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Beyond Eurasia - the African contribution to the pre-modern world: Examining the global and the local in the Kilwa Sultanate, East Africa
No full textA socio-technical approach to food safety incident analysis using the AcciMap model in the hospitality sector
Get PDFA theory-based systems approach, such as AcciMap accident analysis, has been widely used over the years in multiple safety critical sectors such as the nuclear, petrochemical, aviation and railway industries to provide a detailed understanding of complex systems and the chain of events contributing to accidents resulting from system failure. However, despite its advantages, the use of a systems approach in the food safety context has to date been limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate three established norovirus incidents using the AcciMap accident analysis approach to determine its efficacy at informing the design of food safety policies following a norovirus outbreak to prevent reoccurrence. This approach was found to be of value in analysing norovirus outbreaks. The findings of the AcciMap analysis reveal the norovirus outbreaks were not the outcome of a single causal incident, but a chain of events and interactions that involved governmental failure to control and enforce safety regulations and the impact on managerial and individual behaviours at a lower level in the system. The analysis identified the common contributory factors such as poor inspections, lack of regular monitoring of quality of water supply, inadequate management of wastewater and ineffective communication that led to each incident across the hierarchical levels within a socio-technical system. The value of using the AcciMap approach is that it does not constrain the analysis to individual components or particular types of incident allowing for a more holistic and interconnected risk assessment
Supporting Information 2. Data availability. Hemmings, Elton, Grange. 2022. Supporting Information 2. Data availability. No-mow amenity grassland case study: phenology of floral abundance and nectar resource. Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
Get PDF1. Popular campaigns such as No Mow May seek to encourage early-season forage resource for pollinators in urban greenspaces. Land managers need to balance ecological benefits with extent of accessible amenity grassland.
2. To pilot the identification of a ‘tipping point’ when the nectar resource of unmown grassland exceeds that mown, we surveyed floral abundance in 30 plots on an amenity grassland site at 11 timepoints between late April and July. Each species’ floral abundance per 1m2 was multiplied by published nectar sugar values to obtain an overall nectar sugar value per plot.
3. The nectar sugar value of no-mow plots was overall significantly higher than for mown plots. However, week-by-week analysis revealed that the first significant difference did not occur until mid-late May when no-mow plots yielded three times the nectar sugar value of the mown plots. In early-mid June, there was a significant eight-fold divergence followed by a late June to early July decline. Common Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) provided the greatest nectar sugar value, driving significant differences again in mid-July. No-mow plots contained twice as many (22 versus 11) open flower broadleaf species compared to the mown plots.
4. Land managers could consider extending No Mow May management into June and beyond to maximise nectar sugar resource for pollinators. To comply with S. jacobaea legislation, a management plan and financial resource should be allocated to no-mow projects
Food defence: types of threat, defence plans and mitigation strategies
Get PDFDefending consumer, business and national food supply from intentional malicious attack is an essential public health and business resilience strategy that must be appropriately developed, be agile enough to address all potential threats and be built on strong knowledge of the industry sector and the mitigation strategies available. This chapter considers the present knowledge on food defence strategies, how they are developed using a risk based approach and how they can be applied within the food chain. At international, national and business level, food defence plans need to be designed, implemented and verified to ensure that they remain current and effective. There is still a significant knowledge gap when organisations are seeking to implement food defence plans and a need for greater capacity building to ensure that risk managers understand the methodological approaches that are currently being used, their value but also their limitations too
Desalination may be key to averting global water shortage, but it will take time
No full textClean freshwater is critical for sustaining human life. However, 1.1 billion people lack access to it worldwide. Desalination represents an increasingly popular way of addressing this. Desalination is the process of extracting salt from saline water to make it drinkable. There are two main types of desalination. In the first – called thermal desalination – heat is used. This produces water vapour that condenses on pipes into fresh water. This process remains dominant across the Middle East, where nearly half of the world’s desalinated water is produced. The second process is membrane desalination, commonly referred to as reverse osmosis. This process is used in 60% of plants worldwide. Saline water is forced under high pressure through a semi-permeable membrane whose pores are too small for the salt molecules to pass through
Britain isn’t built to withstand 40°C – here is where infrastructure is most likely to fail
No full textHot weather strains the pipes that pump our water, the power lines that deliver our energy and the roads and railways that get us home at night. As global temperatures continue to rise, national infrastructure will be challenged as never before.
Read the full article on The Conversation Available online at: https://theconversation.com/britain-isnt-built-to-withstand-40-c-here-is-where-infrastructure-is-most-likely-to-fail-18722
Selection criteria for planning cold food chain traceability technology enabling industry 4.0
Get PDFFailure to deliver safe and high-quality food not only causes costly food crises and foodborne illnesses, but also impairs consumer confidence and the performance of cold food chains. Industry 4.0 transformation in food traceability systems i.e., the transition from manual paper-based record keeping to automatic identification and sensor technologies, holds the potential to enable improved data transmission and self-monitoring to reduce food quality issues. Selection of these technologies to meet a specific need requires a measurement on how they perform across a range of criteria. An overview of traceability technology performance rating for criteria enabling industry 4.0 in cold food chain is absent in the literature. This article presents a summary of the traceability technology criteria relevant to cold food chain industry 4.0 transformation through iterative literature review and expert validation. The selection criteria are then combined into a quantitative technology performance matrix that can help users to determine which technology is the most beneficial for a given supply chain scenario
What are the Priority Research Questions for Digital Agriculture?
