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Introduction Children with cancer are immunocompromised due to the disease per se or anticancer therapy. Children are believed to be at a lower risk of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease.Objective This study analyzed the outcome of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in children with cancer.Materials and Methods A retrospective analysis was performed on patients (<= 14 years) with cancer attending the pediatric oncology services of our institute who tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 infection and those who had COVID-19 disease between August 2020 and May 2021. Real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction performed on the nasopharyngeal swab identified the SARS-CoV-2 infection. The primary endpoints were clinical recovery, interruption of cancer treatment, and associated morbidity and mortality.Results Sixty-six (5.7%) of 1,146 tests were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fifty-two (79%) and 14 (21%) patients had hematolymphoid and solid malignancies. Thirty-two (48.5%) patients were asymptomatic. A mild-moderate, severe, or critical disease was observed in 75% (18/24), 12.5% (3/24), and 12.5% (3/24) of the symptomatic patients. The "all-cause" mortality was 7.6% (5/66), with only one (1.5%) death attributable to COVID-19. Two (3%) patients required ventilation. Two (3%) patients had a delay in cancer diagnosis secondary to COVID-19 infection. Thirty-eight (57.6%) had a disruption in anticancer treatment.Conclusion Children with cancer do not appear to be at an increased risk of severe illness due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our findings substantiate continuing the delivery of nonintensive anticancer treatment unless sick. However, SARS-CoV-2 infection interrupted anticancer therapy in a considerable proportion of children.
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Introduction Vaccines have emerged as our primary line of defence against the scourge of COVID-19. Patients with cirrhosis have a higher risk of severe COVID-19 and mortality and are thus high priority patients for vaccination. However, cirrhotics were excluded from the phase 2 and 3 trials of COVID-19 vaccines. Hence, we aimed to assess the seroconversion rate and safety of currently available COVID-19 vaccines in India, namely COVISHIELD (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) and COVAXIN (BBV 152), in patients with cirrhosis. Methods All patients who had attended tele-hepatology services at our institute from March 2020 to June 2021 and diagnosed with cirrhosis as per their medical records were telephonically interviewed in July 2021 using a pre-specified questionnaire. Patients who had completed full course of vaccine (with the 2nd dose being administered at least 2 weeks back) and without history of documented COVID-19 infection (pre or post vaccination) were tested for SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies using an automated chemiluminescent assay (Orthoclinical Diagnostics). Our primary outcome was seroconversion in patients with cirrhosis who had received complete COVID-19 vaccination. Secondary outcomes included vaccine acceptance, documented COVID-19 infection post-vaccination and adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines in cirrhosis. Results We identified and interviewed 784 patients with cirrhosis [compensated: 213 (27.2%), decompensated 561 (72.8%)] with a mean age of 51.07 ± 8.53 years. Two eighty-three (36.1%) patients had received at least 1 dose of COVID-19 vaccine [COVISHIELD: 231 (29.5%), COVAXIN: 52 (6.6%)] and 159 (20.3%) patients had completed full course of vaccination with 2 doses [COVISHIELD: 134 (17.1%), COVAXIN: 25 (3.2%)]. Documented COVID-19 (on RT-PCR) was reported in 3.2% (9/283) patients who had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine while breakthrough COVID-19 (at-least 2 weeks after administration of 2nd dose) was reported in 3.1% (5/159). Adverse events were reported by 19.8% (56/283) patients with the most common being fever (13.1%), myalgia (5.6%) and sore throat (1.1%). No grade III/IV adverse events were reported. So far, 100 fully vaccinated patients (COVISHIELD: 88, COVAXIN: 12) have been tested for seroconversion. Seroconversion rate with COVISHIELD and COVAXIN were 92% (81/88) and 91.7% (11/ 12), respectively. Seropositive patients were divided into high, moderate, and low antibody responses based on the observed signal/cut-off response and no differences were observed between patients with compensated and decompensated cirrhosis (Table 1). There was no correlation between antibody signal/cut-off ratios and CTP (tau: 0.07, p=0.32) or MELD (tau: 0.08, p=0.29) scores. Conclusion Our preliminary data suggests that currently available COVID-19 vaccines in India are safe with high seroconversion rates in patients with cirrhosis. (Table Presented)
