Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging for the Diagnosis of Infective Endocarditis in the COVID-19 Era

In the COVID-19 pandemic, to minimize aerosol-generating procedures, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) was utilized at our institution as an alternative to transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) for diagnosing infective endocarditis (IE). This retrospective study evaluated the clinical utility of CMR for detecting IE among 14 patients growing typical microorganisms on blood cultures or meeting modified Duke Criteria. Seven cases were treated for IE. In 2 cases, CMR results were notable for possible leaflet vegetations and were clinically meaningful in guiding antibiotic therapy, obtaining further imaging, and/or pursuing surgical intervention. In 2 cases, vegetations were missed on CMR but detected on TEE. In 3 cases, CMR was non-diagnostic, but patients were treated empirically. There was no difference in antibiotic duration or outcomes over 1 year. CMR demonstrated mixed results in diagnosing valvular vegetations and guiding clinical decision-making. Further prospective controlled trials of CMR Vs TEE are warranted. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

Potential Cardiac Tamponade Development Secondary to SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Upon initial discovery in late 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, SARS-CoV-2, has managed to spread across the planet. A plethora of symptoms affecting multiple organ systems have been described, with the most common being nonspecific upper respiratory symptoms: cough, dyspnea, and wheezing. However, the cardiovascular system is also at risk following COVID-19 infection. Numerous cardiovascular complications have been reported by physicians globally, in particular cardiac tamponade Physicians must hold a high index of suspicion in identifying and treating patients with cardiac tamponade who may have contracted the novel coronavirus. This review will describe the current epidemiology and pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 and cardiac tamponade, highlighting their clinical course progression and the implications it may have for the severity of both illnesses. The paper will also review published case reports of cardiac tamponade, clinical presentation, and treatment of this complication, as well as the disease as a whole. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

Oncological emergencies

The incidence of cancer continues to rise, with an estimated 1 in 2 of the UK population born after 1960 diagnosed with malignancy at some point during their lifetime. This is in the context of an ageing population with increasing multimorbidity and polypharmacy. Cancer patients are frequent users of emergency care services and have a high rate of ambulance conveyance and hospital admission after review in emergency departments. Presentations can be a consequence of the cancer, its treatment or coexistent morbidity. Given the expanding armamentarium of cancer therapies, acute and general physicians are faced with a myriad of complex issues and require a knowledge of the broad principles of initial assessment, initial management and timely access to the wider multi-professional cancer team. © 2022

A Study of Infection of SARS-Cov-2 and its Severity among Post Vaccinated Healthcare Workers

Background and Objective: Coronaviruses are important human and animal pathogens. At the end of 2019, a novel coronavirus was found as the cause of a bunch of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. It rapidly spread in the country of China resulting in an epidemic, followed by a global spread in whole world leading to the pandemic. In February 2020, the World Health Organization coined the term COVID-19, The objectives to carry out this study were 1) To determine incidence of Covid-19 in health care workers after partial or complete vaccination 2) To determine severity of Covid-19 in health care workers after partial or complete vaccination at Designated Covid Hospital and Medical College at North Gujarat, India Methods: A cross sectional retrospective study was carried out at Designated Covid Hospital and Medical College at North Gujarat, India through telephonic and personal interview of health care workers who had received partial or complete vaccination. Key variables of the study were profile of work of health care worker at medical facility, type of vaccine received and how was post vaccination covid-19 infection managed. Result(s): We enrolled total 210 health care workers with mean age of 31.5 years with 69 male and 141 female. Out of 210 health workers, 204(97.14%) were fully vaccinated with two dose of covid-19 vaccines,5(2.38%) were partially vaccinated. Symptomatic infection with Covid-19 occurred in total 12 (5.71%) health care worker >= 14 day after second dose of either vaccine. Only one required hospitalization with oxygen support, rest all are managed with home isolation. Interpretation &Conclusion: One in twenty health care workers got infected with covid-19 after vaccination in present study. Extended research required to get larger data for ascertaining predictors of infection mainly mutation in virus and effect of comorbidity on antibody response after vaccination and severity of disease. Copyright © 2022, Dr Yashwant Research Labs Pvt Ltd. All rights reserved.

GEOGRAPHICAL SEVIRD COVID-19 MODEL WITH TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS

Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) models have been widely used to study the spread of Covid-19. These models have been improved to include other states (e.g., exposed, deceased) as well as geographical level transmission dynamics. In this paper, we present an extension to an existing SEVIRD (Susceptible - Exposed - Vaccinated - Infected - Recovered - Death) model to include the effect of air and maritime travel as well as travel restrictions. We use the model to simulate the spread of Covid-19 through 13 different countries. The case study shown illustrates how the model can be used for rapid prototyping at a geographical level and adapted to include changing policies. © 2022 Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS)

Future of the Workforce

The global COVID-19 Pandemic caused tremendous stress in many facets of our existence from global shifts to daily life-altering impacts. Most significantly, the pandemic caused many people and organizations to rethink how they worked, that is, the pandemic was a forcing function. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Paediatric dental A&E service during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Greater London area.

PURPOSE: The UK government introduced a nationwide lockdown on the 23rd March 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19. All elective hospital and dental practice assessments and procedures were mandated to stop. Key hospital dental workers were required to work, and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust became a designated Urgent Dental Care Centre (UDC) for the greater London area. The paediatric dental emergency walk-in service was suspended and replaced with a telephone triage system and evaluation of digital images sent by parents/carers when needed. The aim of this paper is to describe the emergency service provided by staff in the department of Paediatric Dentistry at St Thomas' Hospital during the first lockdown. METHODS: A prospective service evaluation of the modified paediatric dental emergency service was carried out between 25th March and 29th May 2020. RESULTS: Four-hundred and sixty-four patients accessed the paediatric dental emergency service via telephone during the service evaluation period. Of these, 192 (41%) had dental pain, 121 (26%) had pain and swelling of dental origin, and 89 (19%) had trauma. CONCLUSIONS: Remote telephone consultations and digital photographs were useful to screen emergency paediatric dental patients, but lack of face-to-face consultations with radiographic assessment and access to general anaesthetic services were major limiting factors.

BDoTs: Blockchain-based Evaluation Scheme for Online Teaching under COVID-19 Environment

Online teaching has become mandatory across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic situations. Hence, there is a need to uplift the online teaching technology for data privacy preservation and transparency in the system. Various online teaching schemes have been proposed by various authors, but they lack in handling decentralised governance, transparency, trust and communication issues. Blockchain (BC) Technology has emerged to provide decentralised solution in solving the real-time problems. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we propose a BC-based decentralised online teaching scheme known as BDoTs. The security and data privacy issues in BDoTs are resolved by developing smart contracts (SCs) over BC. Moreover, the data storage cost issues are handled by the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) protocol for Off-Chain data storage. Moreover, we present a real-time BC simulation and deployment of SC in Truffle suite. Results show that the proposed scheme performs better in comparison to the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of scalability, data storage cost, and packet loss. © 2020 IEEE.