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Background: COVID-19 is a multi-system all-pervasive disease with protean manifestations, and its major signs and symptoms, such as incessant dry cough, fever, and pneumonia, are well known. Yet, its mucocutaneous manifestations, particularly those of the oral cavity, appear to be little recognized. This may be due either to the rarity of oral manifestations of COVID-19, or poor detection of such symptoms by attending physicians who may do only a cursory examination of the oral mucosa because of the overwhelming gravity of the other major systemic presentations. Nevertheless, there are now a considerable number of reports, including systematic reviews, on oral manifestations of COVID-19 in the literature. This observational study was performed to determine the oral manifestations among COVID-19 patients. Material & Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out among COVID-19 recovered patients. 120 Covid 19 recovered patients were purposively selected as study samples. All the samples diagnosed as mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 disease were selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: The study comprised the majority of males (68%) where females represent (32%) of the study population and the mean age was 39.3+or-12.4. Oral manifestations among study subjects during and after the disease illness including loss of taste being the commonest symptom (40%), followed by erythema and coated tongue (7.5%), mouth ulcerations (6.7%) and dry mouth (1.7%). The study revealed that the 41-60 age group subjects represented the highest (43%) oral manifestations. Conclusions: Early identification of oral symptoms in COVID-19 recovered or suspected cases can help a dentist or a general physician to diagnose high-risk groups, mitigate transmission, and promote overall health.
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Purpose: With the emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the usage of e-money has been reinforced to reach the next level. Therefore, this study aims to examine the mediating role of perceived behavioral control (PBC) on the nexus of customers' innovativeness and continuance intention of electronic money (e-money). This study also explores the moderating roles of perceived risk (PR) and electronic security (e-security) in relationships. Design/methodology/approach: The authors employed a structured questionnaire for data collection and the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) for empirical estimations. Findings: The authors' findings reveal that customers' innovativeness promotes continuance intention of using e-money and demonstrate that PBC partially mediates the relation between customers' innovativeness and continuance intention of using e-money. The empirical findings also reveal that PR negatively moderates the relationship between customers' innovativeness and continuance intention and the relationship between customers' innovativeness and PBC. The empirical findings also exhibit that perceived e-security enhances the degree of the relationship between customers' innovativeness and continuance intention and the relationship between customers' innovativeness and PBC. Practical implications: The findings shed light on an important factor that increases the likelihood of repeat e-money usage and has direct managerial implications for customer experience and risk concerns. Hence, the findings imply that e-money service providers should run a promotional advertisement highlighting what additional features are included or offered and how these could be beneficial for the customers. Furthermore, e-money service providers should provide some tutorial videos in order to increase innovative customers' control over e-money services as well as highlight how risk and security are protected. Originality/value: This paper integrates three key theories: the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the PR theory in post-adoption behavior of e-money usage. The current study also attempts to fill a literature gap by examining the moderating role of PR and e-security, which could be useful within the relationship between customers' innovativeness, PBC and customers' continued intentions of e-money usage. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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This article explores how Bangladeshi immigrants who run and own restaurants in the West Midlands of England (UK) participated in forms of innovation in response to the challenges created by COVID-19. Contributing to debates on innovation and diversification in the ethnic minority entrepreneurship literature, we explore through qualitative interview data how restaurant owners innovatively engaged with particular resources to secure their survival and longer-term futures in localised economies. This form of innovation is significant as it occurs among a population of entrepreneurs who have traditionally been portrayed as reluctant to innovate and embrace change. Our study therefore explores how a long-held culturally rooted reluctance to innovate intersects with a contemporary need to innovate for a demographic responding to the crisis. We theorise the form of innovation we identify as situated between a forced bricolage and a neoclassical approach to innovation. © The Author(s) 2021.
