1,721,043 research outputs found
Pragmatic Use of Planetary Health and Nature-Based Solutions for Future Pandemics Using COVID-19 Case Scenario
Full text linkhttps://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpubh.2021.62012
Salience and perceptions of epidemic-prone diseases in two communities: Findings from freelisting interviews in Khartoum State, Sudan.
Full text linkThe frequency and severity of disease outbreaks disproportionately impacts settings affected by conflict or with weak health systems. Sudan, facing frequent and recurrent epidemics, struggles with limited resources. Understanding local perceptions of epidemic-prone diseases is vital for designing effective epidemic responses. This study describes the salience and perceptions of epidemic-prone diseases in two urban Sudanese communities. We conducted a cross-sectional qualitative study using freelisting in two communities in Khartoum State: Om Doum in Sharg al Neel locality and a neighbourhood in the Sixth Quarter of Ombadda locality. We purposively selected and interviewed consenting adults and recorded their responses to seven freelisting prompts. We analysed the data using Smith's salience index in Excel to evaluate the frequency and importance of terms, and used a relative salience index to compare terms between lists and sites. We interviewed 32 people in Om Doum and 30 in Ombadda. Epidemic-prone diseases, especially malaria, nose, sinus and throat infections (NSTIs), typhoid and COVID-19, were highly salient as common illnesses, recent outbreaks, and future infections and threats. Cancer and chronic diseases, while less salient, were important. Diseases highly salient as future threats, such as COVID-19 and cancer, were less salient, as likely future infections. Conversely, diseases highly salient as future infections, such as NSTIs and malaria, held lower salience for their future impact. This pattern was more pronounced in Ombadda. Infection prevention measures such as environmental hygiene were highly salient in both sites. Epidemic-prone diseases consistently emerged as significant concerns across sites, with local disease patterns shaping, but not fully explaining, perceived risks. While emphasising local disease burdens in risk communication is important, it may not be sufficient in all sites or for all diseases. Freelisting is useful for rapidly capturing the salience and perceptions of epidemic-prone diseases but requires complementary methods to explore nuanced patterns
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Wastewater-integrated pathogen surveillance dashboards enable real-time, transparent, and interpretable public health risk assessment and dissemination.
Full text linkTimely pathogen surveillance and reporting is essential for effective public health guidance. Web dashboards have become a key tool for communicating public health information to stakeholders, health care workers, and the broader community. Over the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wastewater surveillance has increasingly been incorporated into public health workflows for outbreak monitoring and response, enabling community-representative and low-cost monitoring to supplement clinical surveillance. However, the methods used for visualization and dissemination of clinical and wastewater surveillance data differ across programs, and best practices are yet to be defined. In this work, we demonstrate data workflows and dashboards used to perform wastewater-based public health surveillance in tandem with clinical data across local and national scales, leveraging custom-built, reproducible, and open-source software. Using a centralized data aggregation and analysis hub approach, we establish multiple data pipelines for data storage, wrangling, and standardized analyses, and deploy custom-built web dashboards that allow for immediate public release. We find that our approach is effective across scales, computing architectures, and dissemination strategies, and provides an adaptable model to incorporate additional pathogens and epidemiological data
The good, the bad, and the ugly: Compliance of e-pharmacies serving India and Kenya with regulatory requirements and best practices.
