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van Zuiden, Mirjam, Annemieke Kavelaars, Elbert Geuze, Miranda Olff, and Cobi J. Heijnen. "Predicting PTSD: Pre-existing vulnerabilities in glucocorticoid-signaling and implications for preventive interventions." Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 30 (May 2013): 12–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2012.08.015.
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Cabin, William. "Pre-Existing Inequality: The Impact of COVID-19 on Medicare Home Health Beneficiaries." Home Health Care Management & Practice 33, no. 2 (February 8, 2021): 130–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1084822321992380.
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There is significant data on the adverse impact of COVID-19 on persons who were poor, minorities, had compromised physical or mental health, or other vulnerabilities prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant portion of the overall Medicare population has such vulnerabilities. The Medicare home health beneficiary population is even more vulnerable than the overall Medicare population based on gender, race, income level, living alone status, and number of chronic conditions. A literature review indicates there is only 1 study on the impact of COVID-19 in Medicare home health on home care workers and none on the impact on home health beneficiaries. The current study is a qualitative study based on interviews of a convenience sample of 48 home care nurses from 9 different home health agencies in New York City between April 1 and August 31, 2020. Six major themes emerged: need for social service supports increased; loneliness and depression increased among patients; physical and mental health conditions became exacerbated; substance use and abuse increased; evidence of domestic violence against patients increased; and there was a limited amount of staff and equipment to care for patients.
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Schweizerhof, Margarete, Zechser Adrian, and Artur Mueller. "Effects of the measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic on pre-existing mental vulnerabilities and disorders." SCENTIA International Economic Review 1, no. 2 (May 25, 2022): 11–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.52514/sier.v1i2.25.
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This article deals with the following question: "What is the impact of certain pandemic control measures on patient groups with specific mental illnesses, and what are the economic effects on public health?"
For this purpose, 103 patients of psychotherapeutic practice in Germany in the periods before, during and at the current time (April, May 2021) were asked in a twenty-minute survey to indicate the development of their psychiatric symptoms concerning individual measures to combat the pandemic and concerning the general pandemic situation. The collected data were divided into specific diagnostic groups with single and multiple diagnoses and analyzed using the method of descriptive statistical analysis using the IBM SPSS software. As a result, it was found that specific measures to combat the pandemic had varying degrees of influence on the worsening of the specific symptoms of patients with single or multiple diagnoses. Due to the division of patients into diagnostic groups, the present study made it possible for the first time to differentiate and assess the course symptoms of various mental illnesses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been shown that the presence of multiple psychiatric diagnoses causes an inflationary worsening of the symptoms. In addition, the specific influence of different measures on specific psychiatric diagnostic groups could be demonstrated. The authors conclude that the impact of specific pandemic control measures varies depending on the diagnostic group. It was also found that the economic impact is high due to the need for interdisciplinary and multimodal therapeutic approaches to combat the consequences for patients with pre-existing mental illnesses.
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Sekalala, Sharifah, Katrina Perehudoff, Michael Parker, Lisa Forman, Belinda Rawson, and Maxwell Smith. "An intersectional human rights approach to prioritising access to COVID-19 vaccines." BMJ Global Health 6, no. 2 (February 2021): e004462. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004462.
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We finally have a vaccine for the COVID-19 crisis. However, due to the limited numbers of the vaccine, states will have to consider how to prioritise groups who receive the vaccine. In this paper, we argue that the practical implementation of human rights law requires broader consideration of intersectional needs in society and the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 is having on population groups with pre-existing social and medical vulnerabilities. The existing frameworks/mechanisms and proposals for COVID-19 vaccine allocation have shortcomings from a human rights perspective that could be remedied by adopting an intersectional allocative approach. This necessitates that states allocate the first COVID-19 vaccines according to (1) infection risk and severity of pre-existing diseases; (2) social vulnerabilities; and (3) potential financial and social effects of ill health. In line with WHO’s guidelines on universal health coverage, a COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategy that it is more consistent with international human rights law should ensure that vaccines are free at the point of service, give priority to the worst off and be allocated in a transparent, participatory and accountable prioritisation process.
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Kuz, Antonieta. "Educational technological inequalities expressed during confinement by COVID19." EDMETIC 11, no. 2 (August 1, 2022): 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.21071/edmetic.v11i2.13657.
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In Argentina, in March 2020, face-to-face classes were suspended to prevent the spread of the covid-19 with a prolonged quarantine. The design of this work seeks to know some of the factors that operate at the origin of pre-existing technological inequalities. The information was obtained through a quantitative design with 290 students during the year 2020 in Buenos Aires combined non-experimental with descriptive scope, exploratory in nature through interviews with 3 teachers. Combining both analyses we found relevant findings on socio-educational inequalities, with an emphasis on the interpretative-descriptive of pre-existing quarantine problems and vulnerabilities.
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Cetin, Ronay, Eva Quandt, and Manuel Kaulich. "Functional Genomics Approaches to Elucidate Vulnerabilities of Intrinsic and Acquired Chemotherapy Resistance." Cells 10, no. 2 (January 28, 2021): 260. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cells10020260.
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Drug resistance is a commonly unavoidable consequence of cancer treatment that results in therapy failure and disease relapse. Intrinsic (pre-existing) or acquired resistance mechanisms can be drug-specific or be applicable to multiple drugs, resulting in multidrug resistance. The presence of drug resistance is, however, tightly coupled to changes in cellular homeostasis, which can lead to resistance-coupled vulnerabilities. Unbiased gene perturbations through RNAi and CRISPR technologies are invaluable tools to establish genotype-to-phenotype relationships at the genome scale. Moreover, their application to cancer cell lines can uncover new vulnerabilities that are associated with resistance mechanisms. Here, we discuss targeted and unbiased RNAi and CRISPR efforts in the discovery of drug resistance mechanisms by focusing on first-in-line chemotherapy and their enforced vulnerabilities, and we present a view forward on which measures should be taken to accelerate their clinical translation.
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Armingeon, Klaus, Caroline de la Porte, Elke Heins, and Stefano Sacchi. "Voices from the past: economic and political vulnerabilities in the making of next generation EU." Comparative European Politics 20, no. 2 (March 7, 2022): 144–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41295-022-00277-6.
