Q fever is a disease caused by infection with Coxiella burnetii, a bacterium that affects humans and other animals. This organism is uncommon, but may be found in cattle, sheep, goats and other domestic mammals, including cats and dogs. The infection results from inhalation of a spore-like small cell variant, and from contact with the milk, urine, feces, vaginal mucus, or semen of infected animals. Rarely, the disease is tick borne. The incubation period is 9–40 days. A human being can be infected by a single bacterium. The bacterium is an obligate intracellular pathogen.
It was first described by Edward Holbrook Derrick in abattoir workers in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The "Q" stands for "query" and was applied at a time when the causative agent was unknown; it was chosen over suggestions of "abattoir fever" and "Queensland rickettsial fever", to avoid directing negative connotations at either the cattle industry or the state of Queensland.
The pathogen of Q fever was discovered in 1937, when Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Mavis Freeman isolated the bacterium from one of Derrick’s patients. It was originally identified as a species of Rickettsia. H.R. Cox and Gordon Davis isolated it from ticks in Montana, USA in 1938. It is a zoonotic disease whose most common animal reservoirs are cattle, sheep and goats. Coxiella burnetii is no longer regarded as closely related to Rickettsiae, but as similar to Legionella and Francisella, and is a proteobacterium.
Fever (also known as pyrexia) is a common medical sign characterized by an elevation of temperature above the normal range of 36.5–37.5 °C (98–100 °F) due to an increase in the body temperature regulatory set-point. This increase in set-point triggers increased muscle tone and shivering.
As a person's temperature increases, there is, in general, a feeling of cold despite an increasing body temperature. Once the new temperature is reached, there is a feeling of warmth. A fever can be caused by many different conditions ranging from benign to potentially serious. There are arguments for and against the usefulness of fever, and the issue is controversial. With the exception of very high temperatures, treatment to reduce fever is often not necessary; however, antipyretic medications can be effective at lowering the temperature, which may improve the affected person's comfort.
Fever differs from uncontrolled hyperthermia, in that hyperthermia is an increase in body temperature over the body's thermoregulatory set-point, due to excessive heat production and/or insufficient thermoregulation.
Campbell Kevin Thomas Newman (born 12 August 1963) is the 38th and current Premier of Queensland. He has been the leader of the conservative Liberal National Party of Queensland (LNP) since April 2011, and was the 15th Lord Mayor of Brisbane from 2004 to 2011.
Newman was elected Lord Mayor as a member of the Liberal Party of Australia. Since the July 2008 merger of the Queensland Liberals and National Party of Australia (Nationals), Newman has been a member of the resulting LNP party.
In March 2011, Newman announced that he would challenge Leader of the Opposition John-Paul Langbroek for the leadership of the LNP. Langbroek resigned, and Newman was elected his successor. As Newman was not a member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland, former state Nationals' leader Jeff Seeney was elected interim opposition leader while Newman headed the party's election team from outside the legislature.
Newman led the LNP to a landslide victory in the 2012 state election, allowing it to form government for the first time in its history. At the same time, he won election to the seat of Ashgrove in western Brisbane. He was sworn-in as premier two days later.
James Dewitt Yancey (February 7, 1974 – February 10, 2006), better known by the stage names J Dilla, J Mukandila and Jay Dee, was an American record producer who emerged from the mid-1990s underground hip hop scene in Detroit, Michigan. According to his obituary at NPR.org, he "was one of the music industry's most influential hip-hop artists, working for big-name acts like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes and Common."
Renowned producer Pete Rock placed J Dilla on his list of the top five producers of all time, while the editors of About.com ranked him #15 on their list of the Top 50 Hip-Hop Producers. Andy Kellman of Allmusic stated that—by 2004, after being active for well over a decade as a producer—J Dilla had accomplished enough to be considered "an all-time great." J Dilla made the "Elite 8" in the search for The Greatest Hip-Hop Producer of All Time by Vibe. Also, The Source placed him on its list of the 20 greatest producers in the magazine's twenty-year history.
Yancey's career began slowly. He has now become highly regarded, most notably for the production of critically acclaimed albums by Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Common, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde, and Erykah Badu. He was a member of Slum Village and produced their acclaimed debut album Fan-Tas-Tic (Vol. 1) and their follow-up Fantastic, Vol. 2.
Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody III, October 18, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title.
Moody was born in New York City and grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.
He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly. Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism. Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to a reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written.[citation needed]Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.