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The paper presents the development of a virtual simulation lab that provides theoretical content, simulations, models, videos, animations, comparative simulations, simulation benches, and self-check quizzes for e-learning and self-study. Self-assessment evaluates the learning capability and knowledge of students. Virtual lab may play a role to teach students without any assistance of teachers or professors in this coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic situation. The COVID-19 pandemic situation has barriers between students and universities in delivering lectures in classroom. Virtual simulation labs can change the traditional teaching practices of classroom teaching in the world. The virtual lab is developed due to the limited equipment of experiments and simultaneously assisting students. Web-based educational resources have taken an important place in e-education and self-study through an e-learning platform. Virtual simulation lab is an e-learning platform where students can perform experimentation without any direct involvement on instruments in physical lab. An interactive virtual lab is developed to provide web-based global access to everyone without any authentication. This lab does not require any credentials to login into website. This lab provides multiple options for experimentations of various simulations. This can be accessed through web address http://14.139.245.230/mfvlab/home.php and contains over 950 simulations. Each module contains theory as well as audio embedded videos to reduce time and effort required to understand and analysis of various process parameters. Comparative simulation compares among different materials and processed and different parameters with interactive graphs. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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In this article, we propose a novel approach to address the major ethical and societal problem of misinformation on social media. Specifically, how can we identify misinformation, understand how it spreads, and produce effective interventions? Our envisioned solution is sociotechnical in that it relies upon people (specifically community leaders) to push back against the ravages of misinformation but incorporates novel computational support for doing so. Specifically, we envision a digital communication twin platform for misinformation flow in social networks. We present the motivation, components, challenges, and opportunities in the development of this platform. We illustrate the potential for this approach via misinformation about healthcare, which has flourished during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Coronavirus outbreak has challenged the medical, public health infrastructure and economic status of nearly all countries across the World. The main issue of concern with SARS-CoV-2 has been the high infectivity rate and the high mortality rate especially, observed during the wave 2 of COVID-19. The symptoms associated with SARS-CoV-2 are often misleading with influenza and another respiratory tract seasonal viral infection as, majority of the patients report common constitutional symptoms. Hence, correct diagnosis for COVID-19 may play a key role in early detection, management and curtailment in the transmission rate.Therefore, apart from limiting this outbreak, efforts need to be made to plan comprehensive and stringent measures to develop diagnostic tools to prevent future outbreaks of this zoonotic disease. The present manuscript provides a detailed description of various indices and parameters which are currently being used for easier, rapid, accurate diagnosis, medical managementand prognosis assessment of COVID-19 patients in various stages of the disease.
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The evolution of drones from military applications to the consumer world has seen many technological developments. COVID-19 pandemic also witnessed the deployment of drones in a large number of citizen-centric applications. The increasing number of drones and limited operational arena should have a well-suited ecosystem for the success of collaborative operations. As a result, the Internet of Drones (IoD) emerged as a modular framework employing algorithmic coordination of drones. Although these developments have been welcomed they bring along a wide range of security challenges. Drones are highly mobile and they rely on wireless links to communicate among themselves and with the infrastructure. Moreover, they carry a lot of data related to the application where they are deployed. Thus, this brings attention to the security aspects involved in the IoD ecosystem, including various challenges and the mechanisms available to address those challenges. Though several conventional security techniques (like encryption, encoding, and hashing) are already available they are not fully optimized for the IoD environment. This mechanism involves an associated overhead and trade-offs when deployed in the IoD scenario due to limited computational capability of drones. Hence, this brings the necessity to explore alternative security mechanisms like blockchain. However, the conventional blockchain has its limitation of heavy computational primitives (like mining) and may not be useful for the IoD. Hence, we have proposed an unorthodox security framework using an adapted blockchain architecture for IoD. This unorthodox mechanism was validated in a simulated environment and proved to be suitable for the IoD ecosystem. © 2021 IEEE.