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AbstractIn this article, we show that Next Generation EU (NGEU) is mainly a response to the economic and political imbalances left over from the Eurozone crisis. It is a pre-emptive intervention, especially targeted at structurally weak economies with rising Euroscepticism, to avoid costly ex-post bailouts as in the Great Recession. We demonstrate, using quantitative analysis, that pre-existing vulnerabilities, rather than the impact of the pandemic, drove the allocation of NGEU resources: per capita grants largely correspond to past economic vulnerabilities, as well as to political ones. Countries most vulnerable to another adjustment by austerity after the COVID-19 economic crisis receive most resources. Also, countries with strong anti-EU sentiments are entitled to larger NGEU grants per capita. In contrast, grants are not correlated with the severity of the health crisis. Then, we show the domestic relevance of economic and political vulnerabilities through qualitative case studies of national political debates and domestic positions on NGEU in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Despite its innovative traits, NGEU is a politically constrained solution to address the mess from the previous decade, and as such, it is a Janus solution: promising a fresh start, but haunted by the past.
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Lewis, Stephanie J., Karestan C. Koenen, Antony Ambler, Louise Arseneault, Avshalom Caspi, Helen L. Fisher, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Andrea Danese. "Unravelling the contribution of complex trauma to psychopathology and cognitive deficits: a cohort study." British Journal of Psychiatry 219, no. 2 (May 11, 2021): 448–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2021.57.
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BackgroundComplex traumas are traumatic experiences that involve multiple interpersonal threats during childhood or adolescence, such as repeated abuse. These traumas are hypothesised to cause more severe psychopathology and poorer cognitive function than other non-complex traumas. However, empirical testing has been limited to clinical/convenience samples and cross-sectional designs.AimsTo investigate psychopathology and cognitive function in young people exposed to complex, non-complex or no trauma, from a population-representative longitudinal cohort, and to consider the role of pre-existing vulnerabilities.MethodParticipants were from the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, a population-representative birth cohort of 2232 British children. At age 18 years (93% participation), we assessed lifetime exposure to complex and non-complex trauma, past-year psychopathology and current cognitive function. We also prospectively assessed early childhood vulnerabilities: internalising and externalising symptoms at 5 years of age, IQ at 5 years of age, family history of mental illness, family socioeconomic status and sex.ResultsParticipants exposed to complex trauma had more severe psychopathology and poorer cognitive function at 18 years of age, compared with both trauma-unexposed participants and those exposed to non-complex trauma. Early childhood vulnerabilities predicted risk of later complex trauma exposure, and largely explained associations of complex trauma with cognitive deficits, but not with psychopathology.ConclusionsBy conflating complex and non-complex traumas, current research and clinical practice underestimate the severity of psychopathology, cognitive deficits and pre-existing vulnerabilities linked with complex trauma. A better understanding of the mental health needs of people exposed to complex trauma could inform the development of new, more effective interventions.
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Meyers, Benjamin S., Sultan Fahad Almassari, Brandon N. Keller, and Andrew Meneely. "Examining Penetration Tester Behavior in the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition." ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 31, no. 3 (July 31, 2022): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3514040.
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Penetration testing is a key practice toward engineering secure software. Malicious actors have many tactics at their disposal, and software engineers need to know what tactics attackers will prioritize in the first few hours of an attack. Projects like MITRE ATT&CK™ provide knowledge, but how do people actually deploy this knowledge in real situations? A penetration testing competition provides a realistic, controlled environment with which to measure and compare the efficacy of attackers. In this work, we examine the details of vulnerability discovery and attacker behavior with the goal of improving existing vulnerability assessment processes using data from the 2019 Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC). We constructed 98 timelines of vulnerability discovery and exploits for 37 unique vulnerabilities discovered by 10 teams of penetration testers. We grouped related vulnerabilities together by mapping to Common Weakness Enumerations and MITRE ATT&CK™. We found that (1) vulnerabilities related to improper resource control (e.g., session fixation) are discovered faster and more often, as well as exploited faster, than vulnerabilities related to improper access control (e.g., weak password requirements), (2) there is a clear process followed by penetration testers of discovery/collection to lateral movement/pre-attack. Our methodology facilitates quicker analysis of vulnerabilities in future CPTC events.
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Ogunlesi, A. O., and E. O. Akande. "Mental illness in the medical profession: Nigeria in the world." Psychiatric Bulletin 16, no. 8 (August 1992): 502–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1192/pb.16.8.502.
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It is widely acknowledged that the medical profession can be highly stressful. In addition, practitioners in many developing countries face the peculiar problems of poor remuneration, lack of necessary clinical facilities and a heavy clinical case load (due to the lack of qualified manpower). Such a scenario can easily aggravate those medical practitioners with pre-existing deeply rooted emotional conflicts as well as personality vulnerabilities and can result in mental decompensation.
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Varickanickal, Joann, and K. Bruce Newbold. "Extreme heat events and health vulnerabilities among immigrant and newcomer populations." Environmental Health Review 64, no. 2 (June 2021): 28–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.5864/d2021-011.
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With higher temperatures linked to increased human morbidity and mortality, the projected increase in the number of extreme heat events (EHEs) due to climate change poses increased risks. Although the old, individuals with pre-existing illnesses, the socially isolated, and individuals with low income or low educational status are more vulnerable to the health effects of EHEs and are targeted in public health messaging, newcomers and immigrants may be less aware of the dangers of EHEs. The impacts of EHEs on the immigrant and newcomer population are not well documented in the Canadian context and the combination of a greater number of heat events and a growing and diverse immigrant population necessitates further exploration. Framed by intersectionality and using Hamilton, Ontario, as a case example, this work explores the barriers that may affect immigrant’s awareness of EHEs.
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Wang, Heping, Augustin Luna, Gonghong Yan, Xubin Li, Ozgun Babur, Chris Sander, and Gordon Mills. "Abstract 1002: Targeting adaptation to cancer treatment by drug combinations." Cancer Research 82, no. 12_Supplement (June 15, 2022): 1002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/1538-7445.am2022-1002.
