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Federally funded Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) aims to improve nutrition equity through hunger relief setting. However, little is known about TEFAP disbursement method (choice, modified choice, and no choice) to pantries or the quality received by pantries. Food inventory data from 239 pantries in 2020 were used to assess the association between TEFAP quality and type of disbursement methods longitudinally. While no significant differences were observed in quality across disbursement types and months. Our study suggests there are tradeoffs across different methods. TEFAP for the most part is a healthy food source that should be maximized by food pantries.Copyright © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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The ensuing study analyzes the trend of disinformation appertaining to the coronavirus pandemic on social media platforms through mathematical modeling. We introduce a new SEHIR model with an additional compartment of people not reacting instantly or at all to the disinformation called hibernators, to obtain more clarity on the pattern of spread of fake news. The stability analyses of the prevalence free equilibrium have been provided in terms of basic reproduction number, and the existence and uniqueness of the solution have been proved using the fixed-point technique. Furthermore, we conduct a numerical simulation using an experimental survey. The findings are graphically depicted to show different scenarios for social media users across compartments.
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Guest loyalty has great effect on their satisfaction as well as it helps to increase the efficiency, and it leads to improved profit and sale of hotel and create positive impact on customers. Loyalty is a long-Term commitment which helps to stand the business in market for a long time and make business successful. Hospitality industry is the one of the fastest and largest job generating and revenue generating industry in among all sectors. In hospitality industry, employees come with the contact with guest either in front of the house (Front Office F and B service) or back of the house (Food Production Housekeeping) and perform their duties in the best professional way. Customer satisfaction is one of the important objectives to sustain the guest loyalty for repetition. In this research primary data was collected and it belongs to empirical research. Data were collected from the UttrakahndGarhwal region and the major cities covered are Mansoori, Dehradun, Rishikesh and Haridwar. The findings of this study are how customer retention/loyalty relates to the recommendation to the others in addition with the overall outlets performance. The study defines the impact of the overall behavioral variables related to F and B outlets in relation to the satisfaction. The research was conducted with the help of online offline filled questionnaires with the population size of 110. The population covered the regular travelers who have visited any of the Hotels and stayed at least for one night. The data was analyzed by using correlation, ANOVAs and T-Test. The study has reflected the Gap in constraint of the data collection and the COVID-19 Government guidelines. © 2022 IEEE.
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As we can see, only a select few gadgets, such as PCs and smartphones, are internet-connected in the modern world and since governments across the world instituted lockdowns to stop the spread of COVID-19, interest in home gardening has exploded. Internet of Things (IoT) and the internet have completely taken over today's world. All humans utilize the internet to fulfill basic needs. The network of actual items is known as the Internet of Things (IOT). Simply put, it refers to the process of keeping an eye on a physical machine or object. It can also refer to the interconnection of physical objects that have been implanted with electronics, sensors, software, and network connectivity. The foundation of our nation is agriculture. The main issue in agriculture is water scarcity. The water resource is not used in an effective manner, so the water is wasted. To overcome this problem, we proposed plant monitoring approach. © 2022 IEEE.
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Background: In partnership with the Poornima University, the Jodhpur School of Public Health conducted a participatory and live webinar on "Is the world experiencing dual pandemics-COVID and Mental Health? Let's talk positive." On 15th May 2021. Dr. Naresh Nebhinani Additional Professor, Department of Psychiatry AIIMS Jodhpur was the distinguished speaker, who along with Poornima University co-founder Mr. Rahul Singhi and other panellists from Jodhpur School of Public health addressed the topic. Finding(s): The COVID-19 pandemic and the shattering economy have resulted in a detrimental impact on many people's mental health around the globe. It has created new barriers among children, health workers, and elderly along with those who already suffer from mental illness. Every third person who was infected by COVID has shown some signs of mental health issues in one form or the other and prevalence of such disorders have increased by 35% in COVID. The role of behavioural changes towards mental health issues, along with positive attitude, better coping mechanisms, positive lifestyle changes including healthy living, sobriety, healthy eating, regular physical exercise, relaxation, spiritual practice, connectedness with family and close associates, balanced use of gadgets, proper sleep etc result in better outcomes and indicators of mental health resulting due to COVID 19 impacts could be controlled. Conclusion(s): While the health-care system fights to rescue millions of lives on a daily basis, there is a significant risk of a looming pandemic of hidden mental health conditions that might devastate the present mental-health infrastructure. We need inter-disciplinary support of various sectors to execute the plan for people's participation to talk about mental health issues. With specialized psychological interventions and multi-stakeholder collaboration, we can easily curb mental health issues and have a positive outlook in life thereby establishing a balance despite external situations. Copyright © 2023, Institute of Medico-legal Publication. All rights reserved.
