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Scientific Reports Jun 2024Nasally colonized staphylococci carry antibiotic resistance genes and may lead to serious opportunistic infections. We are investigating nasal carriage of Staphylococcus...
Nasally colonized staphylococci carry antibiotic resistance genes and may lead to serious opportunistic infections. We are investigating nasal carriage of Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococci other than S. aureus (SOSA) among young volunteers in Egypt to determine their risk potential. Nasal swabs collected over 1 week in June 2019 from 196 volunteers were cultured for staphylococcus isolation. The participants were interviewed to assess sex, age, general health, hospitalization and personal hygiene habits. Identification was carried out using biochemical tests and VITEK 2 automated system. Disc diffusion and minimum inhibitory concentration tests were performed to determine antibiotic susceptibility. Screening for macrolide resistance genes (ermA, ermB, ermC, ermT and msrA) was performed using polymerase chain reaction. Thirty four S. aureus and 69 SOSA were obtained. Multi-drug resistance (MDR) was detected among most staphylococcal species, ranging from 30.77% among S. hominis to 50% among S. epidermidis. Phenotypic resistance to all tested antibiotics, except for linezolid, was observed. Susceptibility to rifampicin, vancomycin and teicoplanin was highest. ermB showed the highest prevalence among all species (79.41% and 94.2% among S. aureus and SOSA, respectively), and constitutive macrolide-lincosamide-streptogramin B (MLS) resistance was equally observed in S. aureus and SOSA (11.11% and 16.22%, respectively), whereas inducible MLS resistance was more often found in S. aureus (77.78% and 43.24%, respectively). The species or resistance level of the carried isolates were not significantly associated with previous hospitalization or underlying diseases. Although over all colonization and carriage of resistance genes are within normal ranges, the increased carriage of MDR S. aureus is alarming. Also, the fact that many macrolide resitance genes were detected should be a warning sign, particularly in case of MLS inducible phenotype. More in depth analysis using whole genome sequencing would give a better insight into the MDR staphylococci in the community in Egypt.
Topics: Humans; Egypt; Female; Male; Staphylococcus; Microbial Sensitivity Tests; Staphylococcal Infections; Anti-Bacterial Agents; Adult; Phenotype; Young Adult; Genotype; Staphylococcus aureus; Drug Resistance, Multiple, Bacterial; Adolescent
PubMed: 38937465
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-60924-8 -
PloS One 2024Refugees and their healthcare providers face numerous challenges in receiving and providing maternal and newborn care. Research exploring how these challenges are...
INTRODUCTION
Refugees and their healthcare providers face numerous challenges in receiving and providing maternal and newborn care. Research exploring how these challenges are related to adverse perinatal and maternal outcomes is scarce. Therefore, this study aims to identify suboptimal factors in maternal and newborn care for asylum-seeking and refugee women and assess to what extent these factors may contribute to adverse pregnancy outcomes in the Netherlands.
METHODS
We conducted a retrospective analysis of national perinatal audit data from 2017 to 2019. Our analysis encompassed cases with adverse perinatal and maternal outcomes in women with a refugee background (n = 53). Suboptimal factors in care were identified and categorized according to Binder et al.'s Three Delays Model, and the extent to which they contributed to the adverse outcome was evaluated.
RESULTS
We identified 29 suboptimal factors, of which seven were related to care-seeking, six to the accessibility of services, and 16 to the quality of care. All 53 cases contained suboptimal factors, and in 67.9% of cases, at least one of these factors most likely or probably contributed to the adverse perinatal or maternal outcome.
CONCLUSION
The number of suboptimal factors identified in this study and the extent to which they contributed to adverse perinatal and maternal outcomes among refugee women is alarming. The wide range of suboptimal factors identified provides considerable scope for improvement of maternal and newborn care for refugee populations. These findings also highlight the importance of including refugee women in perinatal audits as it is essential for healthcare providers to better understand the factors associated with adverse outcomes to improve the quality of care. Adjustments to improve care for refugees could include culturally sensitive education for healthcare providers, increased workforce diversity, minimizing the relocation of asylum seekers, and permanent reimbursement of professional interpreter costs.
