The importance of a comprehensive study in allergic reactions

Background: Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a condensed polymer of ethylene glycol used as excipient in over 1000 commonly medicines, as well as for industrial products or cosmetics (shampoo, toothpaste.) where it can act as thickener, solvent, softener or humectant. In relation to the recently developed COVID-19 vaccines and their excipients some questions have arisen in our consultations. Method(s): A 48-year- old woman came to our clinic with doubts about the administration of COVID-19 vaccine. 8 years ago, after rectal administration of a healing suppository for an anal fissure she immediately presented a dry cough and a generalized urticaria which subsided spontaneously without attend to the emergency department. 5 years ago, with the application of an hemorrhoid cream se presented an immediate reaction consisting of cough, difficulty breathing and generalized urticaria. The symptoms subsided spontaneously after 30-45 minutes. The patient reported previous tolerance to both drugs. She has avoided them ever since. All these medicines have in common PEG as an excipient. We performed several studies to find out if PEG was the culprit. Result(s): *Prick test with Casenlax (which contains 10 grams of PEG 4000): negative. *Oral provocation test with Casenlax: we started with the intake of 2.5 grams of Casenlax and after 5 minutes she started with oropharyngeal pruritus, dry cough, feeling of shortness of breath and desaturation (since 98% to 92-90%). The patient was monitored and administered intramuscular adrenaline (0.3 ml), methylprednisolone 60 mg and dexchlorpheniramine 5 mg. The symptoms were controlled after 15-30 minutes. *COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine was administered without incident. Conclusion(s): Given the high incidence of reactions to the excipients accompanying the drugs, this should be taken into account when taking the patient's medical history and in the subsequent pharmacological study.

Transfer learning and data augmentation techniques to the COVID-19 identification tasks in ComParE 2021

In this work, we propose several techniques to address data scarceness in ComParE 2021 COVID-19 identification tasks for the application of deep models such as Convolutional Neural Networks. Data is initially preprocessed into spectrogram or MFCC-gram formats. After preprocessing, we combine three different data augmentation techniques to be applied in model training. Then we employ transfer learning techniques from pretrained audio neural networks. Those techniques are applied to several distinct neural architectures. For COVID-19 identification in speech segments, we obtained competitive results. On the other hand, in the identification task based on cough data, we succeeded in producing a noticeable improvement on existing baselines, reaching 75.9% unweighted average recall (UAR). Copyright © 2021 ISCA.

Clinical-epidemiological characterization of 77 children and adolescents infected with sars-COV-2 Coronavirus

Introduction: Children are also vulnerable to Sars-CoV-2 infections, but their clinical manifestations are slight and the evolution in most of the cases is satisfactory. Objective: Characterize in a clinical-epidemiological way pediatric patients infected with the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Methods: Descriptive, cross-sectional and retrospective study in the first 77 patients under 18 years confirmed with COVID-19 and admitted in the pediatric service of “Dr. Luis Díaz Soto” Hospital, in the period from March 13th to June 30th, 2020. From the clinical records were taken data of variables like age and sex, comorbidities, source of infection and place of exposure, presence of symptoms and time of onset after the contact, and period in which started an improvement of the disease. Results: There was a discreet predominance of female sex (54.5 %) and the adolescents (51.8 %) being more vulnerable to the infection. Comorbidities were noticed in 23 cases (22.8 %) and asthma was the most frequent (10-13%). It was specified the source of infection in 74 patients (96.1 %) and 58 patients (75.3 %) were asymptomatic during the diagnosis. The most frequent symptoms were: Respiratory ones (cough: 7–36.8 %;rhinorrhoea: 5–26.3 %;and sneezing: 4–21,0 %);followed by cephalalgia with 4 (21,0 %);just 3 patients presented fever (15.8 %) and other 3 presented anosmia-dysgeusia (15.8 %).The evolution was favorable in 100.0 % of the patients and most of them were asymptomatic at the seventh day. Conclusions: The infection by SARS-CoV-2 was present with significative distinction of sex, more commonly in adolescents with slight manifestations of the disease and satisfactory evolution. There were no deaths. © 2021, Editorial Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.