Atherosclerotic disease has been a feature of more affluent societies since ancient times. Currently, cardiovascular disease accounts for almost half of all mortality across Europe, causing over two million deaths within the EU and costing EU health economies €192 billion per year. The pathogenesis of atherosclerosis is complex, and our understanding of it has come a long way over the last 50 years. The public and many health professionals have an image of cholesterol that is probably over-simplistic. The oxidation of lowdensity lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol to form oxLDL is the first molecular step in atherosclerosis pathogenesis, and it appears that oxLDL levels may act as a useful biomarker in identifying individuals at greatest risk of cardiovascular events. Inhibition of oxLDL or its active removal may represent a useful new therapeutic strategy. Antioxidants such as lycopene may offer another approach to prevention or treatment, and emerging evidence around the role of anti- Chlamydia pneumoniae antibodies in LDL oxidation could open up another avenue of preventative and therapeutic options.

As grid infrastructures become more dynamic in order to cope with the uncertainty of demand, they are becoming extremely difficult to manage. At the Belfast e-Science Centre, we are attempting to address this issue by developing Self Managing Grid Middleware. This paper gives an overview of the middleware and focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of a Resource Manager. Also in this paper we will see how our approach, which is based on federated UDDI registries, has enabled us to implement some of the desired features of next generation grid software.

Using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), between 1987 and 1996 we analyzed Salmonella enteritidis isolates from gastroenteritis cases in four Caribbean countries: Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago. We also determined the resistance of the isolates to 12 antimicrobial agents. Of the 129 isolates of S. enteritidis available for testing, DNA digested by XbaI revealed 13 distinctive PFGE patterns. The most prevalent XbaI PFGE patterns were group 1 (88 of 129 isolates, 68.2%) and group 2 (26 of 129, 20.2%). The patterns found among S. enteritidis isolates correlated with the geographical origin of the isolates. Of the 28 isolates from Barbados, 20 of them (71.4%) belonged to XbaI PFGE group 2, and of the 93 isolates from Trinidad and Tobago, 78 of them (83.9%) belonged to group 1. SpeI digestion of S. enteritidis genome was not as discriminatory as XbaI. Overall, of the 129 isolates, 67 of them (51.9%) exhibited resistance to one or more of the 12 antimicrobial agents that we tested. The prevalence of resistance was 53.8% for the S. enteritidis isolates tested from Trinidad and Tobago, 50.0% for those from Barbados, 28.6% for those from Saint Lucia, and 100.0% for one isolate from the island of Saint Kitts. Resistance was highest to triple sulfur (59 of 129 isolates, 45.7%), followed by furadantoin (10 of 129, 7.8%), ampicillin (7 of 129, 5.4%), and carbamycin (5 of 129, 3.9%).