ABSTRACT
Scientific research activities, in general, have been affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for distancing. In this paper, an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on Brazilian scientific research is made, examining the number of complete manuscripts published in the period from 2018 to 2021, considering the researcher's gender. A crawler is implemented to extract the names of Brazilian researchers from the articles, and some machine learning models (SVM, BiLSTM, and CNN) are applied to classify the authors' gender. Some models are able to accurately predict gender in more than 95% of cases. In addition, we verified that in 2021 there was a drop of 37.47% in the publications of articles by Brazilian researchers. The results indicate that there was a greater drop in publications for females in most machine learning models applied, corroborating differences in the distribution of household activities and family care between the two genders.
ABSTRACT
Poor maternal nutrition remains a critical public health problem globally, including the United States. The global prevalence of maternal underweight and short stature were 14.2% and 9.7%, respectively, in 2015, and nearly half were still anemic. Although we have made significant progress in reducing maternal underweight, there is considerable inequality by region, combined with little to no progress for the other indicators, such as anemia, and increases in overweight and obesity.1,3Studies have shown that routine prenatal iron-folate supplementation is effective in reducing anemia and improving birth outcomes, but several other micronutrient deficiencies (vitamins A, D, B1, B2, B6, B12, and zinc) are common, especially during pregnancy and lactation, when requirements are increased,1,4 and factors such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and conflicts are expected to worsen the availability of and access to quality food across the globe by 2030.5 Although the prevalence of anemia during pregnancy is much lower in the United States than in other parts of the world, 1 in 10 pregnant women who participated in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children were anemic, and these rates were much higher in selected subgroups and also increased from 2008 to 2018 in some states.6 Poor diet quality and inadequate intakes of key nutrients such as n-3 fatty acids, iodine, and iron are also common in the United States.7,8 Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys show that more than 95% of women of reproductive age, including pregnant women, do not meet the recommended intake of at least 250 milligram (mg) of the long chain n-3 fatty acids, docosahexaenoic acid, and eicosapentaenoic acid, and iodine status is also suboptimal during pregnancy.8,9Finally, a major concern is the increased consumption of ultra-processed foods and reduced physical activity that have contributed to dramatic increases in obesity and overweight across the life course in the past three decades.10 Maternal obesity is a major risk factor for adverse pregnancy outcomes, including gestational diabetes, hypertension, preeclampsia, cesarean delivery, preterm delivery, large size for gestational age, and infant death, and recent data from the National Vital Statistics System show that prepregnancy obesity (body mass index >30 kg/m2) increased from 26.1% in 2016 to 29% in 2019 in the United States across all age, education, and race/ethnicity groups.10,11 Furthermore, women who are overweight or obese may also experience increased difficulties in breastfeeding their infants.
ABSTRACT
Purpose>Current covid-19 pandemic challenges health-care ethics. Ones of the most important challenges are medical resources allocation and a duty to treat, often addressed to medical personnel. This paper suggests that there are good reasons to rethink our health-care ethics for future global catastrophic risks. Current pandemic shows how challenging can be an issue of resources allocation even in a relatively small kind of catastrophic event such as covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, the authors show that any future existential bigger catastrophe may require new guidelines for the allocation of medical resources. The idea of assisted dying is considered as a hypothetical scenario.Design/methodology/approach>This is a conceptual work based on conceptual analysis at the intersection of risk studies, health-care ethics and future studies. This study builds the argument on the assumption that the covid-19 pandemic should be treated as a sort of global catastrophic risk. Findings show that there are no such attempts in currently published peer-reviewed academic literature. This is crucial concept for the meta-analysis. This study shows why and how current pandemic can be interpreted in terms of global catastrophic risk even if, literally, covid-19 does not meet all criteria required in the risk studies to be called a global catastrophe.Findings>We can expect an emergence of discriminatory selection policy which will require some actions taken by future patients like, for example, genetic engineering. But even then it is inevitable that there will still be a large number of survivors who require medical assistance, which they have no chance of receiving. This is why this study has considered the concept of assisted dying understood as an official protocol for health-care ethics and resources allocation policy in the case of emergency situations. Possibly more controversial idea discussed in this paper is an idea of assisted dying for those who cannot receive required medical help. Such procedure could be applied in a mass-scale during a global catastrophic event.Research limitations/implications>Philosophers and ethicists should identify and study all possible pros and cons of this discrimination rule. As this study’s findings suggested above, a reliable point of reference is the concept of substantial human enhancement. Human enhancement as such, widely debated, should be studied in that specific context of discrimination of patients in an access to limited medical resources. Last but not least, scientific community should study the concept of assisted dying which could be applied for those survivors who have no chance of obtaining medical care. Such criteria and concepts as cost-benefit analysis, the ethics of quality of life, autonomy of patients and duty of medical personnel should be considered.Practical implications>Politicians and policymakers should prepare protocols for global catastrophes where these discrimination criteria would have to be applied. The same applies to the development of medical robotics aimed at replacing human health-care personnel. We assume that this is important implication for practical policy in healthcare. Our prediction, however plausible, is not a good scenario for humanity. But given this realistic development trajectory, we should do everything possible to prevent the need for the discriminatory rules in medical care described above.Originality/value>This study offers the idea of assisted dying as a health-care policy in emergency situations. The authors expect that next future global catastrophes – looking at the current pandemic only as a mild prelude – will force a radical change in moral values and medical standards. New criteria of selection and discrimination will be perceived as much more exclusivist and unfair than criteria applied today.
ABSTRACT
In recent days, DeFi tokens have gained popularity as an investment option in the pandemic period and has gained a significant amount of investment. Cryptocurrency trading is a type of DeFi that has gained a lot of attention in the global market. The value of such currencies is increasing on a daily basis and peaked during the pandemic. One of these significant cryptocurrencies is the ether cryptocurrency, which ranks second only to the bitcoin cryptocurrency in terms of the value of a single coin. The ARIMA model will be used to forecast the price of ether. In this paper, an hourly forecast and a short term period forecast are performed. The forecast clearly shows that the ARIMA model performed better on log transformed data than on the original data. It's also evident that COVID-19 pandemic has also aided the growth of ethereum when compared to previous year. © 2022 IEEE.