ABSTRACT
Questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the sciences have taken center stage in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. This paper focuses on the experiences of academics engaging in such work, particularly in their roles as educators, by sharing two of the authors' experiences introducing equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in a first-year science course at a Canadian university. Using critical research methodologies like narrative inquiry and memory work, we look at three separate instances where complex personal, institutional and course attributes fostered, allowed, or hindered efforts to bring these initiatives into the classroom. We consider how problematic incidents and obstacles relating to the organization of content on equity, diversity, and inclusion in science cropped up during the process, how they were perceived and handled in the moment, as well as the authors' reflections, takeaways, and lessons learned from the experience. These stories suggest that efforts to center discussions about equity, diversity, and inclusion in undergraduate science classrooms can be unpredictable and complex, particularly at the day-to-day level;this is especially the case when handling subtler microaggressions rather than clear instances of discrimination or harassment. Our study points to the importance of creating a more permanent institutional memory for initiatives that outlive those who initiated and organized them, so that they become embedded within the culture of a course or department. © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.
ABSTRACT
We will present a microfluidic assay to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA from nasopharyngeal swab samples. Our method leverages isotachophoresis (ITP) to integrate sample preparation, RT-LAMP, and CRISPR-based nucleic acid detection in an automatable chip. For the first time, we use ITP to purify, pre-concentrate and isothermally amplify target nucleic acids into a ~1 µL reaction volume on-chip. The device then transitions LAMP amplicons into an on-chip zone containing Cas12-gRNA complexes and reporter molecules to measure target-activated CRISPR activity. We will use our method to automatically detect COVID-19 from nasopharyngeal swab samples. © 2021 MicroTAS 2021 - 25th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The global crisis aroused due to COVID 19 pandemic is a reminder that we all are mere players in the hands of nature, the supreme power controlling humankind for decades. The initial phase of this disease was a grace period for mother earth. Due to restricted movements of people within their respective cities, there has been a relief for the environment - no exhausts from factories, no fumes from cars, clean rivers and oceans, clear sky, and fresh air to breathe. Besides making us aware of the importance of co-existence in nature, the pandemic dramatically helped to reduce carbon emissions globally. As far as the environment is concerned, COVID 19 turned out to be a blessing in minimizing the pollution level by limiting the anthropogenic activities to an extend. This disaster came out as a stroke of luck to nature which was getting worse day by day. The environmental pollution index throughout the globe is declining every day in a dramatic way after the lockdown period, which indicates the world is a self-healing system that balances all the ebb and flow in its own way. On the other side, the huge medical waste and human waste accumulated to overcome the pandemic ridden period has enhanced our impact on the environment negatively. It poses a serious threat to the biosphere and the harmony of life maintained. Our oceans and landfill sites are already overwhelmed with the amount of waste we generated, and the emergence of this pandemic added up to the situation, resulting in increased demand for PPE such as masks, gloves, face shields etc., all ending up in the natural environment. The pandemic forced a shift in the nature of education and work, utilizing emerging technologies and electronic machines will impose another serious hazard as dumping e-waste in the near future. Nature is thus creating numerous challenging and adverse situations for us to be more considerate towards using its natural resources and demanding to be more innovative and judicious at these times to fight the battle against COVID 19 and emerge out as successful from such situations. © 2022 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
ABSTRACT
At the pandemic of COVID-19, the movement of business and other non-essential activities were majorly restricted at the end of March 2020 in India and continued in different lockdown phases until June 2020. By categorically, studying sensitivity towards anthropogenic factors with other environmental implications in urban Indian cities during phase-wise lockdown scenarios will pave the way for a refined Clean Air Programme (CAP). In this study, the aerosol particulate matter variations between the lockdown phases in both spatial and temporal scales have been explored along with cities exceeding national ambient air quality (NAAQ) standards covering different geographical regions of India for their air quality level. The results of the spatial pattern of Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring System (CAMS) near-real-time data showed a negative change both in Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) (-0.2 to 0.1) and black carbon AOD (bcAOD) (-0.9 to -0.75). The changes were evident in successive phases of lockdown with an overall AOD reduction of about 70-90%. Southern urban cities showed a significant impact of mobile sources from temporal analysis than other cities. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for effects of pollutants by anthropogenic factors (mobile and point source) and meteorological factors (wind speed, wind direction, solar radiation, relative humidity) revealed the two significant driving factors. PM reduction was about 50-70%, predominantly due to anthropogenic factors. The factor analysis revealed the influence of meteorological factors between the major urban cities (Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad). Cities that exceed NAAQ standard performed well during phase-wise lockdowns, exceptional to cities in Gangetic plain. This study helps to frame region-specific strategic action plans for the CAP.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has a negative impact on all areas of human life. The affected and non-affected population face the challenges similar to some extent. The aim of the present study was to explore the emerged attitudes and healthcare practices of COVID affected people during the period of their quarantine. The present study follows a qualitative research design for the completion of the research. A total of 10 participants were selected for the study by convenience sampling method from Malappuram district. A semi-structured telephonic interview was conducted to know their emerged attitudes and health care practices. The result shows that, attitude and vulnerabilities of the individual during quarantine, Environmental factors of the individual, social environment, and access and availability of resources are the individual and social factors leads to psychological impact on participants during quarantine. And coping strategies and healthcare practices, mental health related practices, social connectivity, socio economic status and social support are the individual and social factors help the participants to overcome the psychological impact..
