CCN activation of ultrafine biogenic-WSOC under restricted anthropogenic emissions: A study over eastern Himalaya in India

The present study was conducted to investigate the potential of water soluble organic carbon (WSOC) in CCN activation under restricted anthropogenic emissions over a high altitude station, Darjeeling (27.01° N and 88.15° E,∼2200 amsl and covered with huge coniferous forests) in the eastern parts of Himalaya in India. We measured CN, CCN, and ultrafine WSOC (WSOC0.1) during April–May 2020 (COVID-19 lockdown) and compared with the normal period (April–May 2019) to investigate the relative dominance of biogenic over anthropogenic emissions to the aerosol-CCN activation. Though an expected significant decline (53%) in CN concentration was observed, CCN exhibited ∼17% increase during the lockdown period. The activation ratio (AR: CCN/CN) jumped from 0.30 during normal to 0.72 during the lockdown period. The aerosol solubility was also found to be increased during the lockdown period (∼27% decrease in the k- parameter (k)). Lockdown-WSOC was higher (1.62 μg m−3) than the normal-WSOC (1.13 μg m−3) and exhibited better regression with CCN in absence of anthropogenic emissions (Lockdown: R2 = 0.83, p < 0.05;Normal: R2 = 0.40, p < 0.05). Here we hypothesize that under restricted fossil fuel emissions during lockdown (57% decline in NOx), surface ozone was increased by 31%, that in turn favored the photochemical oxidation of biogenic VOCs emitted only from coniferous forest cover to produce huge amount of SOC. The ultrafine "biogenic-only” WSOC (under restricted anthropogenic WSOC during lockdown) participated in CCN activation actively and with higher proficiency compared to the normal period. The study bears immense importance of the role of biogenic emissions in cloud droplet formation over this part of the Himalaya under restricted anthropogenic emissions. The present hypothesis could open a new route of aerosol formation and their CCN activation under high deficiency of anthropogenic emissions. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Laryngeal injury in a coronavirus disease 2019 caregiver following voluntary cough-holding within an inappropriately sized personal protective equipment suit.

OBJECTIVE: To document laryngeal framework rupture following voluntary cough-holding as an airway complication of donning a personal protective equipment suit that was too small in size. METHODS: Clinical record and literature review, with proposition of plausible aerodynamics of the airway injury. RESULTS: Whilst carrying out his duty in the coronavirus disease ward, a resident attempted to stifle a paroxysm of cough when wearing a personal protective equipment suit that was too small with his neck flexed and restricted. There was a sudden release of pressure, intense pain and swelling in the neck with crepitus. Imaging revealed a non-displaced fracture in the lower end of the partially ossified right thyroid lamina, a cricothyroid membrane tear and subcutaneous emphysema. The symptoms resolved gradually on conservative management. CONCLUSION: This report underlines the importance of donning appropriately sized personal protective equipment and encouraging its proper use amongst coronavirus disease 2019 caregivers. Non-traumatic laryngeal injury, itself a rare event, has never been reported as a posture-related complication of wearing personal protective equipment.

COVID-19 Induced Income Loss among Migrant Workers: Evidence from Eight Villages of Bihar

The COVID-19 crisis re-shaped many livelihood options and placed significant burdens on those with precarious incomes exacerbating persisting vulnerabilities, especially among a large section of the migrant population. This group faced a dual threat – both to their livelihood and health. To understand the consequences of this pandemic on the income of the migrant population, a household level survey was conducted in the state of Bihar, India, which is one of the highest migrant-sending states. We examine the role of differences in the socio-economic status of migrants and their households in determining the extent of vulnerability caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Vulnerability is proxied by the income lost by migrants during the lockdown. The results suggest that households with diversified income portfolio, larger landholdings, and those receiving government benefits suffered significantly lower income loss whereas, larger household size and greater distance from town tended to escalate income loss. Additionally, private salaried workers faced higher income loss and an increment in years of education lowers the losses significantly. It is observed that individual-level characteristics also played a significant role in determining economic loss due to the lockdown. Our findings suggest a binding necessity to actively shape policies considering the financial insecurity of vulnerable migrants at their destination and the household members at the origin. © 2022 The Economic Society of Australia.

