Local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play critical roles in providing immediate relief resources and long-term recovery support for communities after a disaster. Drawing on interviews with NGO representatives involved in three Northern California wildfires in 2017 and 2018, this study identifies challenges and opportunities for NGOs supporting wildfire relief and recovery. Across fires and NGOs, NGO management and wellbeing, coordination and disaster experiences emerge as common barriers and enablers of relief and recovery. In many cases, local NGOs' participation in wildfire relief and recovery included simultaneous expansion of an organisation's mission and activities and negative impacts on staff mental health. Under the rapidly evolving circumstances of relief and the prolonged burdens of recovery, personal relationships across NGOs and government agencies significantly improved coordination of assistance to communities. Finally, interviewees expressed greater confidence when responding to wildfires if they had previous experience with a disaster, although the COVID-19 pandemic presented distinct challenges on top of pre-existing long-term recovery work. Despite repeated assertions that interviewees' experiences reflected only their individual community or wildfire, key challenges and opportunities were consistent across disasters. These results may aid other NGOs in preparing to provide immediate disaster relief and long-term recovery in California and other wildfire-prone areas.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and novel coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) epidemics represent the biggest global health threats in the last two decades. These infections manifest as bronchitis, pneumonia or severe, sometimes fatal, respiratory illness. The novel coronavirus seems to be associated with milder infections but it has spread globally more rapidly becoming a pandemic. This review summarises the state of the art of nanotechnology-based affinity biosensors for SARS, MERS and COVID-19 detection. The nanobiosensors are antibody- or DNA-based biosensors with electrochemical, optical or FET-based transduction. Various kinds of nanomaterials, such as metal nanoparticles, nanowires and graphene, have been merged to the affinity biosensors to enhance their analytical performances. The advantages of the use of the nanomaterials are highlighted, and the results compared with those obtained using non-nanostructured biosensors. A critical comparison with conventional methods, such as RT-PCR and ELISA, is also reported. It is hoped that this review will provide interesting information for the future development of new reliable nano-based platforms for point-of-care diagnostic devices for COVID-19 prevention and control. [Image: see text]

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the UKs primary healthcare priority-setting body, responsible for advising the National Health Service in England on which technologies to fund and which to reject. Until recently, the normative approach underlying this advice was described in a 2008 document entitled Social value judgements: Principles for the development of NICE guidance (SVJ). In January 2020, however, NICE replaced SVJ with a new articulation of its guiding principles. Given the significant evolution of NICEs methods between 2008 and 2020, this study examines whether this new document (Principles) offers a transparent account of NICEs current normative approach. It finds that it does not, deriving much of its content directly from SVJ and failing to fully acknowledge or explain how and why NICEs approach has since changed. In particular, Principles is found to offer a largely procedural account of NICE decision-making, despite evidence of the increasing reliance of NICEs methods on substantive decision-rules and modifiers that cannot be justified in purely procedural terms. Thus, while Principles tells NICEs stakeholders much about how the organisation goes about the process of decision-making, it tells them little about the substantive grounds on which its decisions are now based. It is therefore argued that Principles does not offer a transparent account of NICEs normative approach (either alone, or alongside other documents) and that, given NICEs reliance on transparency as a requirement of procedural justice, NICE does not in this respect satisfy its own specification of a just decision-maker.

The proceedings contain 52 papers The topics discussed include: the effect of urban infrastructure development on female labor force participation among the poor and middle class in India;understanding the sensibility of social media use and privacy with Bangladeshi facebook group users;persuasive information campaign to save water in universities: an option for water-stressed areas?;digital interventions to improve health and nutrition outcomes for children from low-income communities;an alternative to India's reservation policy: a unified framework for rigorous and adaptive measurement of socio-economic status;COVID-19 on facebook ads: competing agendas around a public health crisis;gaze-based screening of autistic traits for adolescents and young adults using prosaic videos;and information technology (IT) and welfare in India: does IT work?

