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One Health is an upgrade and optimization of health concepts, which recognizes the integrated health of the human-animal-environment. It emphasizes the use of interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-sectoral coordination, and multi-organizational One Health approaches to solve scientific questions. The surveillance and early warning system is the basis of public health emergency prevention and control. The COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging infectious disease (EID) have put great challenges on the existing surveillance and early warning systems worldwide. Guided by the concept of One Health, we attempt to build a new pattern of integrated surveillance and early warning system for EID. We will detail the system including the One Health-based organizational structure, zoonotic and environmental science surveillance network, EID reporting process, and support and guarantee from education and policy. The integrated surveillance and early warning system for EID constructed here has practical and application prospects, and will provide guidance for the prevention and control of COVID-19 and the possible EID in the future.Copyright © 2022, National Institute of Parasitic Diseases. All rights reserved.
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This paper presents a portable, fast and accurate electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) device with 8-well interdigitated electrode chips for biomarker detection. The design adopts low crest factor multisine signal synthesis at low frequencies (<1 kHz) and single-tone signals at high frequencies (>1 kHz), which significantly increases measurement speed without sacrificing accuracy. In addition, the low excitation amplitude of 10 mV preserves impedance linearity and protects the biosamples. The system achieved an average magnitude accuracy error of 0.30% in the frequency range of interest and it requires only 0.46 s to scan 28 frequency points from 10 Hz to 1 MHz. Experiments were conducted to test the capability to detect antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. Gold nanoparticles bound with protein G (GNP-G) were employed as the conjugated secondary antibody probe to detect anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG in serum. A highly statistical significance (p = 7×10−6) could be found in the impedance data at 10 kHz. The impedance magnitude alteration caused by the GNP-G of the positive and negative groups were 27.2%±13.6% and 4.1%±1.7%, respectively. The results imply that the proposed system enables rapid COVID-19 antibody biomarker detection. Moreover, the EIS system and GNPs have the potential to be modified to detect other biomarkers. © 2022 The Author(s)
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The outbreak of COVID-19 made researchers notice some new points and change their focus, such as the economies of scale for residential energy use, energy dependency of societies, etc. This paper provides a bibliometric analysis of 497 articles by VOSviewer, finding that existing studies on building energy use during COVID-19 could be summarized into four keywords, i.e., building occupants, coronavirus, sustainability and monitoring and management. Significant increases in residential energy consumption are found with the increased duration of in-home-activity, while the growth rate varies between different neighborhoods, different times of day and different usage of energy. Attitudes vary toward the changing trend in the post-pandemic period, and the impacts of lockdown, new confirmed cases, social distancing, etc. on residential energy consumption have been given special attention in recent studies. Policy implications are concluded for maintaining normal operation of residential energy systems under the shock of public health emergencies. © 2023 Newcastle University.
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Moxibustion has been widely used in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. However, there is no systematic review of current topics and clinical findings on moxibustion for COVID-19. We conducted this scoping review to systematically summarize and analyze the themes and findings of published articles, and to provide an overview of current knowledge and practice of moxibustion for COVID-19.Methods:: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, SinoMed, Wan Fang Data, and VIP databases were searched from inception until April 2022. The relevant data were presented through bar graphs, structured tables, and figures along with descriptive statistics and analysis. This scoping review was conducted based on the PRISMA-ScR Checklist. Results:: A total of 76 articles were reviewed: 47 reviews, 19 clinical research studies, seven systematic reviews (all were protocols), and three guidelines. All the studies were conducted by Chinese researchers and published from January 1, 2020 to March 14, 2022. The feasibility of moxibustion in the prevention and treatment of mild or moderate COVID-19 is based on the consensus of therapeutic mechanisms and effectiveness. The most adopted approach was the suspended and gentle moxibustion, and the most frequently applied or recommended acupoints were found to be ST36, CV8, CV6, CV4, CV12, GV14, BL13, LI4, ST25, and LR3. Conclusions:: As a convenient and safe traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) therapy with its specific feature, moxibustion has been significantly effective at ameliorating mild or moderate symptoms among COVID-19 patients. Further large-scale, well-designed research and international cooperation are still warranted in clinical evaluations of moxibustion. Graphical :: http://links.lww.com/AHM/A35.
