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Lung cancer is the most common cancer in males and the second most common among females both in Europe and worldwide. Moreover, lung cancer is the leading cause of death due to cancer in males. The European region accounts for 23% of total cancer cases and 20% of cancer-related deaths. Relationships have been described between a number of infectious agents and cancers, but our knowledge of the role of viruses, both respiratory and systemic, in the pathogenesis of lung cancer is still rudimentary and has been poorly disseminated. In this chapter, we review the available evidence on the involvement of HPV, Epstein-Barr virus, HIV, cytomegalovirus and measles virus in the epidemiology and pathogenesis of lung cancer.Copyright © ERS 2021.
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In Brazil, the Covid-19 pandemic spread across an extremely unequal and exclusory territory, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable populations. In order to identify how living and habitability conditions and their overlap with gender, race, and class affect the impact of Covid-19 on certain social groups, the "Ação Covid-19” research group developed the Covid-19 Protection Index (CPI) as an alternative to the Human Development Index to measure inequalities in the context of the pandemic. Our aim was to examine specific territories (states, cities, and neighborhoods) and demonstrate how the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be associated with a socially exclusory model of territorial occupation, what regions and populations would be most severely affected, and who would suffer most if measures to mitigate the spread of the pandemic were not taken (potentially increasing these populations' vulnerability). The CPI uses data from the Brazilian Institute of Geographical and Statistical Research (IBGE) to build fourteen variables classified along three dimensions: the urban surroundings of households (Urban Environment), the living standard inside households, and the human dimension. At all territorial scales, the CPI corresponded to actual Brazilian inequalities. The index was found to be negatively correlated to the number of cases and deaths at the beginning of the pandemic, giving us a good portrait of the pre-existing vulnerabilities to which populations are subject in Brazil. We also used the index as an input in a simulator developed by our research group to emulate the dynamics of the virus's spread in different neighborhoods within a city. As expected, we observed higher infection curves for low CPI territories and flatter curves for high CPI neighborhoods. Furthermore, even among lower CPI territories we found important discrepancies, as some communities were able to organize themselves to protect the community from the virus even in the absence of public intervention measures. The CPI was also juxtaposed to vaccination rates in Brazil, where we found that the vulnerabilities pointed out by the CPI were maintained, reflecting the national vaccination program's lack of prioritization of more vulnerable populations. The index was shown to be a good tool to identify vulnerable territories, and thus could be used to direct government action, pointing out those territories that should be prioritized not only in terms of the healthcare system but other interrelated matters, such as their environment, economy, demography, housing, and territorial infrastructure. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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In this work, SARS-CoV-2 infectivity after UV-C exposure of porous and non-porous surfaces was assessed under controlled environment conditions. The irradiance of a setup of UV-C lamps, placed indoors was studied in detail as a function of the geometry and the distance to the surface. In the presence of living beings, the external UV-C lamps are turned off, and the UV-C lamps mounted inside the disinfection chamber are kept active, allowing a continuous air disinfection and a decreased risk of indoor transmission. © 2022 17th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, INDOOR AIR 2022. All rights reserved.
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BACKGROUND: Cannabis is the most-frequently used illicit drug in Europe. Over the last few years in Spain, treatment demand has increased, yet most cannabis users do not seek treatment despite the related problems. A web-based self-help tool, like CANreduce 2.0, could help these users to control their consumption. METHODS: This study protocol describes a three-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) comparing the effectiveness of three approaches, in terms of reducing cannabis use among problematic cannabis users, the first two treatment arms including the Spanish version of CANreduce 2.0 (an adherence-focused, guidance-enhanced, web-based self-help tool) (1) with and (2) without psychological support; and the third group (3) treatment as usual (TAU). Study hypotheses will be tested concerning the primary outcome: change in the number of days of cannabis use over the previous week, comparing assessments at 6 weeks and 3 and 6 months follow-up between groups and against baseline. Secondary outcomes related to cannabis use will be tested similarly. Mental disorders will be explored as predictors of adherence and outcomes. Analyses will be performed on an intention-to-treat basis, then verified by complete case analyses. DISCUSSION: This study will test how effective the Spanish version of CANreduce 2.0 (CANreduce-SP) is at reducing both the frequency and quantity of cannabis use in problematic users and whether adding psychological support increases its effectiveness. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This trial is registered with the Clinical Trials Protocol Registration and Results System (PRS) number: NCT04517474 . Registered 18 August 2020, (Archived by archive.is https://archive.is/N1Y64 ). The project commenced in November 2020 and recruitment is anticipated to end by November 2022.