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Abstract Adaptation of tumors to therapeutic interventions contributes to dismal long-term patient outcomes. Adaptation to therapy involves the co-action of functionally related proteins that together activate cell survival programs and compensate for the therapeutic impact. Oncogenic dependencies to such adaptive events, however, can generate new therapeutic vulnerabilities that can be targeted with drug combinations. The precision medicine approaches in which targeted drugs are matched to pre-existing genomic aberrations fail to address the adaptive responses and resulting vulnerabilities. Here, we provide the mathematical formulation, implementation, and validation of the TargetScore method. The TargetScore identifies collective adaptive responses to targeted interventions as concurrent changes of phospho-proteins that are connected within a signaling network. Based on the adaptive responses, the method predicts drug-induced vulnerabilities. Using TargetScore, we inferred the adaptive responses with short-term (i.e., days) stress and long-term (i.e., months) acquired resistance to inhibitors of antiapoptotic mediators, MCL1 and BCL2. With experiments guided by the predictions, we identified synergistic interactions between inhibitors of PARP, SHP2, and MCL1 in breast cancer cells. TargetScore is readily applicable to existing precision oncology efforts by matching targeted drug combinations to emerging molecular signatures under therapeutic stress. Citation Format: Heping Wang, Augustin Luna, Gonghong Yan, Xubin Li, Ozgun Babur, Chris Sander, Gordon Mills. Targeting adaptation to cancer treatment by drug combinations [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 1002.
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Barr, Makenzie L., Courtney Martin, Courtney Luecking, and Kathryn Cardarelli. "Losses, Gains, and Changes to the Food Environment in a Rural Kentucky County during the COVID-19 Pandemic." Nutrients 13, no. 11 (November 3, 2021): 3929. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu13113929.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused alterations to be made in the way many people access, prepare, and consume food. Rural communities are particularly impacted due to pre-existing structural vulnerabilities, i.e., poverty, lack of infrastructure, and limited fresh food options. This study aimed to characterize experiences of one rural Appalachian community’s changes to the food environment during the pandemic. In April 2021, six focus groups were conducted with residents of Laurel County, Kentucky. Using grounded theory, we identified losses, gains, and overall changes to the community food environment since the onset of COVID-19. Seventeen Laurel Countians (17 female; ages 30–74) participated in the six focus groups. Three main themes emerged regarding food environment changes—(1) modifications of community food and nutrition resources, (2) expansion and utilization of online food ordering, and (3) implications of the home food environment. Rural communities faced considerable challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part, due to gaps in existing infrastructure and loss of pre-existing resources. This study illustrates the complexity of changes occurring during COVID-19. Using the preliminary data obtained, we can better understand pre-existing issues in Laurel County and suggestions for future programming to address the inequitable access and response during public health emergencies and beyond.
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Charnley, Gina E. C., Sebastian Yennan, Chinwe Ochu, Ilan Kelman, Katy A. M. Gaythorpe, and Kris A. Murray. "The impact of social and environmental extremes on cholera time varying reproduction number in Nigeria." PLOS Global Public Health 2, no. 12 (December 14, 2022): e0000869. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000869.
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Nigeria currently reports the second highest number of cholera cases in Africa, with numerous socioeconomic and environmental risk factors. Less investigated are the role of extreme events, despite recent work showing their potential importance. To address this gap, we used a machine learning approach to understand the risks and thresholds for cholera outbreaks and extreme events, taking into consideration pre-existing vulnerabilities. We estimated time varying reproductive number (R) from cholera incidence in Nigeria and used a machine learning approach to evaluate its association with extreme events (conflict, flood, drought) and pre-existing vulnerabilities (poverty, sanitation, healthcare). We then created a traffic-light system for cholera outbreak risk, using three hypothetical traffic-light scenarios (Red, Amber and Green) and used this to predict R. The system highlighted potential extreme events and socioeconomic thresholds for outbreaks to occur. We found that reducing poverty and increasing access to sanitation lessened vulnerability to increased cholera risk caused by extreme events (monthly conflicts and the Palmers Drought Severity Index). The main limitation is the underreporting of cholera globally and the potential number of cholera cases missed in the data used here. Increasing access to sanitation and decreasing poverty reduced the impact of extreme events in terms of cholera outbreak risk. The results here therefore add further evidence of the need for sustainable development for disaster prevention and mitigation and to improve health and quality of life.
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Lewis, Stephanie J., Karestan C. Koenen, Antony Ambler, Louise Arseneault, Avshalom Caspi, Helen L. Fisher, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Andrea Danese. "Psychopathology and cognitive deficits in young people exposed to complex trauma." BJPsych Open 7, S1 (June 2021): S36—S37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2021.149.
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AimsComplex traumas are traumatic experiences that involve multiple interpersonal threats during childhood or adolescence, such as repeated abuse. This type of trauma is hypothesized to lead to more severe psychopathology and poorer cognitive function than other non-complex traumas, such as road traffic accidents. However, empirical testing of this hypothesis has been limited to clinical or convenience samples and cross-sectional designs. To better understand this topic, we aimed to investigate psychopathology and cognitive function in young people exposed to complex, non-complex, or no trauma from a population-representative longitudinal cohort, and to consider the role of pre-existing vulnerabilities.MethodParticipants were from the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, a population-representative birth-cohort of 2,232 children born in England and Wales in 1994-95. At age 18 years (93% participation), we assessed lifetime exposure to complex and non-complex trauma. We also assessed past-year psychopathology including general psychopathology ‘p’ and several psychiatric disorders, as well as current cognitive function including IQ, executive function, and processing speed. Additionally, we prospectively assessed early childhood vulnerabilities including internalizing and externalizing symptoms at age 5, IQ at age 5, family history of mental illness, family socioeconomic status, and sex.ResultWe found that participants who had been exposed to complex trauma had more severe psychopathology and poorer cognitive function across wide-ranging measures at age 18, compared to both trauma-unexposed participants and those exposed to non-complex trauma. Early childhood vulnerabilities had an important role in these presentations, as they predicted risk of later complex trauma exposure, and largely explained associations of complex trauma with cognitive deficits, but not with psychopathology.ConclusionBy conflating complex and non-complex traumas, current research and clinical practice under-estimate the severity of psychopathology and cognitive deficits linked with complex trauma, as well as the role of pre-existing vulnerabilities. A better understanding of the mental health needs of people exposed to complex trauma and underlying mechanisms could inform the development of new effective interventions.