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There has been a surge in biomedical imaging technologies with the recent advancement of deep learning. It is being used for diagnosis from X-ray, computed tomography (CT) scan, electrocardiogram (ECG), and electroencephalography (EEG) images. However, most of them are solely for particular disease detection. In this research, a computer-aided deep learning model named COVID-CXDNetV2 has been presented to detect two separate diseases, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and pneumonia, from the X-ray images in real-time. The proposed model is made based on you only look once (YOLOv2) with residual neural network (ResNet) and trained by a vast X-ray images dataset containing 3788 samples of three classes named COVID-19 pneumonia and normal. The model has obtained the maximum overall classification accuracy of 97.9% with a loss of 0.052 for multiclass classification (COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal) and 99.8% accuracy, 99.52% sensitivity, 100% specificity with a loss of 0.001 for binary classification (COVID-19 and normal), which beats some current state-of-the-art results. Authors believe that this method will be applicable in the medical domain for the diagnosis and will significantly contribute to real life. © 2022 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.
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This study examined the effect of ubiquitous connectivity, service quality, system quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment on the intention and adoption of mobile shopping among consumers in Malaysia. A total of 316 respondents were collected from consumers in Malaysia using the online platform. The findings revealed that ubiquitous connectivity, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment had a significant positive effect on the behavioral intention to adopt mobile shopping whereas service quality and system quality contributed insignificant impact on consumers’ intention to adopt mobile shopping. The results identified that consumers’ behavioral intention exhibited higher significant impact on the adoption of mobile shopping during the COVID-19 lockdown. The findings further revealed that intention to adopt mobile shopping mediated the association between ubiquitous connectivity, perceived usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyment on the adoption of mobile shopping. The current study contributed significant theoretical and practical implications for marketers and mobile service providers to better promote the adoption of mobile shopping consumers in Malaysia through the implementation of an effective strategy. © The Author(s) 2022.
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INTRODUCTION: More than 180 million people have been infected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and more than 4 million coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) patients have died in 1.5 years of the pandemic. A novel therapeutic vaccine (NASVAC) has shown to be safe and to have immunomodulating and antiviral properties against chronic hepatitis B (CHB). MATERIALS AND METHODS: A phase I/II, open-label controlled and randomized clinical trial of NASVAC as a postexposure prophylaxis treatment was designed with the primary aim of assessing the local and systemic immunomodulatory effect of NASVAC in a cohort of suspected and SARS-CoV-2 risk-contact patients. A total of 46 patients, of both sexes, 60 years or older, presenting with symptoms of COVID-19 were enrolled in the study. Patients received NASVAC (100 µg per Ag per dose) via intranasal at days 1, 7, and 14 and sublingual, daily for 14 days. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The present study detected an increased expression of toll-like receptors (TLR)-related genes in nasopharyngeal tonsils, a relevant property considering these are surrogate markers of SARS protection in the mice model of lethal infection. The HLA-class II increased their expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cell's (PBMC's) monocytes and lymphocytes, which is an attractive property taking into account the functional impairment of innate immune cells from the periphery of COVID-19-infected subjects. NASVAC was safe and well tolerated by the patients with acute respiratory infections and evidenced a preliminary reduction in the number of days with symptoms that needs to be confirmed in larger studies. CONCLUSIONS: Our data justify the use of NASVAC as preemptive therapy or pre-/postexposure prophylaxis of SARS-CoV-2 and acute respiratory infections in general. The use of NASVAC or their active principles has potential as immunomodulatory prophylactic therapies in other antiviral settings like dengue as well as in malignancies like hepatocellular carcinoma where these markers have shown relation to disease progression. HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Fleites YA, Aguiar J, Cinza Z, et al. HeberNasvac, a Therapeutic Vaccine for Chronic Hepatitis B, Stimulates Local and Systemic Markers of Innate Immunity: Potential Use in SARS-CoV-2 Postexposure Prophylaxis. Euroasian J Hepato-Gastroenterol 2021;11(2):59-70.