Full text linkAs with most technology-driven change, e-pharmacy markets have expanded faster than the pace of regulation, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. We developed and applied a checklist to assess compliance with best practices and regulations by e-pharmacies serving clients in India and Kenya, two countries with contrasting regulatory environments. We defined e-pharmacies as businesses selling prescription-only medicines directly to consumers through websites or apps. We identified the universe of e-pharmacies through online searches, and captured data using a structured questionnaire (Jan-May 2023). We then assessed e-pharmacies against a set of global 'best practice' standards, as well as national regulations (for Kenya) and 'proposed requirements' from local guidelines and draft bills (for India, which had no e-pharmacy-specific regulations). We identified 61 websites and 37 apps serving India, and 26 websites and 3 apps serving Kenya. Regarding best practices, a facility to upload prescriptions was provided by 90% of websites serving India and 58% serving Kenya. Only 16% (India) and 42% (Kenya) provided complete drug information. On average, websites serving Kenya met 8.9 of the 12 (74%) Kenyan regulatory requirements, while those serving India met 7.5 of the 14 (54%) 'proposed requirements'. Only 31% serving Kenya and none serving India displayed required registration numbers. Contrary to regulations/guidelines, many e-pharmacies serving Kenya (62%) and India (34%) listed narcotic/controlled drugs for sale. In both countries, high-traffic websites and e-pharmacies located within the study country had higher mean compliance to regulation and best practices compared to the others. These findings can be leveraged to strengthen enforcement in Kenya and inform the development of a comprehensive regulatory framework in India. We recommend a risk-based regulatory approach, where regulators work with the largely compliant ("good") e-pharmacies, improve enforcement among the partially compliant ("bad"), and eliminate the largely non-compliant ("ugly") from the market
Cost of wastewater-based environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2: evidence from pilot sites in Blantyre, Malawi and Kathmandu, Nepal
Full text linkEnvironmental surveillance of rivers and wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 detection has been explored as an innovative way to surveil the pandemic. This study estimated the economic costs of conducting wastewater-based environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 to inform decision making if countries consider continuing these efforts. We estimated the cost of two SARS-CoV-2 environmental surveillance pilot studies conducted in Blantyre, Malawi, and Kathmandu, Nepal. The cost estimation accounted for the consumables, equipment, and human resource time costs used for environmental surveillance from sample selection until pathogen detection and overhead costs for the projects. Costs are reported in 2021 US6,175 to 16,756 to 25 to 120 to 0.07 to 0.07 to $0.13 in Kathmandu. Environmental surveillance may be a low-cost early warning signal for SARS-CoV-2 that can complement other SARS-CoV2 monitoring efforts
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Prevalence, drivers and surveillance of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic use in rural China: Interdisciplinary study
Full text linkFrom PLOS via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2022-10-06, collection 2023, accepted 2023-05-22, epub 2023-08-09Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge the multidisciplinary study team for their help and guidance in conducting this research. In particular, we thank Tao Jiang, Xuemeng Dong, Maomao Xie and AMU graduate students for data collection, and Melissa Cole for support with coordination. This work could only be accomplished through the active involvement of many health professionals and patients in the study sites and we are very grateful for their willingness to participate in this study. We also thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped us to improve the manuscript.Publication status: PublishedFunder: Newton Fund; funder-id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010897; Grant(s): MR/P00756/1Funder: Natural Science Foundation of China; Grant(s): 81661138001Paul Kadetz - ORCID: 0000-0002-2824-1856
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2824-1856This study aimed to characterise antibiotic prescribing and dispensing patterns in rural health facilities in China and determine the community prevalence of antibiotic resistance. We investigated patterns and drivers of antibiotic use for common respiratory and urinary tract infections (RTI/UTI) in community settings, examined relationships between presenting symptoms, clinical diagnosis and microbiological results in rural outpatient clinics, and assessed potential for using patient records to monitor antibiotic use. This interdisciplinary mixed methods study included: (i) Observations and exit interviews in eight village clinics and township health centres and 15 retail pharmacies; (ii) Urine, throat swab and sputum samples from patients to identify potential pathogens and test susceptibility; (iii) 103 semi-structured interviews with doctors, patients, pharmacy workers and antibiotic-purchasing customers; (iv) Assessment of completeness and accuracy of electronic patient records through comparison with observational data. 87.9% of 1123 recruited clinic patients were prescribed antibiotics (of which 35.5% contained antibiotic combinations and >40% were for intravenous administration), most of whom had RTIs. Antibiotic prescribing for RTIs was not associated with presence of bacterial pathogens but was correlated with longer duration of infection (OR = 3.33) and presence of sore throat (OR = 1.64). Fever strongly predicted prescription of intravenous antibiotics (OR = 2.87). Resistance rates in bacterial pathogens isolated were low compared with national data. 25.8% of patients reported antibiotics use prior to their clinic visit, but only 56.2% of clinic patients and 53% of pharmacy customers could confirm their prescription or purchase included antibiotics. Diagnostic uncertainty, financial incentives, understanding of antibiotics as anti-inflammatory and limited doctor-patient communication were identified as key drivers of antibiotic use. Completion and accuracy of electronic patient records were highly variable. Prevalence of antibiotic resistance in this rural population is relatively low despite high levels of antibiotic prescribing and self-medication. More systematic use of e-records and in-service training could improve antibiotic surveillance and stewardship in rural facilities. Combining qualitative and observational anthropological methods and concepts with microbiological and epidemiological investigation of antibiotic resistance at both research design and analytic synthesis stages substantially increases the validity of research findings and their utility in informing future intervention development.The Newton Fund supported this study under the UK-China AMR Partnership Initiative through UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) grant number MR/P00756/1 (grant recipient: Helen Lambert) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant number 81661138001 (grant recipient: Debin Wang). The funding source had no role in study design, analysis or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. RK, CC, MH and IO all acknowledge support from the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Evaluation of Interventions at the University of Bristol.pubpu
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