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Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) and COVID-19: a review of the literature
No full textMultisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) is a novel pediatric hyperinflammatory syndrome that has recently emerged globally as a potential complication of COVID-19 infection and has features similar to Kawasaki Disease (KD). In this article, a review of existing literature on MIS-C was conducted to identify trends in patient characteristics, clinical and biological features, treatment, and outcomes. MIS-C affects previously healthy school-age children, with over-representation of those of Black and Afro-Caribbean descent. It presents with fever, gastrointestinal complaints, and KD-type features including rash and conjunctivitis. Laboratory and imaging studies demonstrate evidence of systemic inflammation and myocarditis. Accordingly, children are often critically ill and require intensive care admission and organ support. However, prompt anti-inflammatory treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin, steroids, and aspirin appears to lead to favourable outcomes. Though evidence of current coronavirus infection by RT-PCR is variable, most children have positive serology results indicating prior infection, which supports theories of MIS-C as a dysfunctional post-infectious immune process. Though similar to KD in some ways, MIS-C has important differences in its patient characteristics, clinical features, and cardiac involvement. Large-scale case registries and analysis of resulting data will be crucial to refining our understanding of MIS-C to ensure optimal outcomes for children worldwide
Internationalization Policies of Public Schooling and Neoliberal Discourses: A Stephen Ball Informed Analysis
No full textThis article examines the neoliberal underpinnings of current internationalization policies of public schooling in Canadian contexts. It goes beyond the existing institutional practices and approaches to internationalize K–12 public schooling and focuses more on the federal and provincial international education policies and strategies that govern the institutional practices. The article pays more attention to the neoliberal developmental contexts of these governmental policies. It employs Stephen Ball’s writings, particularly his views of policy as text and policy as discourse, to analyze the ways in which global neoliberalism and its public discourses on public education marketization, privatization, and expansion of policy communities relate to the development of current internationalization policies of K–12 public schooling as texts and as discourses in Canada. The analysis suggests that the global neoliberal ideology and its public discourses are the contexts that promote and legitimize the development of current market-oriented internationalization policy texts and discourses. These neoliberal discourses view public education as an internationally tradable commodity that the private sector may provide for international students and contribute to its policy development. In that context, current international education policies pay more attention to the recruitment of fee-paying K–12 international students with an increased role for the private sector in this process.
Hermeneutical Backlash: Trans Youth Panics as Epistemic Injustice
No full textIn this paper we use the contemporary example of trans youth panics to introduce the notion of hermeneutical backlash, in which defenders of an established, unjust hermeneutical regime actively work to undermine and discredit hermeneutical liberation. We argue that the strategies and tropes of the trans youth panic illustrate a general propaganda vulnerability of epistemic liberation movements (including familiar examples from recent history), and so are troubling for reasons that go beyond their application to trans youth. This exploration of a few specific cases of hermeneutical liberation and hermeneutical backlash calls attention to the need for further theoretical work on the dynamics of struggles for (and against) hermeneutical justice
Book Review of Democratic Citizenship Education in Non-Western Contexts: Implications for Theory and Research by Serhiy Kovalchuk and Anatoli Rapoport (Eds.)
No full textThe Road to Western’s Campus-Wide Vaccine Policy
No full textWith the rollout of an increasing number of vaccinations against COVID-19, case counts have begun to decrease and the world appears to be opening back up. Part of the world that hopes to reopen under a ‘new normal’ is the education system. This is especially important for Ontario’s universities, which operated almost entirely virtually during the last school year. As immunizations against COVID-19 approach levels needed for herd immunity, Ontario universities are committed to returning to in-person classes for the 2021-2022 school year. The question is, what measures will need to be taken for this to occur safely
Barriers Faced by Older Adults Accessing Psychological Care: A Critical Review
No full textWith a recent surge in older adult populations worldwide (i.e., composed of individuals aged 65 years and older), disparities in mental healthcare delivery and access are increasingly apparent. An analysis of the literature on service provision for individuals experiencing mental health issues shows that older adults are ubiquitously underrepresented and underserved. Older adults who require resources frequently fall through the cracks of family healthcare and community mental health centres. Older adults underutilizing mental health resources is likely due to a myriad of barriers to perceiving a need for care and to accessing care once a need is acknowledged. This critical review explores how physical and psychological barriers are distinct and how they lead to adverse outcomes for older adults through physical and social isolation and internalized ageism stigma. Proposed steps to mitigating challenges to accessing mental healthcare are discussed, including increasing availability of specialized geriatric care providers, establishing healthy and diverse community support networks with more physically accessible community programs, and increasing integration of medical and mental healthcare
Reframing the Present: An Analysis of Competing Russo-Ukrainian Historical Narratives and Their Role in the Ongoing Ukrainian Crisis
No full textSince the 2013-14 Euromaidan protest movement and the ousting of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and his administration, Ukraine has been embroiled in a political crisis both domestically and with its neighbour, Russia. Namely, the Ukrainian state has lost the Crimean Peninsula to a Russian military incursion and remains engaged in the local Donbas War against pro-Russian insurrectionists. Alongside these events, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration has been waging an information war against Ukraine through its employment of Russian state media. In doing so, Russian state media has revived and internationalized Soviet historical narratives of the Great Patriotic War, discrediting the present Ukrainian state by associating it with historic examples of fascism. Thus, this paper argues that contemporary Russian attempts to reframe Ukrainian national history along a Russo-Soviet narrative, without consideration for the more authentically Ukrainian nationalist narrative, is irrespective of the Ukrainian historical experience and is a dangerous abuse of Great Patriotic War imagery in the present. Considering the legacy of the former imperial relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and the Russian state’s current interest in restoring bygone prestige, this dimension of the current threat to Ukrainian sovereignty should not be ignored. 
