Johanna Knapstein,1 Daniel Grimm,1 Marcus A Wörns,1 Peter R Galle,1 Hauke Lang,2 Tim Zimmermann111st Department of Internal Medicine, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany; 2Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, GermanyIntroduction: Hepatitis C virus reinfection occurs universally after liver transplantation, with accelerated cirrhosis rates of up to 30% within 5 years after liver transplantation. Dual antiviral therapy with pegylated interferon-2a and ribavirin only reaches sustained virological response rates of ~30% after liver transplantation. With the approval of viral (...) NS3/4A protease inhibitors telaprevir, boceprevir, and simeprevir and the NS5B polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir, combination therapy offers new therapeutic options for HCV-infected patients, resulting in considerably higher sustained virological response rates in the nontransplant setting. Case presentation: We report three cases of TVR-based triple antiviral therapy in HCV genotype 1 reinfected patients after liver transplantation, of whom a 57-year-old Caucasian female and a 43-year-old Caucasian male were therapy naïve, and a 49-year-old Caucasian male patient was pretreated ineffectively. After 4 weeks of therapy, viral load decreased one to three log10 and became negative in weeks 6 to 8 in the therapy naïve patients. The pretreated patient showed a negative viral load in week 4. TVR was administered over 12 weeks, 750 mg thrice daily. Doses of immunosuppression with cyclosporine were reduced four to six fold. Initial peg-IFN and RBV doses ranged from 135–180 µg/week and 800–1,200 mg/day, according to the patient's body weight. Doses of peg-IFN and RBV were adapted to 90–135 µg/week and 400–800 mg/day after 2 to 12 weeks of protease inhibitor therapy. Dual therapy was continued for 36 weeks with total treatment duration of 48 weeks in the therapy naïve patients leading to a sustained virological response 12 weeks after the end of therapy. In the pretreated patient a breakthrough was detected in week 24 and therapy was discontinued. Overall, antiviral therapy was well tolerated. Side effects included dysgeusia and anemia leading to erythropoietin application and blood transfusions. Conclusion: This case series emphasizes that triple therapy with TVR is an efficient treatment for therapy naïve HCV genotype 1 reinfected patients after liver transplantation. But therapeutic options for pretreated patients require improvement. Keyword: cyclosporine, interferon, ribavirin, hepatitis C, protease inhibitor. (shrink)

The Brotherton Collection, which now forms part of the Library of the University of Leeds, contains a manuscript of Cicero's De Officiis which is usually assigned to the twelfth century. On page 3 of the catalogue of the Brotherton Library the manuscript is incorrectly said to contain ‘DE OFFICIIS LIBER PRIMUS’. In fact the manuscript contains all three books with the exception of nine leaves which have been removed. At present the manuscript consists of 41 folios on vellum measuring 11 (...) in. X 7½ in. Ff. 39–41 are written by a later hand. (shrink)

This article sheds new light on late-19th-century debates about the organization of knowledge through its emphasis on German orientalism and comparative linguistics. Centering on Friedrich Carl Andreas’ (1846–1930) controversial reconstruction of the Avestan language and its sacred literary corpus, I highlight a shift from the history of texts to an engagement with ‘living’ language in the decades around 1900. Andreas is shown to have inherited aspects of two schools, which collectively defined the landscape of 19th-century philological research – one traditional (...) and the other comparative. The long-standing struggle between these schools demonstrates that ‘the humanities’ were no monolithic foil to the rise of natural sciences during the second half of the 19thcentury. Instead, I argue that alternative conceptual frameworks were cultivated within German philology – concepts that were taken up in broader disciplinary debates, though they were not narrowly the products of them. (shrink)

The existence of consciousness in animals may have been overlooked. Continuity in consciousness between humans and animals is predicted by evolutionary theory. However, there are specific methodological difficulties associated with investigating such a phenomenon: it cannot be directly measured; animals, unlike humans, cannot directly tell us about their conscious experience; experiments which have made comparisons to human consciousness cannot detect consciousness of a different form; application of the law of parsimony in science has traditionally led to the conclusion that it (...) does not exist. (shrink)