1,721,016 research outputs found
Biological Emergency Management: The Case of Ebola 2014 and the Air Transportation Involvement
No full textThe putative spread after the outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever epidemic caused by Ebola virus in West Africa,
in the early months of 2014, puts the spotlight on the management of biological risks involving air transportation.
Ebola virus is a highly pathogenic agent, causing a haemorrhagic fever defined Ebola HF, characterized by a high
fatality. This virus is generally considered to be self-limiting in terms of diffusion; its lethality is in fact so high as to
prevent the exit from rural areas where outbreaks generally occur. However, when the virus comes from rural areas
and reaches urban places, it is important to assess the risk of spreading even in areas far from the outbreak of origin.
Therefore, the development or strengthening of strategies and plans to take action with timely and effective response
in order to reduce the consequences of public health emergencies is paramount. During Ebola virus outbreak in
West Africa in 2014, World Health Organization focused attention on many airports, stops of main flights coming from
Africa; the aviation, due to its nature, has the potential to help boost the global spread of transmissible diseases,
since air travel allow to reach the most remote locations in hours.
The management of biological emergencies during ordinary operations of airlines and airports represents a
real constraint in the event of contrast epidemic situations or endemic outbreaks. An effective response plan should
include a careful assessment of the risks and the establishment of procedures to carry on board of aircrafts or on
the ground.
To ensure that this complex system works correctly, a broad and effective cooperation between the different
actors involved is required. On the international level, several documents and recommendations relating to the
management of contagious diseases in aeronautical environment have been produced by authoritative agencies.
In this paper, after an overview on the international response to public health emergencies in the aviation
environment, the attention is focused on emergency response to the Ebola virus crisis in 2014, including an
evaluation of the potential dispersion of the pathogen
Infectious diseases seeker (Ids): An innovative tool for prompt identification of infectious diseases during outbreaks
No full textBackground: Several technologies for rapid molecular identification of pathogens are currently available; jointly with monitoring tools (i.e., web-based surveillance tools, infectious diseases modelers, and epidemic intelligence methods), they represent important components for timely outbreak detection and identification of the involved pathogen. The application of these approaches is usually feasible and effective when performed by healthcare professionals with specific expertise and skills and when data and resources are easily accessible. Contrariwise, in the field situation where healthcare workers or first responders from heterogeneous competences can be asked to investigate an outbreak of unknown origin, a simple and suitable tool for rapid agent identification and appropriate outbreak management is highly needed. Most especially when time is limited, available data are incomplete, and accessible infrastructure and resources are inadequate. The use of a prompt, user-friendly, and accessible tool able to rapidly recognize an infectious disease outbreak and with high sensitivity and precision may be a game-changer to support emergency response and public health investigations. Methods: This paper presents the work performed to implement and test an innovative tool for prompt identification of infectious diseases during outbreaks, called Infectious Diseases Seeker (IDS). IDS is a standalone software that runs on the most common operative systems. It has been built by integrating a database containing an interim set of 60 different disease causative agents and COVID-19 data and is able to work in an off-line mode without requiring a network connection. Results: IDS has been applied in a real and complex scenario in terms of concomitant infectious diseases (yellow fever, COVID-19, and Lassa fever), as can be in the second part of 2020 in Nigeria. The outcomes have allowed inferring that yellow fever (YF), and not Lassa fever, was affecting the area under investigation. Conclusions: Our result suggests that a tool like IDS could be valuable for the quick and easy identification and discrimination of infectious disease outbreaks even when concurrent outbreaks occur, like for the case study of YF and COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria
Use of Non-Pathogenic Biological Agents as Biological Warfare Simulants for the Development of a Stand-Off Detection System.
No full textDevelopment of new technologies for Biological Warfare Agents (BWA) stand-off detection implies several
safeties, logistic and economic drawbacks that involve production of different highly virulent bacteria and viruses,
their isolation and characterization under adequate bio-containment and sample preparation for each agent to
evaluate the testing method. In order to overcome these difficulties most of the research activities and tests reported
so far, are performed using simulants: Biological Agents (BA) which are phylogenetically or structurally related to
BWA. The use of the simulants (BWA-S) show, however, some limitations: they can share some of the properties of
the biological warfare agents but have different antigens, proteome and genome. In this work, different BWA-S was
evaluated for the application in the development and training of stand-off detection systems. This study is the basis
for the use of simulants in the development of an Ultraviolet Laser Induced Fluorescence (UV-LIF) based detection systems
On the optimal indoor air conditions for sars-cov-2 inactivation. An enthalpy-based approach
Full text linkIn the CoViD-19 pandemic, the precautionary approach suggests that all possible measures should be established and implemented to avoid contagion, including through aerosols. For indoor spaces, the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 could be mitigated not only via air changes, but also by heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems maintaining thermodynamic conditions possibly adverse to the virus. However, data available in literature on virus survival were never treated aiming to this. In fact, based on comparisons in terms of specific enthalpy, a domain of indoor comfort conditions between 50 and 60 kJ/kg is found to comply with this objective, and an easy-to-use relationship for setting viable pairs of humidity and temperature using a proper HVAC plant is proposed. If confirmed via further investigations on this research path, these findings could open interesting scenarios on the use of indoor spaces during the pandemic
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
Predicting SARS-CoV-2 weather-induced seasonal virulence from atmospheric air enthalpy
Full text linkFollowing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, several studies have
examined the possibility of correlating the virulence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus
2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, to the climatic conditions of the involved sites;
however, inconclusive results have been generally obtained. Although neither air temperature
nor humidity can be independently correlated with virus viability, a strong relationship between
SARS-CoV-2 virulence and the specific enthalpy of moist air appears to exist, as confirmed by extensive
data analysis. Given this framework, the present study involves a detailed investigation based on the
first 20–30 days of the epidemic before public health interventions in 30 selected Italian provinces
with rather different climates, here assumed as being representative of what happened in the country
from North to South, of the relationship between COVID-19 distributions and the climatic conditions
recorded at each site before the pandemic outbreak. Accordingly, a correlating equation between
the incidence rate at the early stage of the epidemic and the foregoing average specific enthalpy of
atmospheric air was developed, and an enthalpy-based seasonal virulence risk scale was proposed
to predict the potential danger of COVID-19 outbreak due to the persistence of weather conditions
favorable to SARS-CoV-2 viability. As an early detection tool, an unambiguous risk chart expressed
in terms of coupled temperatures and relative humidity (RH) values was provided, showing that
safer conditions occur in the case of higher RHs at the highest temperatures, and of lower RHs at
the lowest temperatures. Despite the complex determinism and dynamics of the pandemic and the
related caveats, the restriction of the study to its early stage allowed the proposed risk scale to result
in agreement with the available infectivity data highlighted in the literature for a number of cities
around the world
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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