Get PDFThere is a need to identify key existing and emerging issues relevant to digitalisation in agricultural production that would benefit from a stronger evidence base and help steer policy formulation. To address this, a prioritisation exercise was undertaken to identify priority research questions concerning digital agriculture in the UK, but with a view to also informing international contexts. The prioritisation exercise uses an established and effective participatory methodology for capturing and ordering a wide range of views. The method involves identifying a large number of participants and eliciting an initial long list of research questions which is reduced and refined in subsequent voting stages to select the top priorities by theme. Participants were selected using purposive sampling and snowballing to represent a number of sectors, organisations, companies and disciplines across the UK. They were each invited to submit up to 10 questions according to certain criteria, and this resulted in 195 questions from a range of 40 participants (largely from England with some representation from Scotland and Wales). Preliminary analysis and clustering of these questions through iterative analysis identified seven themes as follows: data governance; data management; enabling use of data and technologies; understanding benefits and uptake of data and technologies; optimising data and technologies for performance; impacts of digital agriculture; and new collaborative arrangements. Subsequent stages of voting, using an online ranking exercise and a participant workshop for in-depth discussion, refined the questions to a total of 27 priority research questions categorised into 15 gold, 7 silver and 5 bronze, across the 7 themes. The questions significantly enrich and extend previous clustering and agenda setting using literature sources, and provide a range of new perspectives. The analysis highlights the interconnectedness of themes and questions, and proposes two nexus for future research: the different dimensions of value, and the social and institutional arrangements to support digitalisation in agriculture. These emphasise the importance of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, and the need to tackle the binary nature of current analytical frames. These new insights are equally relevant to contexts outside the UK. This paper highlights the need for research actions to inform policy, not only instrumentally by strengthening the evidence base, but also conceptually, to prompt new thinking. To our knowledge this methodology has not been previously applied to this topic
Cardiocurative effects of aqueous leaf extracts of Ximenia americana (linn.) and Pappea capensis (eckl. and zeyh.) against myocardial infarction in rats
Get PDFDifferent plants are traditionally applied in the treatment of different diseases, including chest
pains, hypertension, and inflammation, among others. This study scientifically evaluated the
curative treatment effects of X. americana and P. capensis leaf aqueous extracts in rats induced
with myocardial infarction. The rats were randomly distributed as follows: Normal control
group, consisting of rats treated with oral normal saline; Negative control group, comprising
rats induced with MI and treated with normal saline; Positive control group, consisting of rats
induced with MI and orally treated with propranolol (10 mg/Kg bw); and three experimental
groups consisting of rats induced with MI and treated with plant extracts at dose levels 150,
200 and 250 mg/Kg bw. This study’s findings demonstrated that there was a significant
reduction in the amounts of cTnT, LDH-1, CK-MB, T-cholesterol, triglyceride, LDL-c, and
malondialdehyde, as well as a significant increase in levels of HDL-c, catalase, SOD, and
glutathione peroxidase among rats treated with propranolol and plant extracts as compared to
the negative control rats. Additionally, LC-MS analysis revealed the presence of flavonoids,
tannins, and phenolics, which could explain the observed cardiocurative effects. This study
concluded that aqueous leaf extracts of X. americana and P. capensis possess cardiocurative
activities in rats with myocardial infarction. However, further studies on isolated fractions of
the phytochemicals present are recommended. This study provides preliminary data useful in
the development of pure and safe cardioactive compounds
Assessment of the use and benefits of the Plantwise Knowledge Bank
Get PDFThis study assesses the use and benefits of the Plantwise Knowledge Bank (PWKB) using mixed
methods. Focusing on website activity for 2021, study findings show that the PWKB has diverse users
within national plant health ecosystems from both Plantwise and non-Plantwise countries. Plantwise
countries are countries who have implemented elements of CABI’s Plantwise programme. Most users
in 2021 were from Plantwise countries in Asia, with users from other regions also contributing
significantly to the site traffic. Furthermore, there was an increase in number of users, visits and page
views as compared to past years, with the site having more men than women, visitors. Most users
were repeat visitors who found the site organically via mobile phones. The site had very few referrals
via social sites or paid searches, but there were fairly consistent referrals from Wikipedia
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Agriculture_and_Bioscience_International#Plantwise).
The top most searched and viewed content stayed relatively similar to past years, with the main use
of information for research, identifying plant pests and diseases and for training/teaching. Examples
of use show that the PWKB has real-life applicability and helps users to create solutions. Most survey
respondents feel that the PWKB provides them with quick access to relevant information. In addition,
it saves them searching many different websites and increases the quality of their work. Going
forward, it is essential to continue site optimization for mobile users to ensure increased access by
target users. There is also the need to prioritize the most searched sections on the homepage, thus
making it easier for users to find what they are looking for. Suggestions from users for improving the
site are provided