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PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases Jun 2024West Nile virus (WNV) is the most common mosquito-borne disease in the United States, resulting in hundreds of reported cases yearly in California alone. The...
Exploring the role of temperature and other environmental factors in West Nile virus incidence and prediction in California counties from 2017-2022 using a zero-inflated model.
West Nile virus (WNV) is the most common mosquito-borne disease in the United States, resulting in hundreds of reported cases yearly in California alone. The transmission cycle occurs mostly in birds and mosquitoes, making meteorological conditions, such as temperature, especially important to transmission characteristics. Given that future increases in temperature are all but inevitable due to worldwide climate change, determining associations between temperature and WNV incidence in humans, as well as making predictions on future cases, are important to public health agencies in California. Using surveillance data from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), meteorological data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and vector and host data from VectorSurv, we created GEE autoregressive and zero-inflated regression models to determine the role of temperature and other environmental factors in WNV incidence and predictions. An increase in temperature was found to be associated with an increase in incidence in 11 high-burden Californian counties between 2017-2022 (IRR = 1.06), holding location, time of year, and rainfall constant. A hypothetical increase of two degrees Fahrenheit-predicted for California by 2040-would have resulted in upwards of 20 excess cases per year during our study period. Using 2017-2021 as a training set, meteorological and host/vector data were able to closely predict 2022 incidence, though the models did overestimate the peak number of cases. The zero-inflated model closely predicted the low number of cases in winter months but performed worse than the GEE model during high-transmission periods. These findings suggests that climate change will, and may be already, altering transmission dynamics and incidence of WNV in California, and provides tools to help predict incidence into the future.
PubMed: 38913741
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0012051 -
Environmental History Oct 2023For over a century, New York's Residential Heat and Hot Water Code has controlled the distribution of heat in New York City. Established in 1918 by New York's Department...
For over a century, New York's Residential Heat and Hot Water Code has controlled the distribution of heat in New York City. Established in 1918 by New York's Department of Health, it mandated that all residential and office spaces in the city be heated to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at all times. Changes to it in the ensuing years sought not only to protect New Yorkers' health but reflected pressures in New York's fuel economy, which experienced periods of shortages and a transition from anthracite coal to oil that started between the two World Wars. Consequently, the standardization of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit reflected shifting assumptions about health and the "right to heat" for different communities over time, and the practical need to ensure affordable fuel for the city's population. The Heat Code, accordingly, played a crucial role in shaping energy consumption in New York and helping to formulate an "invisible energy policy"-that is, a policy developed in non-energy fields, such as health and housing, that alters energy usage in important but inconspicuous ways, with important consequences for the environment and for social justice.
PubMed: 38868361
DOI: 10.1086/726711 -
Cureus May 2024subspecies () is a zoonotic pathogen that primarily infects horses, pigs, and dogs. Although rare, it has also been shown to infect humans who consume unpasteurized...
subspecies () is a zoonotic pathogen that primarily infects horses, pigs, and dogs. Although rare, it has also been shown to infect humans who consume unpasteurized dairy food or have direct contact with horses. Here, we present a case of bacteremia in a patient without a clear mode of transmission. An 86-year-old male with a past medical history of coronary artery disease, heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, complete heart block status post pacemaker, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and type 2 diabetes mellitus presented to the Emergency Department with fever and chills. He had fevers and rigors for three days but denied weight loss, cough, sore throat, or rashes. In the Emergency Department, vital signs revealed a fever of 101.2 degrees Fahrenheit and a heart rate of 110 with other stable vital signs. The physical exam was unremarkable except for tachycardia, and laboratory work revealed no leukocytosis but elevated inflammatory markers and elevated lactate. Computed tomography of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis did not reveal any source of infection. Blood cultures grew and the Infectious Diseases team was consulted, who started the patient on Penicillin G. Due to concern for pacer-lead infective endocarditis, transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiograms were performed, which did not show valvular vegetations. Repeat blood cultures showed clearance of the infection, and the patient was ultimately discharged on amoxicillin. While our patient denied consuming unpasteurized dairy products or having direct contact with horses, upon further questioning, he did endorse family members who occasionally interacted with horses. This case is valuable as it adds to the sparse literature on infections specifically in humans. Extensive history taking is of utmost importance when a clear source of infection is not easily identifiable. Further research is also needed to better understand the various modes of transmission of this bacterium to better target and caution those at an increased risk of infection.
PubMed: 38854287
DOI: 10.7759/cureus.59911 -
Cureus Nov 2023A heat stroke (HS) is a medical emergency that can occur when the body is unable to cool itself down after overexertion in a hot condition. It is characterized by a high...
A heat stroke (HS) is a medical emergency that can occur when the body is unable to cool itself down after overexertion in a hot condition. It is characterized by a high body temperature (usually greater than 40.5 degrees Celsius or 104.9 degrees Fahrenheit) and altered mental status. HS can cause a wide range of physiological changes in the body, including damage to the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, and muscles. In the case report presented, the patient was a 40-year-old man who developed severe HS. His condition rapidly deteriorated, and he developed multi-organ failure, involving the brain, liver, kidneys, muscles, and hematological system. The patient was admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) and intubated, despite aggressive treatment. After an 18-day stay in the ICU, the patient achieved full recovery except for myopathy, which necessitated physiotherapy.