Subject(s)
Cannabis , Counseling , Marijuana Abuse , Patient Acceptance of Health Care , Health Behavior , Humans , Internet , Marijuana Abuse/therapy , Mental Disorders , Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic , Treatment OutcomeABSTRACT
The world is slowly emerging from a series of healthcare, financial, and economic disruptions caused by the Covid19 pandemic. While it is still too early to come to a definitive reckoning of the myriad ways in which our world has been forced to make adjustments in how it operates pre-and-post Covid, it is worth considering at least one aspect of the post-Covid reality: its effects on project management practices and theory development. This paper offers my perspective on some implications for current and future practice in project management, as well as the ways in which Covid responses have created the potential for a “new normal” in theory and formulating research questions for project studies. Drawing on the Project Management Institute’s “Global Megatrends 2022” report, I will examine these six trends and their implications for future practice in project-based work, proposing three topics for future research. © 2022, IJ ISPM.
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New reality imposed by months of quarantine days caused by the global spread of COVID-19 affected mostly every industry. In this new digital age, new technologies are being incorporated continuously introducing new shapes of businesses. Companies able to adapt have a high probability of survival but, even now, digital transformation is still a challenge for traditional nondigital companies. A digital business strategy could guide the inevitable transformations that digital technologies trigger. This paper presents a systematic review of current literature on digital (business and/or transformation) strategies with the objective to identify, evaluate and interpret published research that could bring some light to the relevant aspects and pitfalls that should be considered in a digital transformation initiative. The review investigates what is known about the risks and multi-industry aspects in a digital strategy and the results show statistical data, gaps in current research and models of successful implementation.
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Over the years, the evolution of face recognition (FR) algorithms has been steep and accelerated by a myriad of factors. Motivated by the unexpected elements found in real-world scenarios, researchers have investigated and developed a number of methods for occluded face recognition (OFR). However, due to the SarS-Cov2 pandemic, masked face recognition (MFR) research branched from OFR and became a hot and urgent research challenge. Due to time and data constraints, these models followed different and novel approaches to handle lower face occlusions, i.e., face masks. Hence, this study aims to evaluate the different approaches followed for both MFR and OFR, find linked details about the two conceptually similar research directions and understand future directions for both topics. For this analysis, several occluded and face recognition algorithms from the literature are studied. First, they are evaluated in the task that they were trained on, but also on the other. These methods were picked accordingly to the novelty of their approach, proven state-of-the-art results, and publicly available source code. We present quantitative results on 4 occluded and 5 masked FR datasets, and a qualitative analysis of several MFR and OFR models on the Occ-LFW dataset. The analysis presented, sustain the interoperable deployability of MFR methods on OFR datasets, when the occlusions are of a reasonable size. Thus, solutions proposed for MFR can be effectively deployed for general OFR. © 2022 IEEE.
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Objective: To determine the consumption of medicines and medical devices during the COVID-19 pandemic in the period from 2019 to 2020. Materials and methods: A descriptive research will be carried out, non-experimental design, of a cross-sectional type, with information on the annual consumption of medicines and medical devices in a hospital, technique: documentary analysis, Data collection sheet instrument, it was processed in an Excel. Results: It is observed that the medicines have a p-value of 0.003, which is less than 0.05, and in terms of medical devices, we have a p-value of 0.0001, which is less than 0.05, we can indicate that there was a significant reduction in the consumption of medicines and medical devices for the year 2020 with respect to the year 2019, as can be seen in graphs 1 and 2. Conclusion: We are facing a very complex problem because not having consumed pharmaceutical products generated a stagnation on the stock of some medicines and/or medical devices, in addition to due to the expiration, it produced considerable losses of medicines and/or medical devices.
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Introduction: The Covid-19 pandemic most certainly impacted the mental health of healthcare professionals in Malaysia. Aim: The aim of our research is to assess the mental health of house officers in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic and to compare this with the pre-pandemic times. Method: 122 house officers from 28 hospitals in Malaysia were recruited into the study and completed an online questionnaire of their demographics, including the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale 21 items (DASS-21), Satisfaction with Life Scale and Brief Resilience Scale. Results: Results showed that depression (36.1%), anxiety (33.7%) and stress (23.8%) were all prevalent among house officers with depression being the most prevalent among the three. Majority of the house officers were slightly satisfied with life (30.3%) and most of them had normal resilience (71.3%). Discussion: We compared our study with 5 other studies from 2010 to 2017 and found similar prevalence in depression, anxiety and stress except for the study in 2017 which showed overall prevalence in depression, anxiety and stress. 8.2% of our subjects recorded extremely severe depression, which is almost twice as much as the two studies we have for comparison. Conclusion: Housemanship training in Malaysia is indeed a stressful period for junior doctors especially in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. More support systems should be made.
