Mixed Test (Biology)

The incidence of positional plagiocephaly has increased, since the ‘Back to Sleep’ campaign but it is still recommended to put babies to sleep in supine position to reduce the risk of cot death.

The ORACLE trial showed a benefit from administration of oral antibiotics. Each case should be assessed on its merits, as if the mother has frank sepsis it may be safer to deliver the baby immediately.

Microarray is the only test here that will identify that genes are working or not. Family history and clinical examination will be very useful in most cases, but may fail to identify the specific genetic cause in a number of cases.

The umbilical artery carries used blood away from the fetus and so the pH can never be higher than in the vein.

Urine production is the major contributor to amniotic fluid, but in the fetus the placenta is the organ responsible for the removal of waste products.

The high-velocity turbulence creates a rasping noise.

Unlike stroke volume, contractility is independent of preload and afterload and is an innate property of myofibrils. It can be influenced by inotropes (e.g. dobutamine).

Haemolytic jaundice is the most important cause of jaundice presenting on the first day of life and needs to be excluded.

A major concern about subunit vaccines, especially when just short peptides are used, is the variation in ability to associate with the different polymorphic forms of MHC molecules present in an outbred population.

Maternal IgG is transferred across the placenta from the mother to the fetus by a mechanism involving the specific Fc gamma receptor FcRn IgG is the only immunoglobulin class to cross the placenta. Immunoglobulins in the milk (mostly secretory IgA) will provide enteric protection for the baby, but are not absorbed. Thus the maternal immunoglobulin in the circulation of a 2-month-old-baby will mostly be placentally-transferred IgG, which will provide 'cover' for the first few months of life.

Deliberate attempts to ward off infections by inducing a minor form of the disease were common in China in the middle ages. The practice of variolation as a protection against smallpox spread from India, through Turkey and into Western Europe in the 18th century.

Subunit vaccines require lengthy protein synthesis and purification procedures, DNA vaccines circumvent this and DNA from the current variants of, for example, influenza virus, could be rapidly isolated and replicated for use in a DNA vaccine.

Lady Wortley Montague introduced the practice of variolation to Western Europe, a practice that was common in China in the Middle Ages as a means of preventing smallpox.

The objective of vaccination is to provide effective immunity. The particular immune mechanisms which need to be stimulated and the site of the immune response evoked by vaccination will differ for different organisms. Mycobacteria are found as intracellular infections within macrophages and therefore stimulating T-cells to produce macrophage-activating cytokines such as IFN-gamma is appropriate in this case.

Although a single peptide sequence, being a linear array of amino acids, by definition cannot fully represent a discontinuous epitope, it can comprise a part of such an epitope. However, because the epitope is incomplete, the peptide would probably only generate antibodies that have a relatively low affinity for the native antigen.