine actually lowers mortality, partly by reducing schizophrenia-related suicides, but preventable deaths still occur. Clozapine should be used earlier and more widely, but there should be better monitoring and better management of toxicity.

The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery (WCPCCS) will be held in Washington DC, USA, from Saturday, 26 August, 2023 to Friday, 1 September, 2023, inclusive. The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery will be the largest and most comprehensive scientific meeting dedicated to paediatric and congenital cardiac care ever held. At the time of the writing of this manuscript, The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery has 5,037 registered attendees (and rising) from 117 countries, a truly diverse and international faculty of over 925 individuals from 89 countries, over 2,000 individual abstracts and poster presenters from 101 countries, and a Best Abstract Competition featuring 153 oral abstracts from 34 countries. For information about the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, please visit the following website: [www.WCPCCS2023.org]. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the activities related to global health and advocacy that will occur at the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery.

Acknowledging the need for urgent change, we wanted to take the opportunity to bring a common voice to the global community and issue the Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action on Addressing the Global Burden of Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases. A copy of this Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is provided in the Appendix of this manuscript. This Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is an initiative aimed at increasing awareness of the global burden, promoting the development of sustainable care systems, and improving access to high quality and equitable healthcare for children with heart disease as well as adults with congenital heart disease worldwide.

Negative symptoms of schizophrenia manifest as reduced motivation and pleasure (MAP) and impaired emotional expressivity (EXP). These can occur as primary phenomena, but have also been suggested to occur secondary to other clinical factors, including antipsychotic-induced sedation. However, this relationship has not been established formally. Here, we examined the effect of antipsychotic-induced sedation (assessed via the proxy of total daily sleep duration) on MAP and EXP in a cohort of 187 clozapine-treated patients with schizophrenia followed for over 2 years on average, using multilevel regression and mediation models. MAP, but not EXP, was adversely influenced by sedation, independently of the severity of psychosis or depression. Moreover, clozapine impaired MAP indirectly by worsening sedation, but after accounting for clozapine-induced sedation, clozapine improved MAP. Our results highlight the importance of addressing sedative side-effects of antipsychotics to improve clinical outcomes.

Guided by Tarksi’s fixpoint theorem in order theory, we show how to derive monotone recursive types with constant-time roll and unroll operations within Cedille, an impredicative, constructive, and logically consistent pure typed lambda calculus. This derivation takes place within the preorder on Cedille types induced by type inclusions, a notion which is expressible within the theory itself. As applications, we use monotone recursive types to generically derive two recursive representations of data in lambda calculus, the Parigot and Scott encoding. For both encodings, we prove induction and examine the computational and extensional properties of their destructor, iterator, and primitive recursor in Cedille. For our Scott encoding in particular, we translate into Cedille a construction due to Lepigre and Raffalli (2019) that equips Scott naturals with primitive recursion, then extend this construction to derive a generic induction principle. This allows us to give efficient and provably unique (up to function extensionality) solutions for the iteration and primitive recursion schemes for Scott-encoded data.

In shell-secreting molluscs, age and growth rate of individuals and hence their performance can normally be measured using growth lines that are deposited in the shell throughout their lives. An annual periodicity of growth line formation of the warm-water limpet Patella depressa was established using marked and recaptured individuals from north Wales, UK. Length at age from suitably prepared shell sections was determined in limpets from non-range-edge populations and at two range edges, where different demographic attributes have been recorded. Individuals collected from their poleward range-edge in north Wales were older when compared with individuals at their range-edge in southern England. Shells collected from southern England were characterized by rapid growth with most individuals reaching >30 mm in maximum length by the fourth or fifth year, contrasting with those from north Wales, where most shells only reached this size at 7–10 years of age. Von Bertalanffy growth coefficients (K-values) were negatively related to P. depressa density, showing faster growth in lower total densities of both P. depressa and Patella vulgata combined. Higher intra-specific effects on K-values were found in P. depressa compared with its congener P. vulgata, with stronger effects in north Wales than in southern England. These results confirm differences in population patterns and individual traits between the two leading edges of P. depressa. Understanding annual growth in P. depressa over large scales could help to disentangle the processes determining differences in shell growth and age structure seen at the two range edges of this limpet species.

Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana Decne.) is rapidly spreading in the United States, gaining attention in the last two decades as a serious invasive pest. Recommended control methods include foliar, basal bark, cut stump, and hack-and-squirt application of herbicides, but there are few published studies with replicated data on efficacy. Four readily available herbicidal active ingredients and a combination of two active ingredients were tested for control efficacy against P. calleryana in old-field areas and loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) understory. Basal bark applications (triclopyr, triclopyr + aminopyralid), foliar applications (glyphosate, imazapyr), and a soil application (hexazinone) effectively killed P. calleryana with the exception of hexazinone at one site, where rainfall may not have been optimal. Foliar application of glyphosate provided the most consistent control. Our results demonstrate efficacy of registered herbicide formulations for P. calleryana control in two geographic locations and two habitat types. The need for development of integrated pest management programs for P. calleryana is discussed.

