The fish-borne clonorchiasis caused by the oriental liver fluke Clonorchis sinensis is endemic in a number of countries with over 35 million people being infected globally. Rapid and accurate detection of C. sinensis in its intermediate host fish is important for the control and prevention of clonorchiasis in areas where the disease is endemic. In the present study, we established a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) approach for the sensitive and rapid detection of C. sinensis metacercariae in fish. The specificity and sensitivity of primers designed from the C. sinensis cathepsins B3 gene were evaluated, and specific amplification products were obtained with C. sinensis, while no amplification products were detected with DNA of related trematodes, demonstrating the specificity of the assay. The LAMP assay was proved to be 100 times more sensitive than a conventional polymerase chain reaction for detection of C. sinensis. The established LAMP assay provides a useful tool for the rapid and sensitive detection of C. sinensis in fish, which has important implications for the effective control of human clonorchiasis.

Availability and timeliness of relevant information is of paramount importance during disaster response. Structural and situational information should be made available lavishly to decision makers, field workers, victims, even the general public provided that it would be possible to track down potential abuses. The trustworthy emergency information brokerage service (TIBS) described in this paper was developed based on such a conviction. This pervasive information flow control system offers information desensitization, flow traceability and use accountability services in two separate phases of disaster management: (1) in the preparatory phase, a prospective P-TIBS subsystem will provide information filtering and fusion tools that can help resource owners to desensitize organizational/structural information and store them in a virtual repository deployed pervasively on many points of service (POS); (2) during the disaster responsive phase, a retrospective R-TIBS subsystem will lease the desensitized information and offer information flow traceability as well as use accountability services according to pre-specified information release and accountability policies. This accountability approach will be more scalable and responsive than the "breakthe-glass" access control overriding mechanism available in many hospital information systems as it alleviates the need to authenticate individual users and authorize their emergency information access. This paper provides an overview of the TIBS system architecture and the enabling technology it employs.