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- Bjerregaard-Andersen, Morten, et al.
(författare)
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Tuberculosis burden in an urban population: a cross sectional tuberculosis survey from Guinea Bissau
- 2010
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Ingår i: BMC Infectious Diseases. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1471-2334. ; 10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Little is known about the prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in low income countries. We conducted a cross sectional survey for pulmonary TB and TB symptoms in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, in an urban cohort with known HIV prevalence. TB surveillance in the area is routinely based on passive case finding. Methods: Two cohorts were selected based on a previous HIV survey, but only 52.5% of those enrolled in the adult cohort had participated in the HIV survey. One cohort included all adults living in 384 randomly selected houses; in this cohort 8% (135/1687) were HIV infected. The other included individuals 50 years or older from all other houses in the study area; of these 11% (62/571) were HIV infected. Symptom screening was done through household visits using a standardised questionnaire. TB suspects were investigated with sputum smear microscopy and X-ray. Results: In the adult cohort, we found 4 cases among 2989 individuals screened, giving a total TB prevalence of 134/100,000 (95% CI 36-342/100,000). In the >50 years cohort, we found 4 cases among 571 individuals screened, giving a total prevalence of 701/100,000 (191-1784/100.000). Two of the eight detected TB cases were unknown by the TB program. Of the total TB cases five were HIV uninfected while three had unknown HIV status. The prevalence of TB symptoms was 2.1% (63/2989) and 10.3% (59/571) in the two cohorts respectively. Conclusions: In conclusion we found a moderately high prevalence of pulmonary TB and TB symptoms in the general population, higher among elderly individuals. By active case finding unknown cases were detected. Better awareness of TB and its symptoms needs to be promoted in low income settings.
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| 2. |
- Mortensen, Morten Fischer, et al.
(författare)
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Turfs and Timbers- Resource use in the construction of the Viking Age Ring Fortress Borgring, Southeast Denmark
- 2021
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Ingår i: Danish Journal of Archaeology. - : Det Kgl. Bibliotek/Royal Danish Library. - 2166-2290 .- 2166-2282. ; 10, s. 1-18
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Viking Age ring fortresses were some of the largest construction projects in Danish prehistory. In this article we reconstruct the amount of turf and timber used in the construction of the Borgring ring fortress and estimate the resource area needed to supply the building materials. Using REVEALS pollen data modelling, we quantify the regional oak land cover and estimate the resource area. The results show that even though Borgring was built in an open cultural landscape, sufficient supply of oak for the construction would have been accessible within a few kilometres from the fortress.
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| 3. |
- Attanasio, Orazio, et al.
(författare)
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(S)Cars and the Great Recession
- 2020
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- US households’ consumption and car purchases collapsed during the Great Recession, for reasonsthat are still poorly understood. In this paper we use the Consumer Expenditure Survey to derive cohort and business cycle decompositions of consumption profiles. When decomposing the car expenditure data into its extensive and intensive margins, we find that the intensive margin contracted sharply in the Great Recession, a finding in stark contrast to conventional wisdom and to the experience of prior recessions. We interpret the evidence through the prism of a very rich life-cycle model where individuals are subject to idiosyncratic uninsurable income shocks, aggregate income shocks, wealth shocks, and credit shocks. We show that, because of their salience and the transaction costs, cars are particularly sensitive to changes in the perception of fu- ture expected income and its variability. We find that on top of a large aggregate income shock, life-cycle income profile shocks and wealth shocks are important determinants of consumption choices during the Great Recession.
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| 4. |
- Attanasio, Orazio, et al.
(författare)
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(S)Cars and the Great Recession
- 2022
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Ingår i: Econometrica. - 0012-9682 .- 1468-0262. ; 90:5, s. 2319-2356
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- United States households' consumption expenditures and car purchases collapsed during the Great Recession and more so than income changes would have predicted. Using CEX data, we show that both the extensive and the intensive car spending margins contracted sharply in the Great Recession. We also document significant cross‐cohort differences in the impact of the Great Recession including a stronger reduction in car spending by younger cohorts. We draw inference on the sources of the Great Recession by investigating which shocks can explain household choices in a 60 period life‐cycle model with idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks fitted to aggregate and life‐cycle moments. We find that the Great Recession was caused by a combination of large aggregate income and wealth shocks, while cross‐cohort adjustment patterns imply a role for life‐cycle income profile shocks. We also find a role for car loan premia shocks in accounting for car spending and car loans.
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| 7. |
- Nielsen, Morten Aagaard, et al.