ABSTRACT
One Health is an upgrade and optimization of health concepts, which recognizes the integrated health of the human-animal-environment. It emphasizes the use of interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-sectoral coordination, and multi-organizational One Health approaches to solve scientific questions. The surveillance and early warning system is the basis of public health emergency prevention and control. The COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging infectious disease (EID) have put great challenges on the existing surveillance and early warning systems worldwide. Guided by the concept of One Health, we attempt to build a new pattern of integrated surveillance and early warning system for EID. We will detail the system including the One Health-based organizational structure, zoonotic and environmental science surveillance network, EID reporting process, and support and guarantee from education and policy. The integrated surveillance and early warning system for EID constructed here has practical and application prospects, and will provide guidance for the prevention and control of COVID-19 and the possible EID in the future. © 2022, National Institute of Parasitic Diseases. All rights reserved.
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The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019, declared as a major public health emergency, profoundly affected the mental health of older adults. Several studies have provided reasonable recommendations to alleviate these effects. A vital role was played by healthcare robots in providing the psychosocial care to the older adults. This review analyzes relevant studies and addresses the research progress on the effects, recommendations, and robot-mediated therapy to alleviate mental health problems developed among older adults during the pandemic. Social robots can provide strong support for mental health. © 2022 IEEE.
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Objective To introduce how to quickly set up a doctor team to achieve efficient treatment of batchs COVID-19 patients in Changchun GongTi shelter hospital. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted to analyze the basic situation of the doctors who supported the Changchun Gongti shelter hospital. The workload is the total number of patients from April 3 to 28, 2022. At the beginning of the task, the first week and the third week of the task, the five point scoring method was used to reflect the doctor's physical and mental state, stress state and rescue achievement. The time phased scheduling and disease grading management were fully implemented after 10 days of operation in the shelter. The doctors' ward round efficiency and self scoring changes before and after the implementation of the plan were compared, and the rescue results were summarized. Results Total of 56 doctors (the Sichuan medical assistance team to Changchun), who undertook the work of Changchun Gongti shelter Hospital, came from 12 professional departments of 14 hospitals. By internal and external linkage-time phased scheduling and information-based patient zoning and grading management, the admission time of batch patients was shortened from (14.64±10.09) min to (6.80±5.10) min per person(P<0.05), the number of patients that each doctor can view per hour ranges from (28.50±12.26) to (68.43±19.95) (P<0.01). A total of 1 293 patients were treated. There were no deaths, no accidents and no mild illness to severe illness in shelter hospital. 35 doctors completed a continuous survey. Before and after the implementation of those measures, the average physical state scores and the psychological state scores of doctors improved (P=0.03), the self-score of stress feeling decreased (P<0.01), and the self-score of professional achievement increased (P<0.01). Conclusions To adapt to the characteristics of emergency treatment for batch COVID-19 patients, the internal and external linkage-time phased scheduling and information-based patient zoning and grading management could help the temporarily convened doctors deal with a large number of patients efficiently, reduce work stress and exposure risk in shelter hospital. © 2022 Chinese Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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Both anthropogenic and climatic factors are important determinants of landscape fire. Because the two groups of factors are intertwined and often act simultaneously, dissecting their effects on landscape fire is challenging. We used the COVID-19 lockdown event in Hubei, in which all immediate influences of anthropogenic factors were effectively removed, to quantify the effects of anthropogenic factors on landscape fire occurrence. We hypothesized that outdoor incense burning is the main causal factor of landscape fire. To test the hypothesis, we used random forest algorithm to model fire occurrence, including fire frequency, total area burned, and area of forest burned, for the lockdown period. We then estimated the differences between historical, simulated, and observed values of landscape fire and used the differences to represent the effects of anthropogenic activities on landscape fire. Our results showed that during the lockdown, landscape fire frequency was reduced by 77%, total area burned by 80%, and area of forest burned by 63%. By month, fire frequency decreased the most in April (85%), followed by February (80%), coinciding with the Qingming and Spring Festivals of 2020. The cessation of outdoor incense burning during the festival season was likely to be the most important factor that decreased fire occurrence, confirming our hypothesis about the causal relationship between outdoor incense-burning and landscape fire. Thus, educational programs encouraging people to stop outdoor incense burning during the festival season could reduce the occurrence of landscape fire.