Inverse reconstruction of cell proliferation laws in cancer invasion modelling
No full textThe process of local cancer cell invasion of the surrounding tissue is key for the overall tumour growth and spread within the human body, the past 3 decades witnessing intense mathematical modelling efforts in these regards. However, for a deep understanding of the cancer invasion process these modelling studies require robust data assimilation approaches. While being of crucial importance in assimilating potential clinical data, the inverse problems approaches in cancer modelling are still in their early stages, with questions regarding the retrieval of the characteristics of tumour cells motility, cells mutations, and cells population proliferation, remaining widely open. This study deals with the identification and reconstruction of the usually unknown cancer cell proliferation law in cancer modelling from macroscopic tumour snapshot data collected at some later stage in the tumour evolution. Considering two basic tumour configurations, associated with the case of one cancer cells population and two cancer cells subpopulations that exercise their dynamics within the extracellular matrix, we combine Tikhonov regularisation and gaussian mollification approaches with finite element and finite differences approximations to reconstruct the proliferation laws for each of these sub-populations from both exact and noisy measurements. Our inverse problem formulation is accompanied by numerical examples for the reconstruction of several proliferation laws used in cancer growth modelling
Modeling SARS-CoV-2 spread with dynamic isolation
No full textBackground: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is spreading with a greater intensity across the globe. The synchrony of public health interventions and epidemic waves signify the importance of evaluation of the underline interventions.
Method: We developed a mathematical model to present the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 and to analyze the impact of key nonpharmaceutical interventions such as isolation and screening program on the disease outcomes to the people of New Jersey, USA. We introduced a dynamic isolation of susceptible population with a constant (imposed) and infection oriented interventions. Epidemiological and demographic data are used to estimate the model parameters. The baseline case was explored further to showcase several critical and predictive scenarios.
Results and analysis: The model simulations are in good agreement with the infection data for the period of 5 March 2020 to 31 January 2021. Dynamic isolation and screening program are found to be potential measures that can alter the course of epidemic. A 7% increase in isolation rate may result in a 31% reduction of epidemic peak whereas a 3 times increase in screening rate may reduce the epidemic peak by 35%. The model predicts that nearly 9.7% to 12% of the total population of New Jersey may become infected within the middle of July 2021 along with 24.6 to 27.3 thousand cumulative deaths. Within a wide spectrum of probable scenarios, there is a possibility of third wave
Conclusion: Our findings could be informative to the public health community to contain the pandemic in the case of economy reopening under a limited or no vaccine coverage. Additional epidemic waves can be avoided by appropriate screening and isolation plans.
A robust phenomenological approach to investigate COVID-19 data for France
No full textWe provide a new method to analyze the COVID-19 cumulative reported cases data based on a two-step process: first we regularize the data by using a phenomenological model which takes into account the endemic or epidemic nature of the time period, then we use a mathematical model which reproduces the epidemic exactly. This allows us to derive new information on the epidemic parameters and to compute the effective basic reproductive ratio on a daily basis. Our method has the advantage of identifying robust trends in the number of new infectious cases and produces an extremely smooth reconstruction of the epidemic. The number of parameters required by the method is parsimonious: for the French epidemic between February 2020 and January 2021 we use only 11 parameters in total