Tackling Coronavirus Disease 2019 by Nonpharmaceutical Interventions

Transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is attributed to direct or indirect unguarded contact with infected subjects or inanimate objects. Currently only supportive treatment is available and disease-specific medication or vaccines are yet to be implemented. In such a critical situation, the only choice left is to control the rapid dissemination of the disease through government-enforced strategies and self-imposed precautionary measures across all the afflicted countries around the world. In this chapter, we have appraised in detail the different nonpharmaceutical interventions adapted by government, common people, and health workers to prevent disease spread from one person to another and from one place to another. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Nobody cares about us: COVID-19 and voices of refugees from Aotearoa New Zealand

Aotearoa New Zealand’s pandemic communication approach amidst the COVID-19 (C19) has been applauded around the world. The New Zealand government’s border controls and other measures in response to C19 impacted refugees at the margins and prevented people from accessing support services and healthcare. The sanctioned power to ‘care’ thus became a performative form of power for silencing through the dismissing of voices of refugees as being irrelevant. Experiences of refugees at the margins are constructed amid the erasure of community voices in dominant approaches to health. What was missing from the dominant discourses was the voice of the refugees, who had gone through painful experiences of displacement and resettlement. How did the refugee communities at the margins of Aotearoa New Zealand navigate through the prevailing structural impediments to health during the pandemic? In this study, we use a culture- centred analysis to centre the structural context of disenfranchisement during the COVID-19 lockdown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with refugee participants, we attend to how health is negotiated in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown response at the margins. Infectious diseases such asC19 lay bare the structural determinants that create health and well-being challenges among refugee communities in New Zealand. The narratives point out that the one-size-fits-all approach of the government left behind refugees at the margins during the C19 in the public health efforts. © 2021 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association.

Identification of Potential Inhibitors Against SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro, PLpro, and RdRP Proteins: An In-Silico Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic is still evolving and is caused by SARS-CoV-2. Me-too drugs are chemically, structurally, or functionally similar to preexisting drugs. These drugs may be chemically related to the prototype, and may have an identical mechanism of action with enhanced target specificity and reduced risks of adverse reactions. In the present study, we have performed a chemical similarity analysis to identify Me-too (similar) ligands relative to previously reported potential drug hits (reference compounds) against the major viral proteins, including 3CLpro, PLpro, and RdRP. The binding efficiency of the similar molecules was then evaluated by using molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation approaches to assess their binding effectiveness relative to the reference compounds. Our results indicate that several molecules show better interaction compared to the reference molecules. These molecules may be potential drugs inhibiting different stages of the SARS-CoV-2 viral lifecycle. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Culturally centring digital inclusion and marginality: A case study in Aotearoa New Zealand

The dominant approach to digital inclusion positions technology as a ‘fix’ to the challenges experienced by marginalized communities. Largely erased are the broader structures of marginalization, the role of technology in relationship to structures and the cultural contexts within which technologies are negotiated. In this essay, we culturally centre digital inclusion to offer insights into the ways in which technologies play out within the margins, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, including 60 initial interviews, group meetings and 25 interviews carried out amidst the lockdown in response to COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that the pandemic offers a window into the relationship between inequalities and technologies, rendering structural contexts of these inequalities visible. We highlight how technology adoption produces marginality in service delivery, situating technology amidst the ecologies of everyday life and the interplays of culture, structure and agency. © The Author(s) 2022.

Singapore's extreme neoliberalism and the COVID outbreak: culturally centering voices of low-wage migrant workers. (Special Issue: The COVID-19 pandemic: precarious migrants and outbreak inequality.)

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic-worker-activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore's extreme neoliberalism.

Machine learning approach for automatic lungs sound diagnosis from pulmonary signals

Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRDs) are the most common diseases that affect people in today's world. In COVID 19 pandemic many people are suffering from different types of respiratory diseases. There is a shortage of medical professionals and hence there is a requirement of artificial intelligence-based tools for automatic diagnosis of pulmonary diseases in the lungs. This paper presents a machine learning-based automatic classification method for the diagnosis of multiple pulmonary diseases from lung sounds. This work uses comprehensive lung sound categories labeled by a medical professional for use in machine learning-based classification. The proposed work uses four machine-learning classifiers (SVM, KNN, Naïve Bayes, and ANN) for the different discriminant features of lung sounds such as wheezing sound that can be used for diagnosis of asthma. For the detection of multiple lung sound in a noisy environment, data augmentation is used in training data and then trained the model where ANN using 5-fold cross-validation gives the average accuracy of 95.6%. The proposed method has low time complexity, is robust and non-invasive making it ideal for real-time applications to diagnose pulmonary diseases. © 2021 IEEE.