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Mucormycosis is an opportunistic fulminant fungal infection that can cause significant morbidity and frequent mortality in susceptible patients. Common predisposing factors include diabetes mellitus and immunosuppression. Even though this fungus is ubiquitous, the immune system usually prevents the disease, and it is rare. But in the present pandemic era, Mucormycosis has become a prevalent disease among immunocompromised patients and individuals with systemic pathosis. The infection begins in the nose and paranasal sinuses due to inhalation of fungal spores. The fungus invades the arteries leading to thrombosis that subsequently causes tissue necrosis. The infection can spread to orbital and intracranial structures by direct invasion of blood vessels. Here, we describe an interesting and rare case of sino-nasal mucormycosis in a seropositive, uncontrolled diabetic and suspected Covid positive individual to emphasize early diagnosis and treatment of this fatal fungal infection.
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Lemierre's syndrome refers to infectious thrombophlebitis of the internal jugular vein developed as complication of an oropharyngeal infection. It is a rare syndrome, affecting otherwise healthy young adults, which may lead to sepsis complicated by septic embolization. Although there is a characteristic clinical picture, many modern physicians are unaware of this syndrome, leading it to be termed 'the forgotten disease'. The authors report a case of late diagnosis due to initial suspicion of COVID-19 and highlight the pitfalls on its diagnosis.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Lemierre Syndrome , Thrombophlebitis , Humans , Jugular Veins/diagnostic imaging , Lemierre Syndrome/diagnosis , Memory Disorders/complications , Pandemics , Thrombophlebitis/diagnosis , Young AdultABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (MM) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.
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The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases. © 2021 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved.
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Purpose: This study aims to examine effects of the COVID-19-induced lockdown on turnover intentions (TI) for the hospitality retail sector. Design/methodology/approach: This study reviews employee TI literature before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data for the present study were derived from a sample of 301 hospitality retail workers employed within the integrated resorts on The Cotai Strip, Macao. Data were analysed using structural equation modelling. Findings: This study showed a significant positive relationship between job satisfaction (JS) and the two variables of workload and pay (WP) and company support (CS). Co-worker relationship did not influence JS. Furthermore, JS had a significant negative effect on employee TI. WP had the greatest influence on whether to leave the sector or not. Practical implications: The suggested framework can assist hospitality retail management in developing an employee-retention strategy as the sector recovers from pandemic restrictions. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to develop a TI framework for the hospitality retail sector during the pandemic. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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Background. The COVID-19 pandemic created the most severe global education disruption in history. According to UNESCO, at the peak of the crisis over 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries were out of school. After one year, half of the world's student population is still affected by full or partial school closures. Here we investigated whether or not it is possible to build a multivariate score for dynamic school decision-making specially in scenarios without population-scale RT-PCR tests. Methods. Normality rate is based on a COVID-19 risk matrix (Table 1). Total score (TS) is obtained by summing the risk scores for COVID-19, considering the six parameters of the pandemic in a city. The COVID-19 Normality Rate (CNR) is obtained by linear interpolation in such a way that a total score of 30 points is equivalent to a 100% possibility of normality and, in a city with only six total points would have zero percent chance of returning to normality: CNR = (TS - 6)/24 (%). The criteria for opening and closing schools can be defined based on the percentages of return to normality (Table 2). Results. at June 3rd, 2021, we evaluated all 5,570 Brazilian cities (Figure 1): 2,708 cities (49%) with COVID-19 normality rate less than 50% (full schools closure), 2,223 cities (40%) with normality rate between 50% and 70% (in-person learning only for 5 years and 8 months-old children), 583 with normality rate between 71% and 80% (in-person learning extended to children age 12 years and less), 583 cities (1%) with normality rate between 81% to 90% (in-person learning extended to the student population age 18 years), and just one city with 92% COVID-19 normality rate (in-person learning extended to all the student population). We calculated the COVID-19 normality rate between January and May, 2021, in four countries: Brazil, USA, UK, and Italy (Figure 2). At Jun, 3rd, 2021, percentage of people fully vaccinated in Brazil varied from 0% to 69%, an average of 11%. Conclusion. COVID-19 vaccination programs take several months to implement. Besides fully vaccination of the population, it is important to check if people became really safe from the virus. The COVID-19 Normality Rate is a double check multivariate score that can be used as a criteria for optimal time to return to in-person learning safely.
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In this article, Jamie Clayton, Operations Director at Freeman Technology, and Joana Pinto, PhD, Senior Scientist, and Sarah Zellnitz, PhD, Senior Scientist, both of Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering’s Area II – Advanced Products & Delivery section, discuss the benefits of multi-faceted powder characterisation in dry powder inhalation formulations and how it can support efforts to achieve net zero emissions.
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This writing positions the accompanying volume within a realm of complications of climate change journalism that operates amid recognized pressures of journalistic practice through notions of political economy, the social and cultural influences shaping news explanations, and critical interpretations of the current global crisis of a warming planet. Specifically, this volume is interested in how journalism may function among "synergistic effects" of climate change, the compounded impact of severe weather, social and political responses to changing global warming, and the often-unfortunate results and impacts on our environments as global communities attempt to address climate events already challenging for journalists to cover and the social and cultural outcomes associated with them.