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Online conferencing has become a new normal after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, existing systems like ZOOM fall short of facilitating informal social aspects like chats, talks, discussions, dialogues, gatherings, secrets, or even gossip or quarrel, which often occur spontaneously during physical meetings. In this study, we design and prototype a novel system considering key spatial features that influence social interactions offline. The proposed system consists of three typical meeting modes: square mode for free social, room mode for split group discussion, stage mode for speech and presentation. Through Wizard-of-Oz testing with 10 participants, we summarize the design features that contribute to the richness of ambiance, the flexibility of distance, the serendipity of interaction of online conferences, and the effect of these aspects on social interaction. Together with the limitations and suggestions for future work, we hope this paper can inspire the design of spatial interaction on screen, with the aim to improve informal social aspects of online conferencing. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the diagnostic efficiency of four anti-cysticercus IgG, IgG4 or IgM antibody test kits (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, ELISA) by different manufacturers, so as to provide insights into the epidemiological investigation and clinical detection of cysticercosis. METHODS: Forty serum samples from cerebral cysticercosis patients, 100 serum samples from healthy volunteers, 30 serum samples from paragonimiasis skrjabini patients, 17 serum samples from cystic echinococcosis and 19 serum samples from subcutaneous or cerebral sparganosis patients were collected and detected using anti-cysticercus IgG, IgG4 or IgM antibody test kits (brand A) and the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand B). The sensitivity, specificity and false negative rate of the four kits for detection of cysticercosis were estimated. RESULTS: The anti-cysticercus IgG, IgG4 or IgM antibody test kits (brand A) showed 95.00% (38/40), 87.50% (35/40), 7.50% (3/40) sensitivities and 98.00% (98/100), 100.00% (100/100) and 100.00% (100/100) for detection of cysticercosis, while the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand B) presented a 75.00% (30/40) sensitivity and 100.00% (100/100) specificity for detection of cysticercosis. The sensitivity for detection of cysticercosis was significantly higher by the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand A) than by the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand B) (χ2 = 6.28, P < 0.05); however, no significant difference was seen in the specificity by two kits (χ2 = 2.01, P > 0.05). The four ELISA kits showed overall false positive rates of 37.88% (25/66), 22.73% (15/66), 62.12% (41/66) and 15.15% (10/66) for detection of paragonimiasis, echinococcosis and sparganosis (χ2 = 37.61, P < 0.05), and the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand A) presented the highest overall false positive rate for detection of paragonimiasis, echinococcosis and sparganosis (χ2 = 7.56, P' < 0.008), while a higher overall false positive rate was seen for detection of paragonimiasis, echinococcosis and sparganosis by the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand A) than by the anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand B) (χ2 = 8.75, P' < 0.008). The four ELISA kits showed false positive rates of 40.00% (12/30), 16.67% (5/30), 76.67% (23/30) and 13.33% (4/30) for detection of paragonimiasis (χ2 = 32.88, P < 0.05) and 21.05% (4/19), 26.32% (5/19), 73.68% (14/19) and 15.79% (3/19) for detection of sparganosis (χ2 = 19.97, P < 0.05), and the highest false positive rates were found by the anti-cysticercus IgM antibody test kit (brand A) for detection of paragonimiasis and sparganosis (all P' < 0.008). However, the four ELISA kits showed comparable false positive rates of 52.94% (9/17), 29.41% (5/17), 23.53% (4/17) and 17.65% (3/17) for detection of echinococcosis (χ2 = 8.24, P > 0.05). In addition, the anti-cysticercus IgM anti-body test kit (brand A) showed false positive rates of 76.67% (23/30), 23.53% (4/17) and 73.68% (14/19) for detection of paragonimiasis, echinococcosis and sparganosis (χ2 = 14.537, P < 0.05), with the lowest false positive rate seen for detection of echinococcosis (χ2 = 14.537, P' < 0.014), while no significant differences were seen in the false positive rate for detection of paragonimiasis, echinococcosis and sparganosis by other three ELISA kits (all P > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The four anti-cysticercus IgG, IgG4 or IgM antibody test kits exhibit various efficiencies for serodiagnosis of cysticercosis. The anti-cysticercus IgG antibody test kit (brand A) has a high sensitivity for serodiagnosis of cysticercosis; however, it still needs to solve the problems of cross-reaction with other parasitic diseases and stability.