The homotypic and heterotypic antibody response to rotavirus was determined in three pony mares and their foals. The normal concentrations of anti-rotavirus antibodies in mares milk and mares and foals serum over the first 10 weeks post-partum were measured using IgA, IgG and rotavirus sero-type-specific enzyme linked immunosorbent assays. Experimental infection of the foals with serotype 3 equine rotavirus produced a rapid, serotype-specific response which peaked 10 days after infection and a slower heterotypic response which peaked 32 days later. In contrast, vaccination of the mares with an inactivated, adjuvanted serotype 6 bovine rotavirus produced a heterotypic response similar to that of the homotypic response in both serum and milk, although the predominant response in serum was IgG, while in milk it was IgA. These results suggest that non serotype-restricted passive protection of foals against rotavirus may be achieved by parenteral vaccination of mares.

Considering the population density, healthcare capacity, limited resources and existing poverty, environmental factors, social structure, cultural norms, and already more than 18,863 people infected, the community transmission of COVID-19 is happening fast. These exacerbated a complex fear among the public. The aim of this article is, therefore, to understand the public perception of socioeconomic crisis and human stress in resource-limited settings of Bangladesh during the COVID-19 outbreak. The sample comprised of 1066 Bangladeshi participants. Principal component analysis (PCA) was considered to design a standardized scale to measure the mental stress and socioeconomic crisis, one-way ANOVA and t-test were conducted to perceive different demographic risk groups; multiple linear regression was applied to estimate the statistically significant association between each component, and classical test theory (CTT) analysis was applied to examine the reliability of each item according to the components to develop a composite score. Without safeguarding the fundamental needs for the vulnerable ultra-poor group can undeniably cause the socioeconomic crisis and mental stress due to the COVID-19 lockdown. It has further created unemployment, deprivation, hunger, and social conflicts. The weak governance in the fragile healthcare system exacerbates the general public's anxiety as the COVID-19 testing facilities are centered around in the urban areas, a long serial to be tested, minimum or no treatment facilities in the dedicated hospital units for COVID-19 patients are the chief observations hampered along with the disruption of other critical healthcare services. One-way ANOVA and t-test confirmed food and nutritional deficiency among the vulnerable poorest section due to loss of livelihood. Also, different emergency service provider professions such as doctors, healthcare staff, police forces, volunteer organizations at the frontline, and bankers are at higher risk of infection and subsequently mentally stressed. Proper risk assessment of the pandemic and dependable risk communications to risk groups, multi-sectoral management taskforce development, transparency, and good governance with inter-ministerial coordination is required along with strengthening healthcare capacity was suggested to reduce mental and social stress causing a socioeconomic crisis of COVID-19 outbreak. Moreover, relief for the low-income population, proper biomedical waste management through incineration, and preparation for the possible natural disasters such as flood, cyclones, and another infectious disease such as dengue was suggested. Finally, this assessment process could help the government and policymakers to judge the public perceptions to deal with COVID-19 pandemic in densely populated lower-middle-income and limited-resource countries like Bangladesh.Psychology; COVID-19; Perception-based questionnaire; Principal component analysis (PCA); Linear regression model; Social panic; Social conflict.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown brought about an exogenous and unparalleled stock market crash The crisis thus provides a unique opportunity to test theories of environmental and social (ES) policies This paper shows that stocks with higher ES ratings have significantly higher returns, lower return volatility, and higher operating profit margins during the first quarter of 2020 ES firms with higher advertising expenditures experience higher stock returns, and stocks held by more ES-oriented investors experience less return volatility during the crash This paper highlights the importance of customer and investor loyalty to the resiliency of ES stocks