Generation of free fatty acid during lockdown and its effect on the corrosion in rolling emulsion tank

Corrosion in roll coolant tank is a rare phenomenon in the steel industry. The ability of the cold rolling emulsion to prevent corrosion on the cold rolled steel, the mild steel coolant tank, the mill housing and pipelines stems from the presence of oil soluble corrosion inhibitors, anti-oxidants or anti-wear additives present in rolling oil formulation. During normal operational conditions, the mill coolant (mixture of oil and water) along with the generated iron fines is continuously recirculated through the rolling mill application system. The concentration of the coolant is maintained by periodic addition of oil and demineralized water in the system. During Covid-19 unprecedented lockdown, voluminous corrosion was observed in the inner walls of coolant tanks, pipelines and other accessories, which remained in contact with the emulsion. Though normal rolling operations were halted, the bath temperature and recirculation of the mill coolant were maintained to sustain the emulsion health against bacterial attack. It has been earlier observed that during indefinite mill shutdowns, if emulsion is left without heating, circulation and stirring the health of emulsion deteriorates leaving a characteristic rancid odor which resembles bacterial attack. This study primarily highlights the role of acidic by-products formed due to depletion of anti-oxidants leading to rapid deterioration of emulsion triggering corrosion within the roll coolant tank. Techniques, like FTIR, SEM-EDS and Raman Spectroscopy were employed to understand the morphology and nature of the corrosion. Corrosion rust formed after simulation under accelerated laboratory conditions was finally subjected to Raman Spectroscopy, and Protective Ability Index (PAI) was applied to verify the variation in rust protection ability of the fresh and lockdown period rolling oil. It clearly shows the connection between the loss of protective nature of the rust and increase in acidity due to lockdown leading to accelerated corrosion of the tank system. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Migrant health as a human right amidst COVID-19: a culture-centered approach. (Special Issue: Human rights in healthcare during COVID-19 and other pandemics.)

Purpose - The purpose of this manuscript is to examine the negotiations of health among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore amidst the COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. In doing so, the manuscript attends to the ways in which human rights are constituted amidst labor and communicative rights, constituting the backdrop against which the pandemic outbreaks take place and the pandemic response is negotiated. Design/methodology/approach - The study is part of a long-term culture-centered ethnography conducted with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, seeking to build communicative infrastructures for rights-based advocacy and interventions. Findings - The findings articulate the ways in which the outbreaks in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers are constituted amidst structural contexts of organizing migrant work in Singapore. These structural contexts of extreme neoliberalism work catalyze capitalist accumulation through the exploitation of lowwage migrant workers. The poor living conditions that constitute the outbreak are situated in relationship to the absence of labor and communicative rights in Singapore. The absence of communicative rights and dignity to livelihood constitutes the context within which the COVID-19 outbreak emerges and the ways in which it is negotiated among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore. Originality/value - This manuscript foregrounds the interplays of labor and communicative rights in the context of the health experiences of low-wage migrant workers amidst the pandemic. Even as COVID-19 has made visible the deeply unequal societies we inhabit, the manuscript suggests the relevance of turning to communicative rights as the basis for addressing these inequalities. It contributes to the extant literature on the culture-centered approach by depicting the ways in which a pandemic as a health crisis exacerbates the challenges to health and well-being among precarious workers.

COVID-19, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Precarious Migrant Work in Singapore: Structural Violence and Communicative Inequality

Drawing upon an ongoing ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, this article builds on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore the experiences of the workers amid COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. The CCA foregrounds the interplays of communicative and material inequalities, suggesting that the erasure of infrastructures of voices among the margins reproduces and circulates unhealthy structures that threaten the health and well-being of the working classes. The voices of the low-wage migrant workers who participated in this study document the challenges with poor housing, poor sanitation, and food insecurity that are compounded with the absence of information and voice infrastructures. Amid the everyday threats to health and well-being that are generated by neoliberal reforms across the globe, the hyper-precarious conditions of migrant work rendered visible by the trajectories of COVID-19 call for structurally transformative futures that are anchored in the voices of workers at the margins of neoliberal economies.