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Cysticercosis , Cysticercus , Animals , Antibodies, Helminth , Cysticercosis/diagnosis , Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay , Humans , Reagent Kits, Diagnostic , Sensitivity and Specificity , Serologic TestsABSTRACT
Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi, which can be spread, directly or indirectly, from one person to another. Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to human health, especially COVID-19 that has became a serious worldwide health concern since the end of 2019. Contact tracing is the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent its onward transmission. Contact tracing can help us better understand the transmission link of the virus, whereby better interrupting its transmission. Given the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, contact tracing has become one of the most critical measures to effectively curb the spread of the virus. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on contact tracing, with a detailed coverage of the recent advancements the models, digital technologies, protocols and issues involved in contact tracing. The current challenges as well as future directions of contact tracing technologies are also presented.
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The world has suffered a lot from the COVID-19 pandemic. Though vaccines have been developed, we still need to be ready for its variants and other possible pandemics in the future. To provide people with pandemic risk assessments without violating privacy, a Federated Learning (FL) framework is envisioned. However, most existing FL frameworks can only work for homogeneous models, i.e., models with the same configuration, ignoring the preferences of the users and the various properties of their devices. To this end, we propose a novel two-way knowledge distillation-based FL framework, Fed2KD. The knowledge exchange between the global and local models is achieved by distilling the information into or out from a tiny model with unified configuration. Nonetheless, the distillation cannot be conducted without a common dataset. To solve this bottleneck, we leverage the Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to generate data that will be used as a proxy dataset for distillation. The proposed framework is firstly evaluated on benchmark datasets (MNIST and FashionMNIST) to test its performance against existing models such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg). The performance of Fed2KD improves by up to 30% on MNIST dataset, and 18% on FashionMNIST when data is non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) as compared to FedAvg. Then, Fed2KD is evaluated on the pandemic risk assessment tasks through a mobile APP we developed, namely DP4coRUna, which provides indoor risk prediction. © 2022 IFIP.
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Wearing face masks is an effective measure to prevent COVID-19. Infrared thermal image based temperature measurement and identity recognition system has been widely used in many large enterprises and universities in China, so it is totally necessary to research the face mask detection of thermal infrared imaging efficiently. A novel method named as GMPPS was proposed in this paper, which Gray Histogram Equalization and Gaussian Filter was adopted to pre-processing the image, then Max-pooling and fast PCA was used to extract the feature, and SVM was employed to classify the data finally. The experiment was performed on 3 different scales of training data set, the results showed that the average face mask recognition of the method can be up to 99.638% for 800 test samples only with 32 training samples, and the average test time overhead for one sample is 1. 0749s, and the method's performance is very robust. © 2021 IEEE.
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Left unmitigated, climate change poses a catastrophic risk to human health, demanding an urgent and concerted response from every country. The 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change and The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change have been initiated to map out the impacts of climate change and the necessary policy responses. To meet these challenges, Tsinghua University, partnering with the University College London and 17 Chinese and international institutions, has prepared the Chinese Lancet Countdown report, which has a national focus and builds on the work of the global Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change. Drawing on international methodologies and frameworks, this report aims to deepen the understanding of the links between public health and climate change at the national level and track them with 23 indicators. This work is part of the Lancet's Countdown broader efforts to develop regional expertise on this topic, and coincides with the launch of the Lancet Countdown Regional Centre in Asia, based at Tsinghua University. The data and results of this report are presented at the provincial level, where possible, to facilitate targeted response strategies for local decision-makers. Based on the data and findings of the 2020 Chinese Lancet Countdown report, five recommendations are proposed to key stakeholders in health and climate change in China: (1) Enhance inter-departmental cooperation. Climate change is a challenge that demands an integrated response from all sectors, urgently requiring substantial inter-departmental cooperation among health, environment, energy, economic, financial, and education authorities. (2) Strengthen health emergency preparedness. Knowledge and findings on current and future climate-related health threats still lack the required attention and should be fully integrated into the emergency preparedness and response system. (3) Support research and raise awareness. Additional financial support should be allocated to health and climate change research in China to enhance health system adaptation, mitigation measures, and their health benefits. At the same time, media and academia should be fully motivated to raise the public and politicians' awareness of this topic. (4) Increase climate change mitigation. Speeding up the phasing out of coal is necessary to be consistent with China's pledge to be carbon neutral by 2060 and to continue to reduce air pollution. Fossil fuel subsidies must also be phased out. (5) Ensure the recovery from COVID-19 to protect health now and in the future. China's efforts to recover from COVID-19 will shape public health for years to come. Climate change should be a priority in these interventions. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.