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BACKGROUND: The initial wave of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in an influx of patients with acute viral illness and profound changes in healthcare delivery in New York City. The impact of this pandemic on the presentation and invasive management of acute myocardial infarction (MI) is not well described. METHODS: This single-center retrospective study compared patients with MI who underwent invasive coronary angiography at New York University from March-April 2020, during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic, with those presenting in March-April 2019. RESULTS: Only 35 patients with MI underwent angiography during the study period in 2020 vs 109 patients in 2019. No differences in comorbidities or baseline medications were identified. The proportion of patients with ST-segment elevation MI (STEMI) was higher in 2020 than in 2019 (48.6% vs 24.8%, respectively;P=.01). Median peak troponin concentration was higher (14.5 ng/mL vs 2.9 ng/mL;P<.01) and left ventricular ejection fraction was lower (43.34% vs 51.1%;P=.02) during the pandemic. Among patients with non-STEMI, time from symptom onset to presentation was delayed in 2020 compared with 2019 (median, 24 hours vs 10 hours;P=.04). CONCLUSION: There was a dramatic decrease in the number of patients with MI undergoing coronary angiography during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of those who presented, patients tended to seek care later after symptom onset and had excess myocardial injury. These data indicate a need for improved patient education to ensure timely cardiovascular care during public health emergencies.
ABSTRACT
In Healthcare 4.0, the enhanced view is to analyze the highly affected people in one common disease. In 2021, the global pandemic scenario poses the greatest threat to human life owing to Covid-19. In this approach, medical records and their accessibility play an important role in dealing with illnesses and problems in electronic healthcare record systems (EHR). The proposed system provides a solution for tracking the affected person, who is not in control to isolate them during the high symptoms situation. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an authentication protocol that helps to prevent other human lives to be saved by providing mobile based health care systems. In such cloud access the credentials are turned in important credential authentication such that pass code allows authorizing doctors and caretakers to access it. Since SAML transactions are enabled with border control such that proof of Covid positive people can be recognized easily with the fingerprint scanning. Also proposed work using the SAML protocol for authentication which helps to provide environment for mobile applications for COVID-observed patients to identify the user who are remotely in access by applying the bio-id generated and updated in Cloud service provider. Also on boarding people who are available for supporting the patients. The main objective of the proposed work using healthcare 4-0 as authentication system is to provide Covid patient instant support for availability of necessary control through biometric border control such that the instant death can be avoided by finding the positive patients using their fingerprint and performance the least access from the huge database. Results from implementation using various affected patients from Covid strategies show the reliable data and secured protocol using SAML gives a better performance compared to other services. © 2021 IEEE.