Topics: Humans; Refugees; Female; Netherlands; Pregnancy; Infant, Newborn; Adult; Retrospective Studies; Perinatal Care; Pregnancy Outcome; Health Services Accessibility; Quality of Health Care; Young Adult; Patient Acceptance of Health Care
PubMed: 38935661
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305764 -
Indian Journal of Public Health Oct 2023Cancer incidence rates are rising at an alarming rate in India and are expected to rise by 12% in the next 5 years. Hence, a thorough knowledge of the existing scope of...
BACKGROUND
Cancer incidence rates are rising at an alarming rate in India and are expected to rise by 12% in the next 5 years. Hence, a thorough knowledge of the existing scope of the cancer problem is required to provide an approach for analyzing and regulating the impact of cancer across the country.
OBJECTIVES
This study aimed to determine whether the cancer incidence rates of all the states and union territories across the six geographical regions of India are statistically different from each other or not and also to identify the highly cancer-affected states.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The data have been obtained from the website www.indiastat.com from 2009 to 2020. The one-way analysis of variance, followed by Tukey's test and t-test, is used for the statistical evaluation.
RESULTS
The multiple comparison tests revealed that the difference between the cancer incidence rates is significant in all the states and union territories in every region of India. The highly affected states in the six geographical regions of India are Uttar Pradesh (UP), Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Maharashtra, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh. The most highly affected state among them is UP. These states contributed to nearly half of India's cancer burden in 2020.
CONCLUSION
This study offers significant information on the current status of cancer incidence rates in India for 12 years. As India is observing an increase in cancer incidence, therefore, additional efforts are required to strengthen cancer prevention and control strategies, particularly in India's most cancer-affected states.
Topics: India; Humans; Incidence; Neoplasms
PubMed: 38934824
DOI: 10.4103/ijph.ijph_1587_22 -
MSystems Jun 2024The alarming rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections is driving efforts to develop alternatives to conventional antibiotics. In this context, antimicrobial...
UNLABELLED
The alarming rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections is driving efforts to develop alternatives to conventional antibiotics. In this context, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have emerged as promising candidates for their ability to target a broad range of microorganisms. However, the development of AMPs with optimal potency, selectivity, and/or stability profiles remains a challenge. To address it, computational tools for predicting AMP properties and designing novel peptides have gained increasing attention. PyAMPA is a novel platform for AMP discovery. It consists of five modules, namely AMPScreen, AMPValidate, AMPSolve, AMPMutate, and AMPOptimize, that allow high-throughput proteome inspection, candidate screening, and optimization through point-mutation and genetic algorithms. The platform also offers additional tools for predicting and evaluating AMP properties, including antimicrobial and cytotoxic activity, and peptide half-life. By providing innovative and accessible inroads into AMP motifs in proteomes, PyAMPA will enable advances in AMP development and potential translation into clinically useful molecules. PyAMPA is available at: https://github.com/SysBioUAB/PyAMPA.
IMPORTANCE
This paper introduces PyAMPA, a new bioinformatics platform designed for the discovery and optimization of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). It addresses the urgent need for new antimicrobials due to the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections. PyAMPA, with its five predictive modules -AMPScreen, AMPValidate, AMPSolve, AMPMutate and AMPOptimize, enables high-throughput screening of proteomes to identify potential AMP motifs and optimize them for clinical use. Its unique approach, combining prediction, design, and optimization tools, makes PyAMPA a robust solution for developing new AMP-based therapies, offering a significant advance in combatting antibiotic resistance.
PubMed: 38934543
DOI: 10.1128/msystems.01358-23 -
Archives of Rheumatology Jun 2024The objective was to assess the serum levels of secretory leukocyte protease inhibitor (SLPI) and elafin in individuals diagnosed with axial spondyloarthritis (AxSpA)...
OBJECTIVES
The objective was to assess the serum levels of secretory leukocyte protease inhibitor (SLPI) and elafin in individuals diagnosed with axial spondyloarthritis (AxSpA) and analyze their diagnostic significance and correlation with disease activity.