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Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has continued to spread across the world with increasing numbers of confirmed cases and deaths. Due to outbreaks of new variants of the virus and limited treatment options, positive perception and good practice of preventive guidelines have remained essential measures for the prevention of the disease and slowing down its transmission. We aimed to study perception towards COVID-19 and the practice of guidelines for preventing the disease among Bangladeshi adults during the early stage of the rapid rise of the outbreak. Methods: Data was collected data from 320 participants. For measuring their level of practice, we asked a general question: “Are you properly following the WHO-recommended guidelines to avoid COVID-19?” The frequency distribution, Chi-square (χ2) test and binary logistic regression model were used in this study. Results: The average risk perception among the participants was 3.05±0.75 (median, 3.00) (95% CI of mean: 2.96-3.13) where the score ranges from 0 (no risk) to 4 (high risk). More than 27% of participants showed high-risk perceptions. Males (p<0.05), high educated (p<0.05), rich (p<0.01), service holders (p<0.05), and younger adults (p<0.05) had higher odds of high-risk perception. More than 71% of participants had a good practice of always following the WHO guidelines to prevent COVID-19 and living locations in urban areas (p<0.01), high education (p<0.01), rich (p<0.01), and joint family (p<0.01) had the most contributions to good practice. Conclusions: The study findings revealed that special attention should be given to rural areas, and individuals of low literacy, education and socioeconomic level to more effectively prevent COVID-19. © 2021. Wadood et al.;Licensee Lifescience Global. This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
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This qualitative study focuses on the pandemic's impact on the aquatic food value chains that make up a large part of the Bangladesh' food system and specifically aims to explore in greater depth the pathways by which aquatic food supply chain actors in Bangladesh are affected by COVID-19. It details the pandemic's effects on (i) input suppliers and the increases in input costs, decreases in input availability and accessibility, decline in seed and feed demand, sales volumes and safe prices, financial losses and lower production;(ii) producers and decreases in input affordability, availability, and accessibility, low sales prices and volumes, decreased harvests and impacts on livelihoods;(iii) retailers and wholesalers;(iv) consumer behaviour and social capital, debt, government and non-governmental support. Telephone interviews were conducted with participants of various actor types from all eight divisions of Bangladesh.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is a systemic shock that affects all areas of the global food system. A growing range of impacts on aquatic food producers, value chain actors and consumers is evident. In response, the report provides the impacts of COVID-19 on aquatic food value chains in Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Myanmar and Nigeria. Results show that: (1) COVID-19 and associated containment measures severely disrupted aquatic food value chains, but effects on supply were relatively short-lived;(2)Demand for aquatic foods has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels;(3) prices of aquatic foods have downward trend while prices of manufactured feeds have risen;and (4) COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities. As COVID-19 pandemic reversed years of progress on key human development indicators, it is important to revitalize aquatic food value chains to protect livelihoods and human nutrition. The paper also provides policy recommendations for both supply and demand sides.
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The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in 168 million cases and about 3.5 million deaths (as of May 26, 2021) during the last 18 months. These 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic have been characterized by phases or waves of new cases, the emergence of new variants of the deadly virus, and several new complications. After providing emergency approval to several drugs and adherence to several public health measures with frequent full and partial lockdowns, the incidence of new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could not be contained till now on a global basis. Although prophylactic vaccines have inspired optimism, the scarcity of vaccines and several vaccine-related regulations indicate that the vaccine's benefit would not be reaching the people of developing countries anytime soon. In the course of our clinical practice, we used pegylated interferon (Peg-IFN) in 35 patients with chronic liver diseases (CLD), and we found that only two of them were infected with SARS-CoV-2 that was mild in nature. These two patients with CLD have a mild course of disease cured without any specific therapy. Patients with CLD are usually immune-compromised. However, three CLD patients remained free of SARS-CoV-2 although they had COVID-19 patients among their family members. Next, we accomplished two studies for assessing the immune-modulatory capacities of Peg-IFN, 1 and 12 injections following administration of Peg-IFN. The data revealed that peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of Peg-IFN-administered CLD patients produced significantly higher levels of some cytokines of innate immunity in comparison with the cytokines produced by PBMC of CLD patients before Peg-IFN intake. The pattern of cytokine responses and absence of infection of SARS-CoV-2 in 33 of 35 CLD patients represent some preliminary observations indicating a possible role of Peg-IFN in patients with CLD. The study may be extended to other chronic infections and cancers in which patients receive Peg-IFN. The role of Peg-IFN for pre- or postexposure prophylaxis in the acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 infection and influencing the natural course of COVID-19 remains to be clarified. HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Akbar SMF, Mahtab MA, Aguilar JC, et al. Role of Pegylated Interferon in Patients with Chronic Liver Diseases in the Context of SARS-CoV-2 Infection. Euroasian J Hepato-Gastroenterol 2021;11(1):27-31.
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Background: COVID-19 has now become a pandemic.