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Sakamoto, Maiko, Salma Begum, and Tofayel Ahmed. "Vulnerabilities to COVID-19 in Bangladesh and a Reconsideration of Sustainable Development Goals." Sustainability 12, no. 13 (June 30, 2020): 5296. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su12135296.
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Bangladesh is one of the high-risk countries of the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent losses due to social and economic conditions. There is a significant possibility that economic stagnation would push a large population back into poverty. In the present study, we have reviewed the chronology and epidemiology of COVID-19 in Bangladesh and investigated the country’s vulnerabilities concerning COVID-19 impacts. We focused primarily on four areas of vulnerabilities in Bangladesh: The garment industry, urban slums, social exclusion, and pre-existing health conditions. The result implicated that the country would take time to recover its economy due to the vulnerabilities mentioned above, and many people in Bangladesh would not be able to tolerate the current situation because they do not have enough reserves to do so. We concluded that if at least some Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) had been at least partly attained, the situation would not be as dire as it is now. Based on this conclusion, we suggested a tolerance capacity to indicate how long people can survive without outside support. It is a holistic assessment rather than the indicators presently defined in each SDG, but it should be attained through a harmonized approach to SDGs.
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Fujimoto, Shinya, Fuminori Kawami, Anna Matsukawa, Shosuke Sato, and Shigeo Tatsuki. "Pre-Existing Inequalities, Post-Event Social Environmental Changes, and Long-Term Trajectories of Life Recovery: Findings from Five-Wave Natori City Life Recovery Panel Survey." Journal of Disaster Research 17, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 207–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.20965/jdr.2022.p0207.
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This study aims to clarify: 1) the life recovery trajectories that the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) survivors have followed; 2) the interrelationships between the life recovery trajectories and pre-existing inequalities as well as post-event social environmental changes; and 3) pre- and post-GEJE characteristics of the survivors with stagnant life recovery. The analyses are based on five-wave panel data from “Natori City Life Recovery Population Panel Survey” (n = 316), which was conducted in Natori City, Miyagi Prefecture from the fourth to the tenth years after the GEJE. Cluster analysis was performed to classify the life recovery trajectories and identified six distinct patterns. Two types of them remained at a low level of life recovery throughout the five-wave survey. Multiple correspondence analysis was conducted to analyze the relationships among life recovery trajectory patterns, pre-existing inequalities, and post-event social environmental changes. As a result, the survivors in these two types were typically older people, small household members, poor people, and persons with disabilities. These findings indicate that people with vulnerabilities who would experienced daily life troubles before the GEJE were also struggling even after the disaster.
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Saha, Ananya, and Narendra M. Dixit. "Pre-existing resistance in the latent reservoir can compromise VRC01 therapy during chronic HIV-1 infection." PLOS Computational Biology 16, no. 11 (November 30, 2020): e1008434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008434.
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Passive immunization with broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) of HIV-1 appears a promising strategy for eliciting long-term HIV-1 remission. When administered concomitantly with the cessation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to patients with established viremic control, bNAb therapy is expected to prolong remission. Surprisingly, in clinical trials on chronic HIV-1 patients, the bNAb VRC01 failed to prolong remission substantially. Identifying the cause of this failure is important for improving VRC01-based therapies and unraveling potential vulnerabilities of other bNAbs. In the trials, viremia resurged rapidly in most patients despite suppressive VRC01 concentrations in circulation, suggesting that VRC01 resistance was the likely cause of failure. ART swiftly halts viral replication, precluding the development of resistance during ART. If resistance were to emerge post ART, virological breakthrough would have taken longer than without VRC01 therapy. We hypothesized therefore that VRC01-resistant strains must have been formed before ART initiation, survived ART in latently infected cells, and been activated during VRC01 therapy, causing treatment failure. Current assays preclude testing this hypothesis experimentally. We developed a mathematical model based on the hypothesis and challenged it with available clinical data. The model integrated within-host HIV-1 evolution, stochastic latency reactivation, and viral dynamics with multiple-dose VRC01 pharmacokinetics. The model predicted that single but not higher VRC01-resistant mutants would pre-exist in the latent reservoir. We constructed a virtual patient population that parsimoniously recapitulated inter-patient variations. Model predictions with this population quantitatively captured data of VRC01 failure from clinical trials, presenting strong evidence supporting the hypothesis. We attributed VRC01 failure to single-mutant VRC01-resistant proviruses in the latent reservoir triggering viral recrudescence, particularly when VRC01 was at trough levels. Pre-existing resistant proviruses in the latent reservoir may similarly compromise other bNAbs. Our study provides a framework for designing bNAb-based therapeutic protocols that would avert such failure and maximize HIV-1 remission.
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Qu, Sheng, Zheng Zhang, Bolin Ma, and Yuwen Shao. "Optimization Method of Web Fuzzy Test Cases Based on Genetic Algorithm." Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2078, no. 1 (November 1, 2021): 012015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/2078/1/012015.
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Abstract In order to solve the problems of low code coverage, few vulnerabilities found, and poor fuzzing effect caused by the small number of test cases and single types in Web fuzzing, on the basis of studying the current Web fuzzing methods, the existing fuzzing Web applications are tested Program research. A genetic algorithm-based method for optimizing fuzzing test cases for Web applications is proposed. It analyzes and counts the traffic of public network website business with Web service attack characteristics, and uses genetic algorithms to generate a large number of test cases with various types to explore the Web service vulnerability that exists. Based on the creation of a Web attack signature database with weights, this method uses genetic algorithms to randomly pre-generate the test cases of the fuzzing test, and uses the response of the Web service to repeatedly iterate the weights of different attack signatures in the Web attack signature database. So as to generate the best test cases. Experimental analysis shows that this method effectively finds security vulnerabilities in Web applications.
