In the United States, about 2% of people have hepatitis C, with 35,000 to 185,000 new cases a year. Rates have decreased in the West since the 1990s due to improved blood screening before transfusion. Annual deaths from HCV in the United States range from 8,000 to 10,000. Expectations are that this mortality rate will increase as people infected by transfusion before HCV testing become ill and die.
Infection rates are higher in some countries in Africa and Asia. Countries with very high rates of infection include Egypt (22%), Pakistan (4.8%) and China (3.2%). The high rate in Egypt is linked to a now-discontinued mass-treatment campaign for schistosomiasis, using improperly sterilized glass syringes.
In the mid-1970s, Harvey J. Alter, Chief of the Infectious Disease Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and his research team demonstrated that most post-blood transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or B viruses. Despite this discovery, international research efforts to identify the virus failed for the next decade. In 1987, Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo, and George Kuo at Chiron Corporation, collaborating with Dr. D.W. Bradley from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used a new molecular cloning approach to identify the unknown organism and develop a diagnostic test. In 1988, Alter confirmed the virus by verifying its presence in a panel of non A non B hepatitis specimens. In April 1989, the discovery of HCV was published in two articles in the journal "Science". The discovery led to significant improvements in diagnosis and improved antiviral treatment. In 2000, Drs. Alter and Houghton were honored with the Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for
"pioneering work leading to the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C and the development of screening methods that reduced the risk of blood transfusion-associated hepatitis in the U.S. from 30% in 1970 to virtually zero in 2000."
Chiron filed for several patents on the virus and its diagnosis. A competing patent application by the CDC was dropped in 1990 after Chiron paid $1.9 million to the CDC and $337,500 to Bradley. In 1994, Bradley sued Chiron, seeking to invalidate the patent, have himself included as a coinventor, and receive damages and royalty income. He dropped the suit in 1998 after losing before an appeals court.
The World Hepatitis Alliance coordinates World Hepatitis Day, held every year on July 28. The economic costs of hepatitis C are significant both to the individual and to society. In the United States the average lifetime cost of the disease was estimated at 33,407 USD in 2003, with the cost of a liver transplant approximately 200,000 USD as of 2011. In Canada the cost of a course of antiviral treatment was as high as 30,000 CAD in 2003, while the United States costs are between 9,200 and 17,600 in 1998 USD. In many areas of the world people are unable to afford treatment with antivirals because they lack insurance coverage or the insurance they have will not pay for antivirals.
As of 2011, about one hundred medications are in development for hepatitis C. These medicines include vaccines to treat hepatitis, immunomodulators, and cyclophilin inhibitors. These potentially new treatments have come about due to a better understanding of the hepatitis C virus.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. He wrote about many topics, and influenced many other thinkers.
Foucault studied institutions such as psychiatric wards, hospitals, schools, and prisons, to figure out how they affected the people living in them. He was gay. He also studied the history of sexuality and, later in his life, wrote about homosexuality.
He is often called a postmodernist or post-structuralist philosopher. Some philosophers claim that some of his ideas were influenced by existentialism. However, Foucault rejected all of these labels.
Foucault was born in 1926 in Poitiers, France. His father, Paul Foucault, was a surgeon. He attended the Jesuit Collège Saint-Stanislas. After World War II Foucault studied at the École Normale Supérieure. While attending university, he became depressed, and tried to kill himself.
Foucault became very interested in psychology. He got a degree in philosophy and a degree in psychology. Foucault joined the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953. He left the Communist Party because he was sad about all of the people that Stalin was killing in the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s, he taught at the École Normale. Then he began teaching psychology at the University of Lille. In 1954 Foucault published his first book, "Maladie mentale et personnalité". In the mid-1950s, he worked at Warsaw University and at the University of Hamburg.
He returned to France in 1960 to become a philosophy professor at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In the mid-1960s, Foucault moved with his lover to Tunis (in North Africa), and got a job teaching at the University of Tunis. In 1966 he published "Les Mots et les choses" (The Order of Things), which was very popular. In 1968 he returned to France, where he published "L'archéologie du savoir" (The Archaeology of Knowledge).
In the late 1960s, after France had huge student protests and riots, the French government created a new experimental university at Vincennes. Foucault became the first head of its philosophy department. Foucault joined students in occupying administration buildings and fighting with police.
In 1970, Foucault became a Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. His political involvement now increased. His male lover Defert joined the ultra-Maoist Gauche Proletarienne (GP). Foucault then wrote "Surveiller et Punir" (Discipline and Punish), about prisons and schools.
In the late 1970s, Foucault wrote books about the history of sexuality. Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at the University at Buffalo. In 1978 Foucault toured Iran to support the new revolutionary Islamic government. Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness in Paris on 26 June 1984.
The major collections of Foucault's writing translated into English are:
XHTML
XHTML stands for eXtensible HyperText Markup Language. It is markup used to design websites and webpages.
XHTML is much more strict than ordinary HTML, and is based on both XML and HTML. Due to the lax nature of HTML, different web browsers can sometimes display websites incorrectly since there is more than one way to interpret poorly written HTML. The strict and formal nature of XHTML, once fully adopted will allow for web browsers to display the same page correctly between them. Proper XHTML is also easier to read for humans.
For example, the below code shows one of the differences between HTML and XHTML:
Incorrect, HTML version:
<br>
Correct, XHTML version:
<br />
The line break tag in HTML does not have a closing tag, you just type it once and it creates a line break. In XHTML the rule is that tags that do not have an closing tag must close themselves within the initial tag. These tags are called "empty tags." Another empty tag is <hr /> which inserts a "horizontal rule" or dividing line.
In XHTML, using codice_1 is not "allowed".
XHTML also should not be used together with the JavaScript codice_2 command.
Suspension bridge
A suspension bridge is a type of bridge that has been made since ancient times as early as 100 AD. Some simple suspension bridges, for use by pedestrians and livestock, are still constructed, based upon the ancient Inca rope bridge.
Suspended from two high locations over a river or canyon, simple suspension bridges follow a shallow downward arc and are not suited for modern roads and railroads.
The design of the modern suspended-deck suspension bridge was developed in the early 19th century. It can cross a longer span than other kinds of bridges.