PATIENTS AND METHODS
The case-controlled, cross-sectional study was conducted between August 2021 and April 2023. Sixty patients diagnosed with AxSpA (n=60) were classified according to imaging results as nonradiographic AxSpA (nr-AxSpA [n=30]; 15 males, 15 females; median age: 30 years; range, 27.6 to 34.1 years) and radiographic AxSpA (r-AxSpA [n=30]; 19 males, 11 females; median age: 33 years; range, 30.6 to 38.1 years), forming two patient groups (the nr-axSpA and r-axSpA groups). A total of 30 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (16 females, 14 males; median age: 33 years; range, 29.2 to 37.1 years) were included. Demographic data, laboratory, and clinical characteristics of the participants were recorded.
RESULTS
There was no significant difference between SLPI and elafin serum levels in the disease groups. SLPI and elafin levels in AxSpA and nr-AxSpA groups were significantly higher compared to the control group (p<0.05). Based on receiver operating characteristic analysis, the diagnostic values of both parameters were found to be significant in the Ax-SpA and nr-AxSpA groups (p<0.05). There was no significant correlation between serum levels of SLPI and elafin and disease activity parameters. Significant positive correlations were found between SLPI and elafin in both the nr-AxSpA (p<0.05, r=0.870) and r-AxSpA (p<0.05, r=0.725) groups.
CONCLUSION
The levels of SLPI and elafin were found to be significantly elevated in patients with AxSpA, particularly in those with nr-AxSpA, compared to the control group. Therefore, SLPI and elafin can be used as therapeutic biomarkers for the diagnosis of AxSpA and nr-AxSpA. However, no relationship was found with disease activity.
PubMed: 38933721
DOI: 10.46497/ArchRheumatol.2024.10466 -
Cureus May 2024Turnaround time (TAT) is a crucial clinical parameter that reflects the performance of a laboratory especially in the context of oncology and the COVID-19 pandemic....
INTRODUCTION
Turnaround time (TAT) is a crucial clinical parameter that reflects the performance of a laboratory especially in the context of oncology and the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the Lean Six Sigma methodology, we performed a retrospective analysis of the TAT of the complete blood count (CBC) of cancer patients with the aim of reducing this delay in the future.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Over one month of the COVID-19 pandemic, a retrospective evaluative audit was carried out on the TAT of the CBC in an oncology department. The root causes of failures of the overall analysis process were detected. The initiation of an improvement approach was implemented through the creation of an improvement flowchart and a new request form. The hospital information system (HIS) data were exported to Microsoft Excel® (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, United States). Using the collected data, the mean, standard deviation, median, and interquartile range were calculated using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 23, (Released 2015; IBM Corp., Armonk, New York, United States). All time intervals were expressed in minutes.
RESULTS
Among 263 intra-laboratory TATs analyzed, the median intra-lab TAT was 56 minutes (interquartile range (IQR): 36-80 minutes). A total of 82% of the analyses were performed in less than 90 minutes with a predominance of the interval 30-59 at 42.9%. The main causes of failures were essentially the lack of time stamping of the samples as well as the lack of real-time communication between the biologists and the clinicians. The proposed improvement model is currently being approved by all practitioners whose main items are as follows: At the clinical department level, distinguish the request forms but also the labels of the samples of the oncology hospital by a particular color, indication of clinical signs and sampling time on the request forms and on the HIS. At the laboratory level, create a specific chain for oncology department samples, alarm notification on the HIS, and rapid telecommunication of results for vital situations.
CONCLUSION
The intra-lab TAT of our study is biologically acceptable. Because our work is limited by the phases outside the control of the laboratory, it should lead to a continuous improvement project.
PubMed: 38933641
DOI: 10.7759/cureus.61149 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning and its outstanding capabilities in target detection, innovative methods have been introduced for infrared... (Review)
Review
In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning and its outstanding capabilities in target detection, innovative methods have been introduced for infrared dim small target detection. This review comprehensively summarizes public datasets, the latest networks, and evaluation metrics for infrared dim small target detection. This review mainly focuses on deep learning methods from the past three years and categorizes them based on the six key issues in this field: (1) enhancing the representation capability of small targets; (2) improving the accuracy of bounding box regression; (3) resolving the issue of target information loss in the deep network; (4) balancing missed detections and false alarms; (5) adapting for complex backgrounds; (6) lightweight design and deployment issues of the network. Additionally, this review summarizes twelve public datasets for infrared dim small targets and evaluation metrics used for detection and quantitatively compares the performance of the latest networks. Finally, this review provides insights into the future directions of this field. In conclusion, this review aims to assist researchers in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the latest developments in infrared dim small target detection networks.