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Gak, Liza, Seyi Olojo, and Niloufar Salehi. "The Distressing Ads That Persist: Uncovering The Harms of Targeted Weight-Loss Ads Among Users with Histories of Disordered Eating." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CSCW2 (November 7, 2022): 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3555102.
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Targeted advertising can harm vulnerable groups when it targets individuals' personal and psychological vulnerabilities. We focus on how targeted weight-loss advertisements harm people with histories of disordered eating. We identify three features of targeted advertising that cause harm: the persistence of personal data that can expose vulnerabilities, over-simplifying algorithmic relevancy models, and design patterns encouraging engagement that can facilitate unhealthy behavior. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with individuals with histories of unhealthy body stigma, dieting, and disordered eating, we found that targeted weight-loss ads reinforced low self-esteem and deepened pre-existing anxieties around food and exercise. At the same time, we observed that targeted individuals demonstrated agency and resistance against distressing ads. Drawing on scholarship in postcolonial environmental studies, we use the concept of slow violence to articulate how online targeted advertising inflicts harms that may not be immediately identifiable. CAUTION: This paper includes media that could be triggering, particularly to people with an eating disorder. Please use caution when reading, printing, or disseminating this paper.
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Belsey-Priebe, Maryruth, Deborah Lyons, and Jonathan J. Buonocore. "COVID-19′s Impact on American Women’s Food Insecurity Foreshadows Vulnerabilities to Climate Change." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 13 (June 26, 2021): 6867. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18136867.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on human lives and the global economy, laying bare existing inequities, and galvanizing large numbers to call for change. Women are feeling the effects of this crisis more than others. This paper explores the pre-COVID relationships and amplified negative feedback loops between American women’s economic insecurity, lack of safety, and food insecurity. We then examine how COVID-19 is interacting with these intersecting risks and demonstrate how climate change will likely similarly intensify these feedback loops. The COVID-19 pandemic may be revealing vulnerabilities that societies will face in the wake of an increasingly warming world. It is also an opportunity to build resilience, inclusiveness, and equity into our future, and can help inform how to include gender equity in both COVID-19 and climate recovery policies. Finally, we identify possible strategies to build resilience, specifically highlighting that gendered economic empowerment may create a buffer against environmental health hazards and discuss how these strategies could be integrated into a women-centered Green New Deal.
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Dupéré, V., T. Leventhal, and É. Lacourse. "Neighborhood poverty and suicidal thoughts and attempts in late adolescence." Psychological Medicine 39, no. 8 (October 10, 2008): 1295–306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s003329170800456x.
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BackgroundSuicide tends to concentrate in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and neighborhood disadvantage is associated with many important risk factors for youth suicide. However, no study has directly investigated the link between neighborhood poverty and youth suicidal behaviors, while controlling for pre-existing vulnerabilities. The objective of this study was to determine whether living in a poor neighborhood is associated with suicidal thoughts and attempts in late adolescence over and above background vulnerabilities, and whether this association can be explained by late-adolescence psychosocial risks: depression, social support, negative life events (NLEs), delinquent activities, substance abuse and exposure to suicide. The potential moderating role of neighborhood poverty was also examined.MethodA subset of 2776 participants was selected from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). Late-adolescence suicidal behaviors and risk factors were self-reported. The 2001 Canadian Census was used to characterize neighborhoods during early and middle adolescence. Late-childhood family and individual controls were assessed through parent-report.ResultsAt the bivariate level, the odds of reporting suicidal thoughts were about twice as high in poor than non-poor neighborhoods, and the odds of attempting suicide were about four times higher. After controlling for background vulnerabilities, neighborhood poverty remained significantly associated with both suicidal thoughts and attempts. However, these associations were not explained by late-adolescence psychosocial risks. Rather, youth living in poor neighborhoods may be at greater risk through the amplification of other risk factors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.ConclusionsPotential explanations for the increased vulnerability of youth living in poor neighborhoods are discussed.
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Siriwardhane, Pavithra, and Tehmina Khan. "The Gendered Nature of the Risk Factors of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Gender Equality: A Literature Review from a Vulnerability Perspective." Sustainability 13, no. 23 (December 2, 2021): 13375. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su132313375.
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The risk factors of COVID-19 are not gender-neutral but gendered. A vulnerability approach to pandemics suggests that females are more prone to risk exposure while there are inequalities in accessing resources and opportunities. These inequalities create a gendered pandemic vulnerability. The current article addresses the specific vulnerability on the gendered risk factors encountered by girls and women due to the gendered pandemic in a global context and their impacts on gender inequality. This study analyses the existing literature on the gendered pandemic and risk factors on females that lead to gender inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this study adopts a vulnerability approach to the pandemic as an analytical concept. Our findings from the systematic literature review suggest that women’s pre-existing vulnerabilities are exacerbated in the wake of the pandemic due to the gendered risk factors worsening the gender equality gap. We conclude by arguing that our study’s finding supports a vulnerability approach to disasters.
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Lyu, Hengyu, Rosalba Minelli, Charles E. Deckard, Sahil Seth, Justin Huang, Hong Jiang, Michael D. Peoples, et al. "Abstract LB079: Pancreatic clonal replica tumors display functional heterogeneity in response to KRAS pharmacological inhibition and reveal unique epigenetic vulnerabilities to overcome resistance." Cancer Research 82, no. 12_Supplement (June 15, 2022): LB079. http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/1538-7445.am2022-lb079.