OBJECTIVES: To determine if there is an association between acuity level of care (ALC), case fatality and length of stay in patients admitted to hospital due to COVID-19. DESIGN: A hospital-based observational follow-up study. SETTING: Internal Medicine Service of the Aga Khan University Hospital, Pakistan, from 26 February 2020 to 30 June 2020. PARTICIPANTS: Adult patients with confirmed COVID-19, aged ≥18 years. METHODS: ALC was categorised into low, intermediate and high level and patients were triaged using the standard emergency severity illness score. All patients were followed until the end of hospital admission for the outcome of case fatality and length of stay. RESULTS: A total of 822 patients with COVID-19 were admitted during the study period and 699 met inclusion criteria. The mean age was 54.5 years and 67% were males; 50.4% were triaged to low, 42.5% to intermediate and 7.2% to high acuity care. The overall case-fatality rate was 11.6%, with the highest (52%) in high acuity level followed by 16.2% in intermediate and 2% in low acuity care. Acuity level was associated with case fatality, with an HR (95% CI) of 5.0 (2.0 to 12.1) for high versus low acuity care and an HR of 2.7 (1.2, 6.4) for intermediate versus low acuity care, after adjusting for age, sex and common comorbidities including diabetes, hypertension, ischaemic heart disease and chronic lung disease. Similarly, acuity level was also associated with length of hospital stay. CONCLUSION: High and intermediate acuity level is associated with higher case fatality rate and prolonged length of hospital stay in patients admitted with COVID-19. In resource-limited settings where the provision of high acuity care is limited, the intermediate care acuity could serve as a useful strategy to treat relatively less critical patients with COVID-19.

Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is a chronic, immune/antigen-mediated esophageal disease characterized by symptoms of esophageal dysfunction and eosinophil-predominant inflammation. The diagnostic criteria for EoE have changed with our growing knowledge over the past two decades. Esophageal eosinophilia, which responds histologically to a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) is not a distinct disease but a subset of EoE. An endoscopic scoring system that relies on the assessment of exudates, rings, edema, furrows, and strictures is a useful tool for assessing endoscopic severity. PPIs are regarded as safe and effective first-line treatments for EoE. Oral topical corticosteroids or dietary therapy are also options for first-line treatment. Endoscopic dilation is effective for relieving the dysphagia symptoms of a patient with an esophageal stricture.

In this research, we developed a novel chimeric HTNV-IL-2-G2 DNA vaccine plasmid by genetically linking IL-2 gene to the G2 segment DNA and tested whether it could be a candidate vaccine. Chimeric gene was first expressed in eukaryotic expression system pcDNA3.1 (+). The HTNV-IL-2-G2 expressed a 72 kDa fusion protein in COS-7 cells. Meanwhile, the fusion protein kept the activity of its parental proteins. Furthermore, BALB/c mice were vaccinated by the chimeric gene. ELISA, cell microculture neutralization test in vitro were used to detect the humoral immune response in immunized BALB/c mice. Lymphocyte proliferation assay was used to detect the cellular immune response.- The results showed that the chimeric gene could simultaneously evoke specific antibody against G2 glycoprotein and IL-2. And the immunized mice of every group elicited neutralizing antibodies with different titers. Lymphocyte proliferation assay results showed that the stimulation indexes of splenocytes of chimeric gene to G2 and IL-2 were significantly higher than that of other groups. Our results suggest that IL-2-based HTNV G2 DNA can induce both humoral and cellular immune response specific for HTNV G2 and can be a candidate DNA vaccine for HTNV infection.

Providing collective solutions to global pandemics requires the coordination of information that is accurate and accountable. In recent years there has been a global push for reliable pandemic preparedness indicators. This push has come from U.S. foreign policy, the World Health Organization (WHO), NGOs, and private foundations. These actors want control over how data for preparedness indicators is collected, analysed, and promoted. Governments want to influence how they are assessed, using poor performance to attract attention and good performance to deflect blame. In this article we discuss how the push for pandemic preparedness indicators comes from the dual aims of repelling national risk, the spread of disease, while reducing global harm through stronger transnational governance arrangements. We delve into the development of indicators from the WHO and the privately\run Global Health Security Index, and examine how their claims to authority measure\up against standards of transparency, veracity, and accountability. We stress the importance of understanding how these indicators are composed. This is vital given the current drive to include social and governance metrics in revised efforts at data collection, as well as efforts to include pandemic preparedness indicators in how intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, donors, and funders devise health and development policies.

