DESIGN: Between 1994 and 1997, an active case-finding programme was implemented in homeless shelters using a mobile radiological screening unit, and continued from 1997 to 2007. During these periods, the strains isolated from TB cases diagnosed in the homeless were genotyped by restriction fragment

length polymorphism analysis using the insertion sequence IS6110 as a probe.

RESULTS: Between 1994 and 2007, 313 new TB cases were diagnosed among the homeless population: 179 through the programme among shelter users, and 134 among homeless people not using shelters. Half of the strains were clustered in 35 distinct patterns (2-48 cases/cluster). The clustering of TB cases steadily decreased in shelters during the 13 years of the survey, from 14.3 to 2.7 related cases per year (P < 0.01) and from 75% to 30% of related

cases among all TB cases (P < 0.01). In contrast, there was PP2 order only a slight trend towards a decrease in homeless people not using shelters.

CONCLUSION: Active case finding in homeless shelters resulted in a decrease in case clustering, mainly in shelter users. Genotyping contributed to confirming the positive impact WH-4-023 of the intervention.”
“The superficial layers of the superior colliculus (sSC) appear to function as a subcortical visual pathway that bypasses the striate cortex for the rapid processing of coarse facial information. We investigated the responses of neurons in the monkey sSC during a delayed non-matching-to-sample (DNMS) task in which monkeys were required to discriminate among five categories of visual stimuli [photos of faces with different gaze directions, line drawings of faces, face-like patterns (three dark blobs on a bright oval), eye-like patterns, and simple geometric patterns]. Of the 605 sSC neurons recorded, 216 neurons responded to the visual stimuli. Among the stimuli, face-like patterns elicited responses with the

shortest latencies. Low-pass filtering of the images did not influence the responses. However, scrambling of the images increased HSP inhibitor the responses in the late phase, and this was consistent with a feedback influence from upstream areas. A multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis of the population data indicated that the sSC neurons could separately encode face-like patterns during the first 25-ms period after stimulus onset, and stimulus categorization developed in the next three 25-ms periods. The amount of stimulus information conveyed by the sSC neurons and the number of stimulus-differentiating neurons were consistently higher during the 2nd to 4th 25-ms periods than during the first 25-ms period. These results suggested that population activity of the sSC neurons preferentially filtered face-like patterns with short latencies to allow for the rapid processing of coarse facial information and developed categorization of the stimuli in later phases through feedback from upstream areas.