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This chapter discusses the strategies applied and steps followed for fast-track development of COVID-19 vaccines under different platforms and their applications. In this chapter we also discuss some gene delivery systems and their applications in gene-based COVID-19 vaccine development. Bioinformatics tools also played critical roles in the acceleration of COVID-19 vaccine development. Globally, many academic, government, bio-pharma, and non-profit organizations have collaborated to tackle this crisis. Developments of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 that elicit protective immune responses are essential to prevent and mitigate the morbidity and mortality caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection. The immune system plays a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infection;thus, understanding the immune response and the underlying mechanism is very crucial to develop successful prophylactic vaccines against the virus. The development of an effective vaccine requires a proper antigen and the delivery system to achieve robust cellular and humoral immune responses following vaccination. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Yashwant V. Pathak;individual chapters, the contributors.
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Motivated by various health care applications and many other novel fields of Molecular Communication (MC), it has become an important field of research since the last decade. This paper proposes a molecular communication-based model for the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus in the human body. The virus uses the ACE2 receptor as a gateway to enter the blood vessels, organs and then replicate itself. In response to the infection, the immune system synthesizes pro-inflammatory cytokines such as IL6, IL2, and TNFa. This active bodily response may be further compromised by the generation of anti-inflammatory cytokines such as IL4 and IL10. We also propose a mathematical model using a Markov state transition for a flow-based molecular communication system which contributes to the detection of these pro-inflammatory cytokines level and gives a further inference about the infection in the body by taking multiple cytokines into account. © 2022 IEEE.
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Introduction: The invasion of lung tissue by a commensal like aspergillus after severe viral infection has been known.[1] But coronavirus has multiple fangs like immune dysfunction, precipitates new onset diabetes and hypercoagulability.[2] We hereby present a case of long COVID with pulmonary aspergillosis and deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Case Study: A 46 year old male presented with one and half month history of fever, cough with expectoration, hemoptysis. He had tested positive for COVID and diabetes two months before and had required intensive care treatment. The Chest Xray [Figure 1a] showed left upper lobe opacity. Chest CT Scan [Figure 2] showed cavity with central hypodense component within anterior segment of left upper lobe (bird's nest appearance). BAL from that segment grew aspergillus. The patient was started on voriconazole, hemoptysis was controlled and subsequently discharged. But 15 days later, he was readmitted with hemoptysis and left side calf pain and swelling. Lower limb venous doppler showed thrombosis of parts of Left Superficial femoral vein and popliteal vein. CTPA (CT Pulmonary Angiography) didn't show any filling defect. Patient was started on anticoagulation. After 8 weeks patient improved with significant clearing of lung lesion on chest X Ray [Figure 1b]. Discussion: Studies from Wuhan, China, reported secondary fungal infections in 35.3% critically ill patients.[3] Our patient, apart from other risk factors had received corticosteroids and the dose was more than 0.3 mg/kg/d and the duration was upto 4 weeks.[4] Conclusion: Post COVID cases with hemoptysis should be investigated properly considering the multiple pathogenic pathways that are implicated by this virus.