COVID-19 became a stress-test for many legal systems because it required that a balance be found between rapid action to prevent the spread of the disease, and continued respect for human rights. Many states in Europe, including Ukraine, chose to enforce an obligation to self-isolate. In this article we review what the obligation to self-isolate entails in the case of Ukraine. We also analyse whether such an obligation should be viewed as a deprivation or a mere restriction of liberty, and if it is permissible under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID\19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS\CoV\2) remains a major global health concern in 2022. The association between the rapid spread of the variants, which eliminated the original strain, and clinical manifestations with the variants remains undetermined. METHODS: This was a population\based longitudinal cohort study. Whole citizens in a city with approximately one million population who had contacted COVID\19 patients and were tested by nasopharyngeal SARS\CoV\2 reverse transcription\polymerase chain reaction (RT\PCR) swab test between July 2020 and March 2021 were enrolled. Detailed contact episode and the presence of cough symptoms 4C5 days after contact with patients having COVID\19 were evaluated. RESULTS: Among the 359 RT\PCR test\positive patients, 88 (24.5%) developed cough symptoms by 4C5 days from the infection. The same rate in RT\PCR test\negative cases was 8.6%. The prevalence of cough did not significantly differ by age, sex, and places or closeness of the contact episode. The rate of cough symptoms in RT\PCR test\positive patients increased in FebruaryCMarch 2021 with E484K variant predominance compared to that in JulyCDecember 2020 with the original strain (32.9% vs 19.4%, p = 0.0221), whereas the cough prevalence among RT\PCR test\negative population did not increase. Cough symptoms in COVID\19 patients was associated with strong fatigability, but was independent from fever or dysosmia. CONCLUSIONS: Cough symptoms 4C5 days after infection with SARS\CoV\2 was suggested to have increased with E484K variant, compared to the original strain.

Introduction: To date, the mental health consequences of children hospitalized with COVID-19 remain unclear. We aimed to assess mental health status in children in the context of COVID-19, with a focus on discharged children. Methods: We recruited discharged children who recovered from COVID-19 and healthy controls between July and September 2020 in Wuhan Children's Hospital. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, and sleep problems were assessed in these children using questionnaires. Univariable and multivariable logistic and linear regressions were conducted to identify risk factors. Results: Totally, there were 152 children (61 discharged children and 91 healthy controls) aged 7C18 years old in our study. An increasing trend in the prevalence of PTSD, anxiety, and depression was observed in the discharged children compared with healthy controls (PTSD: 8.20 vs. 2.20%, anxiety: 22.95 vs. 13.19%; depression: 47.54 vs. 32.97%). Discharged children tended to report more depressive symptoms ( = 0.39) and less sleep problems ( = ?0.37). Discharged children who lived in nuclear families and had longer hospital stays were more likely to report depression [odds ratio (OR) = 3.68 and 1.14, respectively]. Anxiety symptoms and the severity of sleep problems of discharged children were positively associated with caregivers' depression and PTSD symptoms (OR = 21.88 and 31.09, respectively). Conclusion: In conclusion, PTSD, anxiety, and depression symptoms were common among recovered children 4 months after COVID-19 hospitalization. Children from nuclear family and those had longer hospital stays need special attention. In addition, parental mental health had a significant impact on their children's mental resilience and recovery.

Objectives: To examine the association between Helicobacter pylori seroprevalence and serum pepsinogens (PGs) as markers of gastric inflammation), with high neutralizing antibody titers to poliovirus type 1 and 3 vaccine strains among children age 3-4 years, subsequent to sub-clinical infection acquired during a wild-type poliovirus type 1 outbreak in Israel. Methods: A serosurvey was conducted among 336 children aged 5-17 years who were vaccinated with both inactivated polio vaccine and oral polio vaccines. H. pylori serum IgG antibodies and PG concentrations were measured using ELISA. Neutralizing antibodies to poliovirus vaccine strains were measured and children with a titer 1:8 were considered immune. High-level immunity was defined as having a serum NA titer >1:2048. Propensity score inverse weighting was used to account for confounders. Results: Neutralizing antibodies titers 1:8 to poliovirus type 1 and 3 vaccine strains were found in 99.4 and 98.2% of the children, respectively. An inverse association was found between H. pylori seropositivity accompanied by PGI:PGII ratio 6.5 (marker of gastric inflammation) and high-level immunity to poliovirus type 1: OR 0.39 (95% CI 0.68-0.91), p = 0.027. The association between H. pylori seropositivity of CagA virulent phenotype and polio high immunity was not significant. The association between H. pylori seropositivity and high neutralizing antibodies to type 3 poliovirus was of low magnitude and not significant. Conclusions: H. pylori seroprevalence accompanied by evidence of gastric inflammation was inversely correlated with high titers of neutralizing antibodies to poliovirus in children from a population with near universal polio immunity.