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Abstract Introduction: Pre-existing tumor heterogeneity may allow tumors to escape treatment via selection and expansion of drug-resistant clones. Recent discovery of KRAS targeted therapies (e.g. SOS1i, KRASG12Ci, etc.) has dramatically changed the clinical outlook for patients with KRAS mutant tumors. Here, we generated and utilized pancreatic clonal replica tumors (CRTs) to identify drug-resistant clones of KRAS inhibitors (e.g. SOS1i and MEKi, KRASG12Di). Deep clonal characterization of KRAS inhibition revealed a novel epigenetic vulnerability which may inform on unbiased combination strategies to prolong responses for pancreatic cancer patients. Experimental procedures: Our CRT platform combines high-complexity in vivo lineage tracing with quantitative assessments of adaptive responses to therapeutics. In this study we generated a KRASG12D-driven CRT xenograft model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and treated the CRTs with MEKi, SOSi, and MEKi + SOSi. Upon comprehensive analysis of the clonal composition associated with each drug treatment, we identified, isolated, and validated a collection of clones with differential response to MEKi + SOS1i or KRASG12Di. Deep molecular characterization of sensitive and resistance clones identified novel combination strategies to overcome resistance to KRAS inhibitors. Results: We found that KRAS inhibition greatly impacted CRT clonal composition and tumor heterogeneity. Well-controlled reconstitution experiments with CRT-informed treatment-naïve clones confirmed the pre-existing nature of the differential clonal response to KRAS inhibitors in pancreatic cancer. Transcriptomic profiling of clonal diversity further revealed a BRD3-driven molecular plasticity in resistant clones that may drive resistance to MEKi + SOS1i or KRASG12Di. Pharmacological combination of MEKi (trametinib) + SOS1i (BI-3406) or KRASG12Di (MRTX1133) with BETi (BI 894999 and dBET6) exhibited combination benefits in preclinical pancreatic cancer models. Conclusions: Our study suggests that pre-existing heterogeneous subclones with epigenetic plasticity contribute to escaping direct KRAS inhibition in pancreatic cancer and provides a new avenue to overcome such resistance by combining KRAS inhibitors with BET inhibitors. Citation Format: Hengyu Lyu, Rosalba Minelli, Charles E. Deckard, Sahil Seth, Justin Huang, Hong Jiang, Michael D. Peoples, Meggie Lam, Christopher A. Bristow, Daniel Gerlach, Ulrike Tontsch-Grunt, Chieh-Yuan Li, I-Lin Ho, Christopher P. Vellano, Marco H. Hofmann, Timothy P. Heffernan, Joseph R. Marszalek, Andrea Viale, Alessandro Carugo. Pancreatic clonal replica tumors display functional heterogeneity in response to KRAS pharmacological inhibition and reveal unique epigenetic vulnerabilities to overcome resistance [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr LB079.
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Rychetnik, Lucie, Peter Sainsbury, and Greg Stewart. "How Local Health Districts can prepare for the effects of climate change: an adaptation model applied to metropolitan Sydney." Australian Health Review 43, no. 6 (2019): 601. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/ah18153.
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Climate change adaptation can be defined as a form of risk management (i.e. assessing climate change-related risks and responding appropriately so that the risks can be pre-emptively minimised and managed as they arise). Adapting to climate change by hospital and community health services will entail responding to changing health needs of the local population, and to the likely effects of climate change on health service resources, workforce and infrastructure. In this paper we apply a model that health services can use to predict and respond to climate change risks and illustrate this with reference to Sydney’s Local Health Districts (LHDs). We outline the climate change predictions for the Sydney metropolitan area, discuss the resulting vulnerabilities for LHDs and consider the potential of LHDs to respond. Three ‘core business’ categories are examined: (1) ambulance, emergency and acute health care; (2) routine health care; and (3) population and preventative health services. We consider the key climate change risks and vulnerabilities of the LHDs’ workforce, facilities and finances, and some important transboundary issues. Many Australian health services have existing robust disaster plans and management networks. These could be expanded to incorporate local climate and health adaptation plans. What is known about the topic? There is an inextricable relationship between climate change and human health, with important implications for the delivery of health services. Climate change will affect health service demand, and the resources, workforce and infrastructure of health services. What does this paper add? This paper outlines how local health services can use existing data sources and models for assessing their climate change-related risks and vulnerabilities to predict, prepare for and respond to those risks. This is illustrated with reference to Sydney’s LHDs. What are the implications for practitioners? Adaptation to climate change by health services is an important component of risk management. Local health services need to prepare for the effects of climate change by assessing the risks and developing and implementing climate and health adaptation plans.
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Hoffmann, Florian F., and Isadora d'Avila Lima Nery Gonçalves. "Border Regimes and Pandemic Law in Time of COVID-19: A View from Brazil." AJIL Unbound 114 (2020): 327–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/aju.2020.65.
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COVID-19 has had a profound impact on migrants and refugees the world over. Their pre-existing vulnerabilities were immediately exacerbated as national health systems were often overwhelmed and many disease control measures were either inaccessible to them or had disproportionate socio-economic effects. But migrants and refugees have also been framed as prima facie causes for the transboundary spread of the virus, and public health exception and derogation clauses in both national and international refugee and human rights instruments have been used to block their entry, suspend asylum processing, or trigger deportations. Taking the example of Brazil as a point of departure, the present contribution argues that (for at least some states) the appearance of the virus seems to have served as a legal carte blanche for fundamentally reconfiguring or closing down border regimes. More specifically, we argue that the strategic mainstreaming of global health regulations into border regimes points to the emergence of a “pandemic law” that encroaches upon already fragile transnational legal regime complexes, with the potential to upend or hollow out existing frameworks for migrant and refugee protection.
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Goel, Shubham, Kunal Gupta, Mayank Garg, and A. K. Madan. "Ethical Hacking and Its Countermeasures." International Journal of Advance Research and Innovation 2, no. 3 (2014): 41–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.51976/ijari.231408.
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In today‘s world the explosive growth of the Internet has brought many good things such as E-commerce-banking, E-mail, Cloud Computing. Most organizations, governments are linked to the internet in some way or the other, but the question arises ‗how safe are they‘. There is also a Dark side to all the progress such as Hack-ing, creation of Backdoors, phishing etc.This paper elucidates in brief about what hacking is, discusses its scope, types of hackers and the techniques employed by them. Itarticulates on the growing trend of smart mailers, which can send mails from any possible email,working with Kali which is an offensive software penetration tool and a provides a demonstration of SQL injection and various vulnerabilities still existing in today‘s sites. The paper also lays out the example of various gaping vulnerabilities found by the authors of this paper in govern-ment websites. Hacking is the first big problem faced by Governments, companies, and private citizens alike around the world. Hackers today are invading privacy like reading e-mail, stealing credit card number shopping sites, and putting it out on the web for everyone to see. The paper and other discussions help the common people and organizations to understand the loopholes, and even if the people can‘t rectify it least they can pre-vent themselves.