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This paper presents an improved SEIRD model (ISEIRD)for COVID-19 Trend Predictions by incorporating birth rate, natural death rate and re-positive rate. The proposed method is evaluated on 448 days of data (March 10, 2020May30, 2021).Our study shows that the ISEIRD model outperforms in simulating the covid-19 infections. The Python simulated results are included in the paper to validate the scheme. © 2021 IEEE.
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Nainital is a well-known hill station in Uttarakhand, India where there is footfall of thousands of tourists every year. Tourism industry at Nainital has always been the main source of income for the people of Nainital. This business has continuously aided in generating high revenue for Uttarakhand State Government. Due to the advent of Covid-19 pandemic, the Government of India enforced complete and partial lockdowns from time to time during 2020-2021 as a measure to control the existing hazardous circumstances prevailing in the country. This brought a drastic blow to the tourism industry at Nainital as well and directly affected the economy of the Uttarakhand State. The abrupt downfall in the industry due to covid -19 instigated the researchers to analyze the scenario in the duration 2020-2021. There were periods of lockdown as well as unlock/partial lockdown in this duration. The researchers analyzed the impact of the pandemic in the tourism industry at Nainital in both the stages-during lockdown and unlock/ partial lockdown. A SWOC (Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities & Challenges) analysis was taken up as an effective warfare mechanism against the ubiquitous unpleasant situation. It was decoded that the surging conditions precipitated from certain psychological and behavioral impediments of all the three components- Government, Public and Covid 19 virus, which were essentially required to be mapped. The present pyramid study is imperial in nature. In the present study the researchers have focused on the study of relationship between the first two components-Government and Public and the third component-Virus of the pyramid. It attempts to trace the impact of these three components on one another through questionnaire survey, group discussion, and telephonic interview. In the present study the researchers not only consider the impact of the pandemic on the unemployment and economy of the state but also on the psychology of the local people as- a-whole. The present study is a visionary and rationalist wherein the researchers consider the scope of survival of tourism industry at Nainital in 2022. © 2021 IEEE.
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Derangements in coagulation profile due to on-going anticoagulant medication can complicate the most primitive physiology in a woman, ovulation. Unmonitored anticoagulant therapy can lead to an array of complications, one of which is intraperitoneal haemorrhage secondary to numerous medical and surgical conditions. The resultant haemoperitoneum can cause sudden hypovolemic shock, especially in a patient with compromised cardiovascular status. This report narrates the case of a 30 years old nulliparous female patient on anticoagulant therapy, operated for multiple cardiac defects and developed massive haemoperitoneum as a consequence of ovulation. The patient presented in shock to the Emergency Department with unstable haemodynamic status. A multi-disciplinary approach to the case converged on ruptured functional ovarian cyst as a working diagnosis. Conservative management of haemoperitoneum was decided upon, whereby correcting shock and providing pro-coagulant therapy along with blood products was the main line of management. All efforts failed soon after when the cyst wall ruptured catastrophically, leading to collapse of the general condition of the patient. Surgical approach was undertaken and a ruptured ovarian cyst wall was identified to be the cause. The cyst wall was subsequently repaired electrosurgically and the patient recovered well with an uneventful postoperative period. However, the characteristic feature of this case is the lack of follow-up due to lockdown restrictions of this continuum, the Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The management of such cases must be carefully titrated, keeping in mind the risks and benefits of both pro-coagulant and anti-coagulant therapy wherein one can jeopardise the effects of the other.
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COVID pandemic management via contact tracing and vaccine distribution has resulted in a large volume and high velocity of Health-related data being collected and exchanged among various healthcare providers, regulatory and government agencies, and people. This unprecedented sharing of sensitive health-related Big Data has raised technical challenges of ensuring robust data exchange while adhering to security and privacy regulations. We have developed a semantically rich and trusted Compliance Enforcement Framework for sharing large velocity Health datasets. This framework, built using Semantic Web technologies, defines a Trust Score for each participant in the data exchange process and includes ontologies combined with policy reasoners that ensure data access complies with health regulations, like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We have validated our framework by applying it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Contact Tracing Use case by exchanging over 1 million synthetic contact tracing records. This paper presents our framework in detail, along with the validation results against Contact Tracing data exchange. This framework can be used by all entities who need to exchange high velocity-sensitive data while ensuring real-time compliance with data regulations. © 2021 IEEE.