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Background: Although hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) lacks benefit in patients with moderate-to-severe COVID-19, its role in asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic disease needs better elucidation. Methods: This multi-centre cohort study included asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic, RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 cases between 30 March and 20 May, 2020. Patients were categorized into two groups (HCQ-treated and untreated) based on exposure to HCQ. Dose of HCQ used was 400 mg twice daily (day one) followed by once daily for seven days. HCQ-untreated patients were managed supportively without any active antiviral or immunomodulatory therapy. Nasopharyngeal SARS-CoV-2 clearance by RT-PCR (primary outcome) was compared between HCQ-treated and untreated patients using Kaplan-Meier analysis and Cox proportional-hazards regression. Clinical efficacy and safety profile of HCQ were assessed (secondary outcomes). Results:162 patients [84 (51·9%) males;mean age 38·2 (15·2) years] were included. Forty-four (27·2%) patients had mild disease, rest 118 (72·8%) were asymptomatic. Seventy-five (46·3%) patients received HCQ. Median time to virological negativity was lesser in HCQ-treated (13 days) versus untreated patients (15 days) (log-rank<0·001) in both asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients. Treatment with HCQ was the only independent predictor of virological negativity (hazard-ratio=2·24;adjusted p-value<0·001). Two (5·4%) mildly symptomatic patients progressed to severe disease within 24 hours (two doses) of HCQ initiation, compared to none in the HCQ-untreated group. Five HCQ-treated patients developed minor gastrointestinal side effects, not requiring drug discontinuation. Conclusion: HCQ reduced the time to virologic negativity (by 2 days) in asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic COVID-19, without any serious adverse events. However, no obvious clinical benefit was noted. © 2022 Journal of Association of Physicians of India. All rights reserved.
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Media has played an important role in public information on COVID-19. But distressing news, e.g., COVID-19 death tolls, may trigger negative emotions in public, discouraging them from following the news, which, in turn, can limit the effectiveness of the media. To understand people’s emotional response to the COVID-19 news, we have investigated the prevalence of basic human emotions in around 19 million user responses to 1.7 million COVID-19 news posts on Twitter from (English-speaking) media across 12 countries from January 2020 to April 2021. We have used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify news themes on Twitter. Also, the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) model was used to identify emotions in the tweets. Our analysis of the Twitter data revealed that anger was the most prevalent emotion in user responses to the news coverage of COVID-19. That was followed by sadness, optimism, and joy, steadily over the period of the study. The prevalence of anger (in user responses) was higher for the news about authorities and politics while optimism and joy were more prevalent for the news about vaccination and educational impacts of COVID-19 respectively. The prevalence of sadness in user responses, however, was the highest for the news about COVID-19 cases and deaths and the impacts on the families, mental health, jails, and nursing homes.We also observed a higher level of anger in the user responses to the (COVID-19) news posted by the USA media accounts (e.g., CNN Politics, Fox News, MSNBC). Optimism, on the other hand, was found to be the highest for Filipino media accounts. Author
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Two sets field experiments were carried out at the College of Agriculture, Iroishemba, Imphal during Kharif, 2018 to study the effect of planting dates on the incidence of yellow stem borer, Scirpophaga incertulus Walker and leaf folder, Cnaphalocrosis medinalis Guenee, and to evaluate the bio-efficacy of certain new molecular inscticides against these pests in Rice crop var. "KD-2-6-3". The planting dates had significant effect on the incidence of the pests. Early planted crop recorded significantly lower population than in the late planted crop. The mean of the various observation intervals' data revealed that the lowest S. incertulas incidence with 2.80% dead heart(DH) and 4.00% white ear head (WEH) was noticed in 30th June planted crop, followed by 15th July planted crop (5.01% DH & 6.24% WEH) and highest DH and WEH incidence (9.79% DH & 10.07% WEH) recorded in the crop planted on 14th August. The significantly lowest C. medinalis incidence was also observed in the early planted crop (30th June) with a mean leaf damage of 2.29%, the late crop (14th August) which witnessed the highest leaf damage (6.46%). The results on the efficacy of insecticides against the pests revealed that Ranaxypyr 20 SC @ 150 ml/ha proved to be the most effective treatment in controlling the S. incertulas with a mean minimum DH and WEH incidence of 2.62 and 0.90%, respectively, while Camphor oil @ 1000 ml/ha recorded maximum incidence of DH (5.39%) & WEH (3.27%). Against the leaf folder also Ranaxypyr 20 SC registered the lowest leaf damage of 2.25% closely followed by Neemazal @ 1000 ml/ha with a record of 2.71% leaf damage but differed significantly between them. The highest mean grain yield (5.25 t/ha) was harvested from the plots treated with Ranaxypyr 20 SC which showed non significant difference with the plots of Dinotefuran 20 SG @ 200 g/ha(5.10 t/ha) and Neemazal (5.08 t/ha), whereas Camphor oil treated plots accrued significantly lowest grain yield of 4.25 t/ha. The extent of avoidable yield loss due to the incidence of pests was estimated to be 24.57% in untreated control which was reduced to 2.85-19.04%;minimum being recorded in Dinotefuran 20 SG and maximum in Camphor oil treatments. The net profit of the insecticidal treatments varied from Rs. 5050.00 to Rs. 41580.00, the minimum being in Camphor oil and maximum in Ranaxypyr 20 SC treatments with the cost : benefit ratios of 1:0.93 and 1: 10.61, respectively.