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The emergence of novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases like the SARS-CoV-2 have underlined the need for developing novel diagnosis and intervention pipelines that can learn rapidly from small amounts of labeled data. Combined with technological advances in next-generation sequencing, metagenome-based diagnostic tools hold much promise to revolutionize rapid point-of-care diagnosis. However, there are significant challenges in developing such an approach, the chief among which is to learn self-supervised representations that can help detect novel pathogen signatures with very low amounts of labeled data. This is particularly a difficult task given that closely related pathogens can share more than 90 % of their genome structure. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing MG-Net, a self-supervised representation learning framework that leverages multi-modal context using pseudo-imaging data derived from clinical metagenome sequences. We show that the proposed framework can learn robust representations from unlabeled data that can be used for downstream tasks such as metagenome sequence classification with limited access to labeled data. Extensive experiments show that the learned features outperform current baseline metagenome representations, given only 1000 samples per class. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Objective: Increase education/awareness of sex/gender (SG) differences in biology, and medicine in high school biology students through an interdisciplinary course on gender-based medicine. Background: Sex and Gender Based Education (SGBE) is a topic many students in medicine and allied health are interested in. Introducing these concepts early in their education pipeline may encourage students to engage in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) careers. Design/Methods: Academic faculty, a second-year medical student, and pre-medical summer interns partnered with the Center for Health Care Innovation to develop and implement a SGBE program to introduce under-represented minorities and high school students career opportunities in STEMM topics. The five-week summer program ( https://www.ttuhsc.edu/medicine/sex-gender-specific-health/default.aspx) was delivered through Zoom, and consisted of three, 1-hour meetings per week. Activities included group sessions with faculty focusing on sex differences in Cerebrovascular, Cardiovascular and Alzheimer's Disease, and Pain, with an emphasis on the impact of COVID infection and racial/ethnic considerations. Participants also studied online case-based SG Specific Health modules, and group mentoring with career mentors in STEMM. Students completed: a) pre-survey covering educational background and current understanding of SG considerations in medicine b) research presentation and c) post-survey assessing perceptions of SGBM impact on clinical outcomes with curriculum feasibility/feedback. Results: Seven students (4 females, 3 males, average age 16, average grade 11th) participated in this program. Two students completed all five online modules. No significant differences in course preference were noted between female and male students. Generally, all students strongly disagreed/disagreed that their institution taught SG differences, and 6/7 strongly agreed/agreed and 1 student neither agreed nor disagreed that "knowing SG differences would improve one's ability to manage patients." Conclusions: This study showed that SG considerations as they relate to biology and medicine, in combination with high school education program, was well received, and that incorporating this programming with online curricula is feasible.
ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 virus spread rapidly all over the globe in 2020 and the second wave has taken our nation, India by storm. The pandemic has posed unique challenges in people with metabolic disorders, including diabetes, hypertension, obesity, pulmonary, cardiovascular, kidney and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Uncontrolled diabetes, in conjunction with endocrine, inflammatory and metabolic effects of the infection itself has made management of hyperglycemia in COVID-19 infection particularly challenging. Furthermore, the post-COVID-19 syndrome has also emerged as a sequela in COVID-19 survivors, increasing the risk of death, complications and adding further burden on the health care system. With more than a year of experience, we have gained substantial insight;and now provide practical recommendations on the management of hyperglycemia in COVID-19 as well as post COVID-19 syndrome. © 2021 Journal of Association of Physicians of India. All rights reserved.
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COVID-19 has led to unprecedented utilization of digital solutions to combat the pandemic. The purpose of the current article is to present an overview of digital technology adoption to handle COVID in the country and to explore the challenges in its continuous adoption in the current post-COVID era. This work is based on the articles, news and reports collected from literature databases like Pubmed, Ebsco, news reports, and blog and government websites. The results suggest that every aspect from successful identification of the genome component of the virus, timely detection of outbreak, monitoring, containment, risk assessment, prediction, development of vaccines to dissemination of knowledge and information related to COVID-19 is targeted through use of digital tools. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), Blockchain are the focus of innovations. Telemedicine is being used increasingly for consulting. Migrant population, lack of bandwidth, infrastructure, lack of scalability and sustainability of the digital solutions, unavailability of timely information are some of the challenges to adoption. Despite the barriers and challenges, there is still a vast opportunity for the leveraging technology to combat COVID-19 spread in the country with National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), Atma Nirbhar Bharat Scheme and booming entrepreneurship models. Moreover the learnings from COVID should be utilized for improving health outcomes in the post-pandemic era. © 2021 Bharati Vidyapeeth, New Delhi. Copy Right in Bulk will be transferred to IEEE by Bharati Vidyapeeth.
ABSTRACT
We will present a microfluidic assay to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA from raw nasopharyngeal swab samples in <30 min. Our method combines isotachophoresis (ITP) and state-of-the-art CRISPR Cas12-based nucleic acid detection. We show, for the first time, that electric field gradients in ITP can be used to pre-concentrate Cas12-guide RNA complex, target nucleic acids, and reporter molecules by ~1,000-fold into a ~100 pL volume on-chip. This pre-concentration accelerates target-activated CRISPR enzymatic activity on reporter molecules. We combine our ITP-CRISPR method with ITP-based nucleic acid extraction and isothermal amplification to detect Covid-19 from both contrived and clinical patient samples. © 2020 CBMS-0001