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Contact tracing is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person ('case') and collecting information about these contacts. Contact tracing is an essential part of public health infrastructure and slows down the spread of infectious diseases. Existing contact tracing methods are extremely time and labor intensive due to their reliance on manually interviewing cases, contacts, and locations visited by cases. Additionally, complex privacy regulations mean that contact tracers must be extensively trained to avoid improper data sharing. App-based contact tracing, a proposed solution to these problems, has not been widely adopted by the general public due to privacy and security concerns. We develop a secure, semantically rich framework for automating the contact tracing process. This framework includes a novel, flexible ontology for contact tracing and is based on a semi-federated data-as-a-service architecture that automates contact tracing operations. Our framework supports security and privacy through situation-aware access control, where distributed query rewriting and semantic reasoning are used to automatically add situation based constraints to protect data. In this paper, we present our framework along with the validation of our system via common use cases extracted from CDC guidelines on COVID-19 contact tracing. © 2021 IEEE.
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A powerful astute ground vehicle is planned which can perform different errands like recognizing objects and evading the articles self-rulingly, and furthermore, it can distinguish paths to move itself whenever needed to ride on a street. The vehicle comprises sensors and camera to identify objects to evade them, and it can likewise move on a predefined way because of the utilization of GPS framework on the vehicle. It may be utilized in the midst of catastrophe to help individuals by checking and identifying presence of harmed individuals in a huge region and giving them fundamentals. It can likewise be utilized as a conveyance vehicle in the midst of pandemic like COVID-19 where contactless conveyance of fundamental merchandise should be finished. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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Covid-19 pandemic brought turmoil to the entire world. It adversely affected diverse areas like economic, political, social, medical, education, etc. The outbreak of the peril stimulated the research fraternity in various areas chiefly in medical science, environment, and education. Primarily focusing on Education, the sudden lockdown brought a complete shut down to the long-standing physical mode of teaching/learning in the education system. To combat the menace of the Covid-19 pandemic, alternative teaching-learning mechanism through online mode was adopted. The only gateway for the teachers and students to remain connected was through a virtual platform. Though this counteractive phenomenon was an aid at this critical time, there were certain emerging anomalies like efficacy and acceptance of a virtual platform. Various apprehensions during this shift like psychological barriers, maintaining attendance, participation, etc. which seeped into the education system were to be studied and analyzed. In the present study, the concern of the researchers was to observe and examine the significant drift of teaching/learning platform from a real classroom to a reel classroom. It aims to study the girth of online teaching/learning in the present education system. The present study also focuses on the role of technology as an important tool in enhancing the Teaching/Learning mechanism during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a big challenge as well as an opportunity for both the learners and teaching fraternity to cope with the stagnancy like carrying out interactive and team building activities, developing rapport and facilitating a learning process, etc. percolated during the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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As healthcare organizations adopt cloud-based services to manage their patient data, compliance with the rules and policies of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulation becomes increasingly complex. At present, HIPAA rules are available only in large textual format and require significant human effort to implement in the Health IT systems. Moreover, every change in the regulation, like the recent relaxation in telehealth policy due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has to be manually implemented in the IT system. We have developed a semantically rich Knowledge graph, using Semantic Web technologies to represent HIPAA rules in a machine-processable format. This will significantly help in automatically reasoning of HIPAA policies. In this paper, we describe our design along with the results of our study of the current status of research on HIPAA ontology. We have validated our design against use cases defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This knowledge graph can be integrated with existing healthcare systems to provide automated compliance with HIPAA policies. © 2021 IEEE.
