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Background Social support theory suggests that parental social support may influence the nature of early parenting behaviours and specifically the mother-infant relationship. This study examines whether support from a partner, friends or family is associated with differences in quality of mother-infant interactions in the context of maternal depression. Methods 210 women were followed from early pregnancy to six months postpartum within Australian pregnancy cohort, the Mercy Pregnancy and Emotional Wellbeing Study (MPEWS). Mother-infant interactions within a standardised observation at six months postpartum were measured by the Emotional Availability (EA) Scales using total scores of the parental scales. In early and late pregnancy and at six months postpartum, mothers rated perceived maternal social support from a partner, family and friends using subscales of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. Depression was measured in early pregnancy and at six months postpartum using the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-IV-TR, with repeated measurement of depressive symptoms by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Data was analysed using structural equation models. Results There were significant interactions between depressive symptoms in early pregnancy and perceived maternal support from a partner (B = .18, 95% CI = 03, .31) and separately from family (B = .12, 95% CI = .03, .32) in predicting maternal emotional availability. No such interaction was found for support from friends. While partner and family support moderated the association between early depressive symptoms and emotional availability, there were no direct associations between maternal depressive disorder in early pregnancy and perceived support, and further, maternal depression was not a significant predictor of emotional availability. Limitations Future studies should consider extending measurement of the mother-infant relationship beyond the EA Scales, inclusion of a

Herpes zoster (shingles) is a painful condition resulting from reactivation of latent varicella zoster virus (VZV). The Australian National Shingles Vaccination Program (commenced November 2016) provides free herpes zoster vaccination for eligible adults aged 70 years, with a 5-year catch-up program (until October 2021) for adults aged 71-79 years. Patterns and impact of the program were evaluated by analysis of vaccine distribution and delivery data and specific antiviral prescription data from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. During the first 2 years, uptake of funded live attenuated shingles vaccine ZOSTAVAX® (Zoster Virus Vaccine Live; ZVL) was high across the ongoing and catch-up programs. Before program implementation (2006-2016), herpes zoster coded antiviral prescription rates increased by 2.2% per year (95% CI: 1.5, 2.9) in the 70-79 years age group. In the two years since program launch, herpes zoster antiviral prescription rates declined substantially in this age group, by an average of 13.6% per year (95% CI: 1.5, 24.2). These results indicate that the National Shingles Vaccination Program has been highly successful in vaccinating a considerable proportion of Australian adults aged 70-79 years against herpes zoster and suggest that vaccine uptake was associated with decreased incidence of herpes zoster.

Automated image analysis allows drug companies to use High Content Screening (HCS) to measure subtle but important changes in fluorescently labeled cells, both rapidly and accurately. Researchers using HCS imaging systems generate thousands of images from which they measure millions of parameters. Some images can be very “dense”, with hundreds of cells and complicated cell morphology. It may take several hours or even days to process the images generated from a single experiment which may be unacceptable for the workflows in laboratories. The large image datasets and fast turnaround requirement has made the efficient batch processing of the massive amount of images a challenging task. With the enormous progress in computing power, computers with multi-core CPUs are now becoming standard. The multi-core shift presents unprecedented opportunities for researchers to deal with large datasets with acceptable computing performance. Unfortunately, having a dual core CPU does not speedup one's application automatically. In fact, most applications use just a single core and see no speed improvements when run on a multi-core machine. It is still a challenge to develop parallel algorithms that address the issues of task concurrency and data parallelism, and that actually take advantage of those multiple processors. In this paper, some efforts have been made to develop a multi-core based high performance solution to speedup the batch processing for micro-well-plate-based HCS. The proposed solution employs an automatic parallelization engine which automatically dispatches the batch processing tasks. The engine automatically detects the number of processors available on the computer on which our High Content Analysis (HCA) software runs, and then creates equal number of work threads to process images in parallel. Therefore, the solution can automatically scale to additional cores and future multi-core processors. Loop parallelization mechanism has been implemented to assign diffe

Barramundi (Lates calcarifer) larvae were reared from 2 to 25 days post hatch in 14‰ saline groundwater with either no potassium supplementation (38% K-equivalence) or full potassium supplementation (100% K-equivalence). Growth, survival and swimbladder inflation of these larvae were compared against those grown in control treatments of seawater (32‰) and seawater diluted to 14‰. Those reared in saline groundwater with 38% K-equivalence exhibited complete mortality within 2 days, while those held in groundwater with full supplementation survived at a rate equal to both control treatments (pooled average 51.1 ± 0.5%). At 25 days post hatch, there was no significant difference in larval length or dry weight between those grown in the 14‰ control treatment and those in the saline groundwater with full potassium supplementation. There were no significant differences in swim bladder inflation between any of the surviving treatments (average 93.3 ± 2.5%). This is the first description of rearing barramundi larvae both in low salinity seawater and in saline groundwater and demonstrates that the requirement for potassium by larval barramundi is higher than for juveniles of the same species.