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Li, Gaoxiang, and Khalid T. Mursi. "A Subspace Pre-Learning Strategy to Break the Interpose PUF." Electronics 11, no. 7 (March 27, 2022): 1049. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics11071049.
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Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are promising security primitives for resource-constrained IoT devices. A critical aspect of PUF security research is to identify all potential security risks. This information about vulnerabilities is beneficial for both PUF developers and PUF-using application developers in terms of designing new PUFs to mitigate existing risks and avoid vulnerable PUFs. Recently, a PUF structure called Interpose PUF (IPUF) was proposed, which claims to be resistant to reliability attacks and machine learning modeling attacks. Related studies on this secure PUF design have demonstrated that some IPUFs can still be broken, but large IPUFs may remain secure against all known modeling attacks. In addition, all these studies either focus on plain challenge–response pair attacks or require prior knowledge of IPUF architecture implementation. However, depending on the claim of attack resistance to reliability attacks, we can employ a different attack approach to break IPUFs. In this paper, we describe a subspace pre-learning-based attack method that can rapidly and accurately break the IPUFs that were treated as secure in the earlier study, revealing a vulnerability in IPUFs if the open interface conforms to the way challenge–response data are accessed by the subspace pre-learning-based attack method.
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Kim, Won-Bin, Su-Hyun Kim, Daehee Seo, and Im-Yeong Lee. "Broadcast Proxy Reencryption Based on Certificateless Public Key Cryptography for Secure Data Sharing." Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing 2021 (December 16, 2021): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2021/1567019.
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Broadcast proxy reencryption (BPRE), which combines broadcast encryption (BE) and proxy reencryption (PRE), is a technology used for the redistribution of data uploaded on the cloud to multiple users. BPRE reencrypts data encrypted by the distributor and then uploads it to the cloud into a ciphertext that at a later stage targets multiple recipients. As a result of this, flexible data sharing is possible for multiple recipients. However, various inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of the BE, such as the recipient anonymity problem and the key escrow problem, also creep into BPRE. Our aim in this study was to address this problem of the existing BPRE technology. The partial key verification problem that appeared in the process of solving the key escrow problem was solved, and the computational efficiency was improved by not using bilinear pairing, which requires a lot of computation time.
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Dharmalingam, Jeya Mala, and M. Eswaran. "An Agent Based Intelligent Dynamic Vulnerability Analysis Framework for Critical SQLIA Attacks." International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies 14, no. 3 (July 2018): 56–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/ijiit.2018070104.
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This article describes how software vulnerability analysis and testing for web applications should detect not only the common attacks but also dynamic vulnerability attacks. These are the attacks such as structured query language injection attacks (SQLIAs) which will extract the most crucial user information from the targeted database. In this proposed approach, an intelligent agent namely intelligent vulnerability analyzer agent (IVA) is proposed in which the external attacks due to dynamic user inputs are identified using a heuristic-guided intelligent graph searching and then a pre and post condition based analysis is performed to identify the dynamic vulnerabilities. Further, the proposed approach is compared with some of the existing works based on the number of false positives and false negatives of attacks detection and confirmed that the proposed work is a novel and effective one in finding out SQLIAs.
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Bromet, E. J., L. Atwoli, N. Kawakami, F. Navarro-Mateu, P. Piotrowski, A. J. King, S. Aguilar-Gaxiola, et al. "Post-traumatic stress disorder associated with natural and human-made disasters in the World Mental Health Surveys." Psychological Medicine 47, no. 2 (August 30, 2016): 227–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0033291716002026.
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BackgroundResearch on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following natural and human-made disasters has been undertaken for more than three decades. Although PTSD prevalence estimates vary widely, most are in the 20–40% range in disaster-focused studies but considerably lower (3–5%) in the few general population epidemiological surveys that evaluated disaster-related PTSD as part of a broader clinical assessment. The World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys provide an opportunity to examine disaster-related PTSD in representative general population surveys across a much wider range of sites than in previous studies.MethodAlthough disaster-related PTSD was evaluated in 18 WMH surveys, only six in high-income countries had enough respondents for a risk factor analysis. Predictors considered were socio-demographics, disaster characteristics, and pre-disaster vulnerability factors (childhood family adversities, prior traumatic experiences, and prior mental disorders).ResultsDisaster-related PTSD prevalence was 0.0–3.8% among adult (ages 18+) WMH respondents and was significantly related to high education, serious injury or death of someone close, forced displacement from home, and pre-existing vulnerabilities (prior childhood family adversities, other traumas, and mental disorders). Of PTSD cases 44.5% were among the 5% of respondents classified by the model as having highest PTSD risk.ConclusionDisaster-related PTSD is uncommon in high-income WMH countries. Risk factors are consistent with prior research: severity of exposure, history of prior stress exposure, and pre-existing mental disorders. The high concentration of PTSD among respondents with high predicted risk in our model supports the focus of screening assessments that identify disaster survivors most in need of preventive interventions.
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Maclean, Miriam Jennifer, Scott Anthony Sims, and Melissa O'Donnell. "Role of pre-existing adversity and child maltreatment on mental health outcomes for children involved in child protection: population-based data linkage study." BMJ Open 9, no. 7 (July 2019): e029675. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-029675.