PubMed: 38931669
DOI: 10.3390/s24123885 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024The high-altitude real-time inspection of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has always been a very challenging task. Because high-altitude inspections are susceptible to...
The high-altitude real-time inspection of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has always been a very challenging task. Because high-altitude inspections are susceptible to interference from different weather conditions, interference from communication signals and a larger field of view result in a smaller object area to be identified. We adopted a method that combines a UAV system scheduling platform with artificial intelligence object detection to implement the UAV automatic inspection technology. We trained the YOLOv5s model on five different categories of vehicle data sets, in which mAP50 and mAP50-95 reached 93.2% and 71.7%, respectively. The YOLOv5s model size is only 13.76 MB, and the detection speed of a single inspection photo reaches 11.26 ms. It is a relatively lightweight model and is suitable for deployment on edge devices for real-time detection. In the original DeepStream framework, we set up the http communication protocol to start quickly to enable different users to call and use it at the same time. In addition, asynchronous sending of alarm frame interception function was added and the auxiliary services were set up to quickly resume video streaming after interruption. We deployed the trained YOLOv5s model on the improved DeepStream framework to implement automatic UAV inspection.
PubMed: 38931645
DOI: 10.3390/s24123862 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024Rapid advancements in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are fueled by breakthroughs in machine learning, yet they encounter significant risks from adversarial...
Rapid advancements in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are fueled by breakthroughs in machine learning, yet they encounter significant risks from adversarial attacks. This study explores the vulnerabilities of machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) within in-vehicle networks (IVNs) to adversarial attacks, shifting focus from the common research on manipulating CAV perception models. Considering the relatively simple nature of IVN data, we assess the susceptibility of IVN-based IDSs to manipulation-a crucial examination, as adversarial attacks typically exploit complexity. We propose an adversarial attack method using a substitute IDS trained with data from the onboard diagnostic port. In conducting these attacks under black-box conditions while adhering to realistic IVN traffic constraints, our method seeks to deceive the IDS into misclassifying both normal-to-malicious and malicious-to-normal cases. Evaluations on two IDS models-a baseline IDS and a state-of-the-art model, MTH-IDS-demonstrated substantial vulnerability, decreasing the F1 scores from 95% to 38% and from 97% to 79%, respectively. Notably, inducing false alarms proved particularly effective as an adversarial strategy, undermining user trust in the defense mechanism. Despite the simplicity of IVN-based IDSs, our findings reveal critical vulnerabilities that could threaten vehicle safety and necessitate careful consideration in the development of IVN-based IDSs and in formulating responses to the IDSs' alarms.
PubMed: 38931632
DOI: 10.3390/s24123848 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024To achieve large-scale development of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) for water wave energy harvesting and powering the colossal sensors widely distributed in the...
To achieve large-scale development of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) for water wave energy harvesting and powering the colossal sensors widely distributed in the ocean, facile and scalable TENGs with high output are urgently required. Here, an elastic self-recovering hybrid nanogenerator (ES-HNG) is proposed for water wave energy harvesting and marine environmental monitoring. The elastic skeletal support of the ES-HNG is manufactured using three-dimensional (3D) printing technology, which is more conducive to the large-scale integration of the ES-HNG. Moreover, the combination of a TENG and an electromagnetic generator (EMG) optimizes the utilization of device space, leading to enhanced energy harvesting efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the TENG achieves a peak power output of 42.68 mW, and the EMG reaches a peak power output of 4.40 mW. Furthermore, various marine environment monitoring sensors, such as a self-powered wireless meteorological monitoring system, a wireless alarm system, and a water quality monitoring pen, have been successfully powered by the sophisticated ES-HNG. This work introduces an ES-HNG for water wave energy harvesting, which demonstrates potential in marine environment monitoring and offers a new solution for the sustainable development of the marine internet of things.
PubMed: 38931554
DOI: 10.3390/s24123770