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The academic institutions are adopting various tactic and policies to make a healthy environment in support of academic integrity. In the current paper the attempt has been taken to identify the knowledge, awareness and attitude towards academic integrity among the scholarly society (under-graduate students, post-graduate students and research scholars) of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow. The study reveals that they are aware of the academic integrity and also have knowledge to support the same. The library of the university is also working in defence of the activities that breach the academic integrity.
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Coronavirus, a pandemic threat to human beings, has awakened huge concern worldwide, but no bibliometric studies have been conducted on Coronavirus research during 2011-Feb.2020. The aim of this study is to map research productivity on the Coronavirus based on the articles indexed in the Scopus database. The articles related to Coronavirus dated from 2011 to Feb. 2020 were retrieved from the Scopus database. A total of 7558 papers were retrieved for this study which indexed by the Scopus database during 2010-Feb. 2020. The most productive year is recognized 2015with 1012 (13.38 %) articles while Maximum AGR 40.38 percent was recorded in the year. The USA ranked first with 2373 publications, followed by China with1378 publications while The Journal of Virology published the highest 330 articles followed by PLoS One with 224 articles. Dusten, C. is ranked topmost productive corresponding author (first position) with 108 articles followed by Memish, Z.A. with 107 articles. Medicine subject identified as the top subject for publishing paper on Coronavirus followed by Immunology and Microbiology. The title Isolation of a novel coronavirus from a man with pneumonia in Saudi Arabia received the highest 1346 citations, followed by Immune Signaling by RIG-I-like Receptors with 818 citations. © 2020. All Rights Reserved.
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Understanding the pathophysiology of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection remains a significant challenge of our times. The gingival crevicular fluid being representative of systemic status and having a proven track record of detecting viruses and biomarkers forms a logical basis for evaluating the presence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The study aimed to assess gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) for evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in 33 patients who were deemed to be COVID-19 positive upon nasopharyngeal sampling. An attempt was also made to comparatively evaluate it with saliva in terms of its sensitivity, as a diagnostic fluid for SARS-CoV-2. GCF and saliva samples were collected from 33 COVID-19-confirmed patients. Total RNA was extracted using NucliSENS easyMAG (bioMérieux) and eluted in the elution buffer. Envelope gene (E gene) of SARS-CoV-2 and human RNase P gene as internal control were detected in GCF samples by using the TRUPCR SARS-CoV-2 RT qPCR kit V-2.0 (I) in an Applied Biosystems 7500 real-time machine. A significant majority of both asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients exhibited the presence of the novel coronavirus in their GCF samples. Considering the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the nasopharyngeal swab sampling as gold standard, the sensitivity of GCF and saliva, respectively, was 63.64% (confidence interval [CI], 45.1% to 79.60%) and 64.52% (CI, 45.37% to 80.77%). GCF was found to be comparable to saliva in terms of its sensitivity to detect SARS-CoV-2. Saliva samples tested positive in 3 of the 12 patients whose GCF tested negative, and likewise GCF tested positive for 2 of the 11 patients whose saliva tested negative on real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. The results establish GCF as a possible mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which is the first such report in the literature, and also provide the first quantifiable evidence pointing toward a link between the COVID-19 infection and oral health.
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COVID-19/diagnosis , Gingival Crevicular Fluid/virology , SARS-CoV-2/isolation & purification , Adult , Aged , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Saliva/virology , Young AdultABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2, a novel Betacoronavirus, has attracted global attention because of its extremely high infection rate and large number of human deaths. It possesses a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA of ~ 30 kb nucleotides as its genetic material. It is responsible for COVID-19 which has been declared a pandemic by WHO. Having reported for the first time in Wuhan, China, the virus infected over 21.48 million people and caused over 0.77 million deaths till mid-august 2020. SARS-CoV-2 contains the spike protein site that gets activated by an enzyme furin which is found in the lung, liver, and small intestine of humans. It shows the potentiality of virus for attacking multiple organs and their failures. Due to the absence of vaccines, the cure is restricted to supportive care including repurposed drugs. In silico approaches may offer an alternative screening to optimize hits to lead stages. It can provide important related to drug resistance, their lineages and evolution. This approach may also help to find an effective vaccine against COVID-19. This review focuses on the in silico aspects of genomics, proteomics, pathogenesis, phylogenetic analysis and viral receptor binding analysis in Betacoronavirus.