PubMed: 38111401
DOI: 10.7759/cureus.48984 -
Weather, Climate, and Society (Print) Jul 2023Climate change is expected to impact individuals' recreational choices, as changing temperatures and precipitation patterns influence participation in outdoor recreation...
Climate change is expected to impact individuals' recreational choices, as changing temperatures and precipitation patterns influence participation in outdoor recreation and alternative activities. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between weather and outdoor recreation using nationally representative data from the contiguous United States. We find that across most outdoor recreational activities, participation is lowest on the coldest days (<35 degrees Fahrenheit) and highest at moderately high temperatures (80 to 90 degrees). Notable exceptions to this trend include water sports and snow and ice sports, for which participation peaks at the highest and lowest temperatures, respectively. If individuals continue to respond to temperature changes the same way that they have in the recent past, in a future climate that has fewer cool days and more moderate and hot days, our model anticipates net participation across all outdoor recreation activities will increase by 88 million trips annually at 1 degree Celsius of warming (CONUS) and up to 401 million trips at 6 degrees of warming, valued between $3.2 billion and $15.6 billion in consumer surplus annually (2010 population). The increase in trips is driven by participation in water sports; excluding water sports from future projections decreases the consumer surplus gains by approximately 75 percent across all modeled degrees of warming. If individuals in northern regions respond to temperature like people in southern regions currently do (a proxy for adaptation), total outdoor recreation trips will increase by an additional 17 percent compared to no adaptation at 6 degrees of warming. This benefit is generally not seen at lower degrees of warming.
PubMed: 37415774
DOI: 10.1175/wcas-d-22-0060.1 -
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) Jun 2023The UNited RESisdue (UNRES) package for coarse-grained simulations, which has recently been optimized to treat large protein systems, has been implemented on Graphical...
SUMMARY
The UNited RESisdue (UNRES) package for coarse-grained simulations, which has recently been optimized to treat large protein systems, has been implemented on Graphical Processor Units (GPUs). An over 100-time speed-up of the GPU code (run on an NVIDIA A100) with respect to the sequential code and an 8.5 speed-up with respect to the parallel Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) code (run on 32 cores of 2 AMD EPYC 7313 Central Processor Units (CPUs)) has been achieved for large proteins (with size over 10 000 residues). Due to the averaging over the fine-grain degrees of freedom, 1 time unit of UNRES simulations is equivalent to about 1000 time units of laboratory time; therefore, millisecond time scale of large protein systems can be reached with the UNRES-GPU code.
AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
The source code of UNRES-GPU along with the benchmarks used for tests is available at https://projects.task.gda.pl/eurohpcpl-public/unres.
Topics: Protein Conformation; Proteins; Software; Physics
PubMed: 37338530
DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad391 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Apr 2023Temperature-controlled closed-loop systems are vital to the transportation of produce. By maintaining specific transportation temperatures and adjusting to environmental...
Temperature-controlled closed-loop systems are vital to the transportation of produce. By maintaining specific transportation temperatures and adjusting to environmental factors, these systems delay decomposition. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) can be used to monitor the temperature levels at different locations within these transportation containers and provide feedback to these systems. However, there are a range of unique challenges in WSN implementations, such as the cost of the hardware, implementation difficulties, and the general ruggedness of the environment. This paper presents the novel results of a real-life application, where a sensor network was implemented to monitor the environmental temperatures at different locations inside commercial temperature-controlled shipping containers. The possibility of predicting one or more locations inside the container in the absence or breakdown of a logger placed in that location is explored using combinatorial input-output settings. A total of 1016 machine learning (ML) models are exhaustively trained, tested, and validated in search of the best model and the best combinations to produce a higher prediction result. The statistical correlations between different loggers and logger combinations are studied to identify a systematic approach to finding the optimal setting and placement of loggers under a cost constraint. Our findings suggest that even under different and incrementally higher cost constraints, one can use empirical approaches such as neural networks to predict temperature variations in a location with an absent or failed logger, within a margin of error comparable to the manufacturer-specified sensor accuracy. In fact, the median test accuracy is 1.02 degrees Fahrenheit when using only a single sensor to predict the remaining locations under the assumptions of critical system failure, and drops to as little as 0.8 and 0.65 degrees Fahrenheit when using one or three more sensors in the prediction algorithm. We also demonstrate that, by using correlation coefficients and time series similarity measurements, one can identify the optimal input-output pairs for the prediction algorithm reliably under most instances. For example, discrete time warping can be used to select the best location to place the sensors with a 92% match between the lowest prediction error and the highest similarity sensor with the rest of the group. The findings of this research can be used for power management in sensor batteries, especially for long transportation routes, by alternating standby modes where the temperature data for the OFF sensors are predicted by the ON sensors.
PubMed: 37177507
DOI: 10.3390/s23094303