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Background Perioperative anaemia is independently associated with adverse outcomes such as increased length of stay, complications and mortality1. Around 40% of patients presenting for major surgery are anaemic2. The most common cause of preoperative anaemia is iron deficiency, which can be treated with iron therapy. Identifying patients with anaemia during the perioperative pathway allows for optimisation and prevention of blood transfusions. A key focus of the Perioperative Quality Improvement Programme (PQIP) in the UK is the management of perioperative anaemia3 and recommendations have been made for institutions to set up a perioperative anaemia management service. Methods Data was retrospectively collected from electronic patient health records, which are maintained by the anaemia and research nurses at our centre. We analysed the relevant data to assess the delivery of the perioperative anaemia service from 2018-2020. Results We identified 1391 patients who received IV iron infusions from 2018-2020. 65% of the patients were females. Iron (III) Isomaltoside (Monofer) was the choice of IV iron preparation during all three years, however, there was an increasing use of Ferric Carboxymaltose (Ferrinject) in 2020. Overall number if iron infusions increased steadily and doubled from 2018 to 2020 (see Image 1a). Across the 3 years there was an 18% increase in perioperative iron infusions in surgical patients. This was seen most predominantly in patients having major intra-abdominal surgery (54% increase) (see image 1b). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the iron infusion service was modified to deliver iron infusions post-operatively. Subsequently, a significant proportion of surgical patients (71%) received iron infusions in the post-operative period. Discussion In our centre a perioperative anaemia and iron infusion service has been established for almost four years. This service is coordinated by a consultant anaesthetist, an anaemia specialist nurse and perioperative anaesthesia fellows. It is feasible to operate a perioperative anaemia service for several surgical specialities with the intention of improving patient outcomes. Our preliminary data shows an improvement in haemoglobin levels following iron infusion. However, we await further analysis to assess whether this has resulted in a reduction in blood transfusions. A well-coordinated service at our centre will help guide quality improvement projects and future research.
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Background Preoperative anaemia affects a high proportion of patients undergoing major elective surgery and is associated with poor outcomes1. At our centre a pre-operative intravenous iron service was the established practice before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the effects of the pandemic, social distancing and requirements for patient shielding resulted in a shift of our service to post-operative iron infusions. Methods A trust quality improvement service evaluation form was submitted for a retrospective analysis. We identified patients who had received IV iron infusion in the year 2020 via the patient electronic health records system. We aimed to look at the feasibility of a post-operative IV iron Infusion service. Results We retrieved data for 733 patients. The distribution of Iron infusions across our patient cohort is shown below in image 1. 594 ( 81%) infusions were for patients undergoing surgical procedures, whilst 139 (19%) were delivered for medical reasons in the outpatient setting. Image 2 shows the iron infusion distribution by surgical sub-specialities. The highest number of infusions were given to patients undergoing major intra-abdominal surgery (43.4%). In the surgical patient group, 171 received iron pre-operatively, and 423 received iron post-operatively (Image 3). Increments in Transferrin saturations and ferritin in both the pre and post-operative iron infusion groups were comparable. The increments in Haemoglobin (Hb) in both the groups were not significantly different ( P= 0.79). Discussion There is limited evidence to show the benefits of post-operative IV iron infusion2. Although our data did not reveal any significant difference in Hb increments in the pre or post-operative iron infusion groups, this demonstrates that a post-operative iron infusion service is feasible. Iron infusions can be successfully delivered to patients when it is not possible to do so pre-operatively. The non-significant increments could also be due to post-operative test values taken at discharge and not allowing enough time to have elapsed between blood test and an increment to have occurred. We noted that greater iron transfusions were administered in female patients and this could potentially be attributed to a lower starting Hb in this group. In the current climate, the benefits of post-operative iron infusion are favourable to prevent an additional patient visit, particularly when the demonstrated Hb increments are comparable to the pre-operative setting.