ABSTRACT
Infections of the central nervous system (CNS) infections are critical problems for public health. They are caused by several different organisms, including the respiratory coronaviruses (CoVs). CoVs usually infect the upper respiratory tract causing the common cold. However, in infants, and in elderly and immunocompromised persons, they can also affect the lower respiratory tract causing pneumonia and various syndromes of respiratory distress. CoVs also have neuroinvasive capabilities because they can spread from the respiratory tract to the CNS. Once infection begins in the CNS cells, it can cause various CNS problems such as status epilepticus, encephalitis, and long‐term neurological disease. This neuroinvasive properties of CoVs may damage the CNS as a result of misdirected host immune response, which could be associated with autoimmunity in susceptible individuals (virus‐induced neuro‐immunopathology) or associated with viral replication directly causing damage to the CNS cells (virus‐induced neuropathology). In December 2019, a new disease named COVID‐19 emerged which is caused by CoVs. The significant clinical symptoms of COVID‐19 are related to the respiratory system, but they can also affect the CNS, causing acute cerebrovascular and intracranial infections. We describe the possible invasion routes of coronavirus in this review article, and look for the most recent findings associated with the neurological complications in the recently published literature.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Dermatomyositis is an idiopathic autoimmune connective tissue disease. It is typically characterized by proximal muscle weakness and skin rashes. Dermatomyositis is associated with a higher risk of malignancy compared to the general population (1). One case in literature has reported a dermatomysitis post COVID-19 vaccination (2). Objective: Case report. Methods: We report a case of dermatomyositis following Covid-19 immunization, notified to the National Centre of Pharmacovigilance of Tunis in May 2021. Results: A 33 year old woman, with no significant past medical history. She developed in March 2021, two days after 1st dose Pfizer BioNTeh Covid-19 vaccination, a mild facial erythema and ipsilateral auxiliary adenopathy. The evolution was marked by a persistence of the erythema and a regression of the adenopathy In April 2021, 2 days following the 2nd dose, she presented an accentuation of the symptomatology: skin erythema and edema in the photo-exposed areas: face, neck and upper limbs. As well as a diffuse myalgia in upper and lower limbs. She was afebrile and didn't present itchiness. The patient received intravenous methylprednisolone 1 injection per day for 5 days, followed by 1 mg/kg prednisolone and anti histaminic drugs without amelioration. The diagnosis of dermatomyositis was suspected in view of the persistence of the symptoms 1 month after vaccination and the installation of a proximal muscular deficit. Laboratory studies revealed a high level of creatine phosphokinase (CPK) at 3800 UI/l (< 140) and Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) at 628 UI/l (< 248). The skin biopsy showed an aspect consistent with a moderate inflammatory myopathy. Autoimmune serology revealed the presence of anti-nuclear antibodies (ANA) (1/100) and a positive anti-Mi-2 antibodies. The patient underwent thorough malignancy screening. Findings of cervico-thoraco-abdomen pelvic scan didn't reveal any evidence for solid organ malignancies or interstitial lung disease. However, the mammogram and ultrasound-guided biopsy has identified an invasive carcinoma. Conclusion: This case showed a dermatomyositis case suspected initially to be associated to mRNA COVID vaccination which was finally related to a breast cancer.
ABSTRACT
Mucormycosis (MM) is an invasive fungal infection that causes severe systemic infections and poses health risks and threat to life. Despite its impact on human health, MM infection is neglected and underrepresented compared to other infections. Invasiveness of MM severely compromises systemic and metabolic functions of the hepatic system, degeneration of lungs, trachea, and alveoli epithelial cell with increased fatality rate, and associated risk with therapeutic use of glucocorticoids in COVID-19. In Africa, the prevalence rate remains unknown due to late prognosis and non-reportability of the disease. Hence, there is a need to include MM diagnosis in patients with COVID-19, increase surveillance of emerging clonal strains, and regulate the routine glucocorticoids use in COVID-19 infection therapy. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Food safety has become a topic of global concern in the recent decades. The significant food safety incidents occur from time to time around the world, seriously threatening the public health and causing extensive economic losses. In particular, the occurrence of COVID-19 highlights the importance of the food safety for the public health. Therefore, there is an urgent need to establish a fast, simple, sensitive, and efficient method for the detection of food safety. In recent years, the upconversion (UC) nanotechnology has been widely used in the field of food detection. The UC fluorescence analysis technology possesses the advantages of ultra-sensitivity detection, non-invasiveness, light stability, etc., and has broad application prospects in the field of food safety. After cladding and surface modification, it can be combined with other substances through a variety of mechanisms, such as electrostatic interaction, thereby expanding its application in the food safety detection. Thus, overall, there is a vital need to evaluate and utilize the potential of UC nanoparticles in the field of rapid detection of food safety.
ABSTRACT
Contactless and efficient systems are implemented rapidly to advocate preventive methods in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the positive benefits of such systems, there is potential for exploitation by invading user privacy. In this work, we analyse the privacy invasiveness of face biometric systems by predicting privacy-sensitive soft-biometrics using masked face images. We train and apply a CNN based on the ResNet-50 architecture with 20,003 synthetic masked images and measure the privacy invasiveness. Despite the popular belief of the privacy benefits of wearing a mask among people, we show that there is no significant difference to privacy invasiveness when a mask is worn. In our experiments we were able to accurately predict sex (94.7%), race (83.1%) and age (MAE 6.21 and RMSE 8.33) from masked face images. Our proposed approach can serve as a baseline utility to evaluate the privacy-invasiveness of artificial intelligence systems that make use of privacy-sensitive information. We open-source all contributions for reproducibility and broader use by the research community. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.