Carbon dioxide ($\text{CO}_{2}$) capture and subsurface storage is one method for reducing anthropogenic $\text{CO}_{2}$ emissions to mitigate climate change. It is well known that large-scale fluid injection into the subsurface leads to a buildup in pressure that gradually spreads and dissipates through lateral and vertical migration of water. This dissipation can have an important feedback on the shape of the $\text{CO}_{2}$ plume during injection, but the impact of vertical pressure dissipation, in particular, remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the impact of lateral and vertical pressure dissipation on the injection of $\text{CO}_{2}$ into a layered aquifer system. We develop a compressible, two-phase model that couples pressure dissipation to the propagation of a $\text{CO}_{2}$ gravity current. We show that our vertically integrated, sharp-interface model is capable of efficiently and accurately capturing water migration in a layered aquifer system with an arbitrary number of aquifers. We identify two limiting cases – ‘no leakage’ and ‘strong leakage’ – in which we derive analytical expressions for the water pressure field for the corresponding single-phase injection problem. We demonstrate that pressure dissipation acts to suppress the formation of an advancing $\text{CO}_{2}$ tongue during injection, reducing the lateral extent of the plume. The properties of the seals and the number of aquifers determine the strength of pressure dissipation and subsequent coupling with the $\text{CO}_{2}$ plume. The impact of pressure dissipation on the shape of the $\text{CO}_{2}$ plume is likely to be important for storage efficiency and security.

Precise measurements of basal melting have been made at a series of 14 sites lying within a few kilometres of the grounding line of the Ronne Ice Shelf, Antarctica, where the ice thickness ranges from 1570 to 1940 m. The study was conducted over the course of 1 year and included a detailed survey of the horizontal deformation, as well as phase-sensitive radar measurements of the vertical displacement of both internal reflecting horizons and the ice-shelf base. Results from the surface survey show that the long-term viscous strain rate is modulated at tidal frequencies by (probably) elastic strains of order 10−5 per metre of tidal elevation. The radar measurements show a similar modulation of the long-term thinning/thickening of the ice shelf, with thickness oscillations up to a few centimetres in range. The long-term trends in ice thickness determined at points moving with the ice-shelf flow are consistent with a steady-state thickness profile. Vertical strain rates within the ice shelf were determined from the relative motion of internal reflectors. At two sites the observations were sufficient to discern the effect of tidal bending about a neutral surface 60% of the way down the ice column. Coincident measurements of horizontal and vertical strain imply a Poisson’s ratio of 0.5, and this combined with the asymmetric bending gives rise to the observed oscillations in thickness. At a number of sites the longterm viscous strain rates were found to be a linear function of depth. For an ice shelf this is an unexpected result. It can be attributed to the presence of significant vertical shear stresses set up close to the grounding line where the ice is still adjusting to flotation. Additional vertical motion arising from firn compaction was observed within the upper layers of the ice shelf. The additional motion was consistent with the assumption that firn density is a function only of the time since burial by steady surface accumulation. With both spatial and temporal fluctuations in the vertical strain rate accurately quantified it was possible to estimate the vertical motion of the ice-shelf base in response. Differences between the calculated and observed motion of the basal reflector arise because of basal melting. Derived melt rates at the 14 sites ranged from −0.11 ±0.31 to 2.51 ±0.10 m a−1, with a mean of 0. 85 m a−1 and a standard deviation of 0.69 m a−1, and showed no signs of significant sub-annual temporal variability. There was no obvious global correlation with either ice thickness or distance from the grounding line, although melt rates tended to decrease downstream along each of the flowlines studied. Previous estimates of basal melting in this region have been obtained indirectly from an assumption that the ice shelf is locally in equilibrium and have included a broad range of values. Only those at the lower end of the published range are consistent with the directly measured melt rates reported here.

Geochemical and related studies have been made of near-surface sediments from the River Clyde estuary and adjoining areas, extending from Glasgow to the N, and W as far as the Holy Loch on the W coast of Scotland, UK. Multibeam echosounder, sidescan sonar and shallow seismic data, taken with core information, indicate that a shallow layer of modern sediment, often less than a metre thick, rests on earlier glacial and post-glacial sediments. The offshore Quaternary history can be aligned with onshore sequences, with the recognition of buried drumlins, settlement of muds from quieter water, probably behind an ice dam, and later tidal delta deposits. The geochemistry of contaminants within the cores also indicates shallow contaminated sediments, often resting on pristine pre-industrial deposits at depths less than 1m. The distribution of different contaminants with depth in the sediment, such as Pb (and Pb isotopes), organics and radionuclides, allow chronologies of contamination from different sources to be suggested. Dating was also attempted using microfossils, radiocarbon and 210Pb, but with limited success. Some of the spatial distribution of contaminants in the surface sediments can be related to grain-size variations. Contaminants are highest, both in absolute terms and in enrichment relative to the natural background, in the urban and inner estuary and in the Holy Loch, reflecting the concentration of industrial activity.