(författare)
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Galectin-3 Decreases 4-1BBL Bioactivity by Crosslinking Soluble and Membrane Expressed 4-1BB
- 2022
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Immunology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-3224. ; 13
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 4-1BB is a T cell costimulatory receptor and a member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor superfamily. Here, we show that Galectin-3 (Gal-3) decreases the cellular response to its ligand (4-1BBL). Gal-3 binds to both soluble 4-1BB (s4-1BB) and membrane-bound 4-1BB (mem4-1BB), without blocking co-binding of 4-1BBL. In plasma, we detected complexes composed of 4-1BB and Gal-3 larger than 100 nm in size; these complexes were reduced in synovial fluid from rheumatoid arthritis. Both activated 4-1BB+ T cells and 4-1BB-transfected HEK293 cells depleted these complexes from plasma, followed by increased expression of 4-1BB and Gal-3 on the cell surface. The increase was accompanied by a 4-fold decrease in TNFα production by the 4-1BBhighGal-3+ T cells, after exposure to 4-1BB/Gal-3 complexes. In RA patients, complexes containing 4-1BB/Gal-3 were dramatically reduced in both plasma and SF compared with healthy plasma. These results support that Gal-3 binds to 4-1BB without blocking the co-binding of 4-1BBL. Instead, Gal-3 leads to formation of large soluble 4-1BB/Gal-3 complexes that attach to mem4-1BB on the cell surfaces, resulting in suppression of 4-1BBL’s bioactivity.
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| 8. |
- Patterson, Allison, et al.
(författare)
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Foraging range scales with colony size in high-latitude seabirds
- 2022
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Ingår i: Current Biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0960-9822 .- 1879-0445. ; 32:17, s. 3800-3807
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Density-dependent prey depletion around breeding colonies has long been considered an important factor controlling the population dynamics of colonial animals.1, 2, 3, 4 Ashmole proposed that as seabird colony size increases, intraspecific competition leads to declines in reproductive success, as breeding adults must spend more time and energy to find prey farther from the colony.1 Seabird colony size often varies over several orders of magnitude within the same species and can include millions of individuals per colony.5,6 As such, colony size likely plays an important role in determining the individual behavior of its members and how the colony interacts with the surrounding environment.6 Using tracking data from murres (Uria spp.), the world’s most densely breeding seabirds, we show that the distribution of foraging-trip distances scales to colony size0.33 during the chick-rearing stage, consistent with Ashmole’s halo theory.1,2 This pattern occurred across colonies varying in size over three orders of magnitude and distributed throughout the North Atlantic region. The strong relationship between colony size and foraging range means that the foraging areas of some colonial species can be estimated from colony sizes, which is more practical to measure over a large geographic scale. Two-thirds of the North Atlantic murre population breed at the 16 largest colonies; by extrapolating the predicted foraging ranges to sites without tracking data, we show that only two of these large colonies have significant coverage as marine protected areas. Our results are an important example of how theoretical models, in this case, Ashmole’s version of central-place-foraging theory, can be applied to inform conservation and management in colonial breeding species.
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| 9. |
- Söderberg, Johan
(författare)
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Price Setting, Inflation Dynamics, and Monetary Policy
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. Essay 1: Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian DSGE models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered, but recent empirical evidence suggests that deviations from uniform staggering are common. This essay analyzes how synchronization of price changes affects the response to monetary policy shocks. I find that even large deviations from uniform staggering have small effects on the response in output. Aggregate dynamics in a model of uniform staggering may serve well as an approximation to a more complicated model with some degree of synchronization in price setting. Essay 2: The welfare cost of inflation in the canonical New Keynesian DSGE model is due to price dispersion. Calibration of the model to match an empirically plausible markup leads to very elastic demand curves. As a consequence, even a small dispersion of prices leads to large distortions in households' allocation of consumption among different goods and substantial welfare losses. The empirical literature suggest, however, that demand adjusts sluggishly to price changes. In this essay, customer markets are integrated in an otherwise standard New Keynesian model by assuming that individual households can only optimize their consumption of an individual good at irregular intervals. With this specification, the welfare loss due to price dispersion is significantly smaller. Moreover, output gap stabilization should be assigned a much more important role in the conduct of monetary policy than previously found in the literature. Essay 3: A main argument for New Keynesian DSGE models is that they have solid microfoundations, but staggered prices and wages are exogenously imposed. How plausible are sticky prices and wages in these models? We show that, in a standard model, there is implausibly large volatility of production and labor supply on the microeconomic level. Also, rationality is violated as households sometimes end up with negative markups, and substantial "menu costs" are needed in order to rationalize the assumed behavior. We present an alternative model with efficiency wages and customer markets that has similar dynamics at the macro level and more plausible behavior on the micro level. In the alternative model, substantially smaller menu costs are required to support an equilibrium with sticky prices and wages.
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