This work aimed to identify the lead causes of upper limb injury presenting to a busy hand and major trauma unit during the UK COVID-19 domestic lockdown period, in comparison to a cohort from the same period one year previously. Hand and upper limb injuries presenting to the host organization during a pre-lockdown period (23rd March 2019C11th May 2019) and the formal UK lockdown period (23rd March 2020C11th May 2020) were compared, using data collated from the host institutions hand surgery database. The UK lockdown period was associated with a 52% fall in the number of patients presenting to the service with hand and upper limb injuries (589 pre-lockdown vs. 284 during lockdown). There was a significant increase in the proportion of injuries due to machinery use during lockdown (38, 6.5% pre-lockdown vs. 33, 11.6% during lockdown, P = 0.009), other etiologies were consistent. The proportion requiring surgical management were similar (n = 272, 46.2% pre-lockdown vs. n = 138, 48.6% during lockdown, P = 0.50). The proportion requiring overnight admission fell (n = 94, 16.0% pre-lockdown vs. 29, 10.2% during lockdown, P = 0.022). COVID-19 related lockdown in the UK resulted in a reduction in the presenting numbers of hand related injuries; however almost half of these patients still required surgery. These data may be of use to other hand surgery centers for resource planning during future lockdown periods, and for injury prevention strategies in the post-COVID-19 world.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Patients with kidney failure can only survive with some form of kidney replacement (transplant or dialysis). Unfortunately, innovations in kidney replacement therapy lag behind many other medical fields. This study compiles expert opinions on candidate technologies for future kidney replacement therapies. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, AND MEASUREMENTS A worldwide web-based survey was conducted with 1,566 responding experts, identified from scientific publications on kidney (renal) replacement therapy, indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (period 2014-2019). Candidate innovative approaches were categorized in line with the Kidney Health Initiative roadmap for innovative kidney replacement therapies. RESULTS Most respondents expected a revolution in kidney replacement therapies: 68.59% before 2040 and 24.85% after 2040, while 6.56% expected none. Approaches anticipated as most likely were implantable artificial kidneys (38.6%) and wearable artificial kidneys (32.4%). CONCLUSIONS A majority of experts expect that kidney replacement therapies can be significantly improved by innovative technologies.

CNS infections have severe manifestations, often leading to high mortality, but the CNS is usually not the primary target of pathogens, leaving a window of opportunity to prevent neuroinvasion. We must prioritize development of therapies to prevent neurological sequelae that cause long-lasting morbidity and disease burden on society.

Todays deep learning systems deliver high performance based on end-to-end training but are notoriously hard to inspect. We argue that there are at least two reasons making inspectability challenging: (i) representations are distributed across hundreds of channels and (ii) a unifying metric quantifying inspectability is lacking. In this paper, we address both issues by proposing Semantic Bottlenecks (SB), integrated into pretrained networks, to align channel outputs with individual visual concepts and introduce the model agnostic AUiC metric to measure the alignment. We present a case study on semantic segmentation to demonstrate that SBs improve the AUiC up to four-fold over regular network outputs. We explore two types of SB-layers in this work: while concept-supervised SB-layers (SSB) offer the greatest inspectability, we show that the second type, unsupervised SBs (USB), can match the SSBs by producing one-hot encodings. Importantly, for both SB types, we can recover state of the art segmentation performance despite a drastic dimensionality reduction from 1000s of non aligned channels to 10s of semantics-aligned channels that all downstream results are based on. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this chapter (10.1007/978-3-030-71278-5_2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Law and regulation have not received much attention as part of the context shaping and being shaped by health informatics. Telemedicine, data, devices and software, and electronic health records (EHRs) are examples of how technologies are affected by privacy, intellectual property protections, and other law and regulation.