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Unexpected incidents can be destructive or even disastrous, affecting the financial markets. Incidents such as the 9/11 attacks (2001), the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), and the COVID-19 outbreaks (2019, 2020) severely shocked both local and global markets. For investors, it is crucial to quantify the key facts that affect the incidents’impacts, and to estimate the reactions of the markets accurately and efficiently for global event-driven investment strategies. Though Web data and other alternative data allow such a possibility, it is still very challenging to mine noisy and often biased heterogeneous data sources, and construct a unified framework for modeling global markets across across time and regions. As a first attempt, we build a framework that extracts incident facts globally based on a deep neural network, feeds them into models built on a global event database complemented with novel socioeconomic datasets (e.g. nightlight data from satellites), and predicts stock market directions in a simulated real-world setting with interpretable results that outperform various baselines. Specifically, we study terrorist attacks in three countries for over 20 years on average, as a first effort to systematically quantify the impact on stock markets at a large scale using novel indicators. CCBYNCND
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Since the end of 2019, the global pandemic of COVID-19 has attracted much attention on bats(Chiroptera), and even people are frequently frowned upon when talking about bats.Bats are extremely diverse in ecology and taxonomy, accounting for ~20% of mammalian diversity worldwide.Bats play an important role in pest control, seed transmission, plant pollination, offering a great economic benefit to human society.Moreover, bats bear important scientific research value in health and longevity, biomimetic, language evolution, and more.There are more than 140 species of bats in China, ranking China one of the top countries in terms of bat species diversity of the world.In recent decades, Chinese researchers have made great progresses in diverse fields such as bat taxonomy, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, and viral pathogens.However, researches focusing on ecosystem services and conservation of bats were very scarce.Due to logging and plants harvesting, over-hunting, habitat destruction, urbanization, agricultural activities, climate change, and so forth, bats in China are largely threatened: 51% of bat species have been listed as Near Threatened or above(Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable).We argue that successful bat conservation in China must first strengthen basic research, particularly in assessing the population status and trends of bat species and establishing a monitoring network for bat diversity.Additionally, a combination of conservation efforts, including the protection of bat habitats, construction of artificial bat habitats, improvement of relevant laws and regulations, and enhancement of public education on bats, are vital to ensuring sustainable bat populations in China. © 2020, Science Press. All right reserved.
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BACKGROUND: Epidemiological and clinical features of patients with COVID-19 have been reported, but none of them focused on medical staff, and few predictors of the duration of viral shedding have been reported. It is urgent to help healthcare workers prevent and recover quickly from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). METHODS: We enrolled 140 medical workers with COVID-19 in Wuhan. Epidemiological, demographic, clinical, laboratory, radiological treatment and clinical outcome data were collected, and predictors of the duration of viral shedding were explored through multivariable linear regression analysis. RESULTS: The medical staff with COVID-19 presented mild clinical symptoms and showed a low frequency of abnormal laboratory indicators. All the medical staff were cured and discharged, of whom 96 (68.6%) were female, 39 (27.9%) had underlying diseases, the median age was 36.0 years, and 104 (74.3%) were infected whilst working in hospital. The median duration of viral shedding was 25.0 days (IQR:20.0-30.0). Multivariable linear regression analysis showed reducing viral shedding duration was associated with receiving recombinant human interferon alpha (rIFN-α) treatment, whilst the prolonged duration of viral shedding correlated with the use of glucocorticoid treatment, the durations from the first symptom to hospital admission and the improvement in chest computed tomography (CT) evidence. Moreover, infected healthcare workers with lymphocytes less than 1.1 × 109 /L on admission had prolonged viral shedding. CONCLUSION: Medical staff with timely medical interventions show milder clinical features. Glucocorticoid treatment and lymphocytes less than 1.1 × 109/L are associated with prolonged viral shedding. Early admission and rIFN-α treatment help shorten the duration of viral shedding.
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COVID-19/virology , Health Personnel , SARS-CoV-2/physiology , Virus Shedding , Adult , China , Female , Glucocorticoids/adverse effects , Hospitalization , Humans , Interferon-alpha/therapeutic use , Male , Middle Aged , COVID-19 Drug TreatmentABSTRACT
The authors would like to inform the readers that an error was made in the original article and one of the authors, Dr. Ming Yang was omitted. Ming Yange,* e. Department of Ophthalmology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China. The authors wish to apologise for any inconvenience caused.