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ObjectivesTo determine mental health outcomes for children with a history of child protection system involvement, accounting for pre-existing adversity, and to examine variation in risk across diagnostic groupings and child protection subgroups.DesignA longitudinal, population-based record-linkage study.ParticipantsAll children in Western Australia (WA) with birth records between 1990 and 2009.Outcome measuresMental health diagnoses, mental health contacts and any mental health event ascertained from International Classification of Diseases codes within WA’s Hospital Morbidity Data Collection and Mental Health Information System from birth until 2013.ResultsCompared with children without child protection contact, children with substantiated maltreatment had higher prevalence of mental health events (37.4% vs 5.9%) and diagnoses (20% vs 3.6%). After adjusting for background risks, all maltreatment types were associated with an almost twofold to almost threefold increased hazard for mental health events. Multivariate analysis also showed mental health events were elevated across all child protection groups, ranging from HR: 3.54 (95% CI 3.28 to 3.82) for children who had entered care to HR: 2.31 (95% CI 2.18 to 2.46) for unsubstantiated allegations. Maternal mental health, aboriginality, young maternal age and living in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods were all associated with an increased likelihood of mental health events. The increase varied across diagnostic categories, with particularly increased risk for personality disorder, and frequent comorbidity of mental health and substance abuse disorders.ConclusionsYoung people who have been involved in the child protection system are at increased risk for mental health events and diagnoses. These findings emphasise the importance of services and supports to improve mental health outcomes in this vulnerable population. Adversities in childhood along with genetic or environmental vulnerabilities resulting from maternal mental health issues also contribute to young people’s mental health outcomes, suggesting a role for broader social supports and early intervention services in addition to targeted mental health programmes.
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Cardoza, Jacqueline E., Carina J. Gronlund, Justin Schott, Todd Ziegler, Brian Stone, and Marie S. O’Neill. "Heat-Related Illness Is Associated with Lack of Air Conditioning and Pre-Existing Health Problems in Detroit, Michigan, USA: A Community-Based Participatory Co-Analysis of Survey Data." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 16 (August 7, 2020): 5704. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17165704.
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The objective of the study was to investigate, using academic-community epidemiologic co-analysis, the odds of reported heat-related illness for people with (1) central air conditioning (AC) or window unit AC versus no AC, and (2) fair/poor vs. good/excellent reported health. From 2016 to 2017, 101 Detroit residents were surveyed once regarding extreme heat, housing and neighborhood features, and heat-related illness in the prior 5 years. Academic partners selected initial confounders and, after instruction on directed acyclic graphs, community partners proposed alternate directed acyclic graphs with additional confounders. Heat-related illness was regressed on AC type or health and co-selected confounders. The study found that heat-related illness was associated with no-AC (n = 96, odds ratio (OR) = 4.66, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.22, 17.72); living ≤5 years in present home (n = 57, OR = 10.39, 95% CI = 1.13, 95.88); and fair/poor vs. good/excellent health (n = 97, OR = 3.15, 95% CI = 1.33, 7.48). Co-analysis suggested multiple built-environment confounders. We conclude that Detroit residents with poorer health and no AC are at greater risk during extreme heat. Academic-community co-analysis using directed acyclic graphs enhances research on community-specific social and health vulnerabilities by identifying key confounders and future research directions for rigorous and impactful research.
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Ebrahim, Hasina Banu, Colwyn Martin, and Lorayne Excell. "Early childhood teachers' and managers' lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa." Journal of Education, no. 84 (November 25, 2021): 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i84a11.
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The declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation in March 2020 brought many changes to the early childhood sector internationally. The South African response is best understood in the context of an under-developed sector with pre-existing vulnerabilities. In this article, we present a contextual understanding of the lived experiences of early childhood development (ECD) teachers and managers during the lockdown and the opening phases of a risk-adjusted approach. Our use of a phenomenological lens together with systems theory provides a reality check through a focus on lived experiences. Data were produced through an online survey with 28 ECD teachers and managers. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a subset of 8 of these participants. Findings show that disruptions of COVID-19 led to entrenching inequities in service provision and early learning opportunities. These intersecting dimensions have implications for building effective ECD systems.
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Grigorescu, Octavian, Andreea Nica, Mihai Dascalu, and Razvan Rughinis. "CVE2ATT&CK: BERT-Based Mapping of CVEs to MITRE ATT&CK Techniques." Algorithms 15, no. 9 (August 31, 2022): 314. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/a15090314.
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Since cyber-attacks are ever-increasing in number, intensity, and variety, a strong need for a global, standardized cyber-security knowledge database has emerged as a means to prevent and fight cybercrime. Attempts already exist in this regard. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list documents numerous reported software and hardware vulnerabilities, thus building a community-based dictionary of existing threats. The MITRE ATT&CK Framework describes adversary behavior and offers mitigation strategies for each reported attack pattern. While extremely powerful on their own, the tremendous extra benefit gained when linking these tools cannot be overlooked. This paper introduces a dataset of 1813 CVEs annotated with all corresponding MITRE ATT&CK techniques and proposes models to automatically link a CVE to one or more techniques based on the text description from the CVE metadata. We establish a strong baseline that considers classical machine learning models and state-of-the-art pre-trained BERT-based language models while counteracting the highly imbalanced training set with data augmentation strategies based on the TextAttack framework. We obtain promising results, as the best model achieved an F1-score of 47.84%. In addition, we perform a qualitative analysis that uses Lime explanations to point out limitations and potential inconsistencies in CVE descriptions. Our model plays a critical role in finding kill chain scenarios inside complex infrastructures and enables the prioritization of CVE patching by the threat level. We publicly release our code together with the dataset of annotated CVEs.
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Nadine Hakizimana. "Addressing the Global Migration Crisis in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic." Thinker 88, no. 3 (September 6, 2021): 66–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.36615/thethinker.v88i3.605.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated pre-existing vulnerabilities faced by asylum seekers, refugees, and forcibly displaced persons. The topic of international migration has long been at the centre of global attention because of the extreme loss of life while crossing borders and the difficulty of managing large numbers of asylum seekers. International migration is arguably one of the most pressing issues of our time because of its transnational characteristic, which affects all countries across the world. Despite some concerted efforts, the international community has largely failed to provide solidarity and collective action to address the protracted global migration crisis. This article explores how the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent health and safety measures have complicated an already vulnerable refugee system. The article also considers where some windows of opportunity for progress in the multilateral refugee protection system may lie as the international community designs efforts to build back better in a post-Covid-19 world.
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Laroia, Gaurav, Benjamin D. Horne, Sean Esplin, and Vasant K. Ramaswamy. "A unified health algorithm that teaches itself to improve health outcomes for every individual: How far into the future is it?" DIGITAL HEALTH 8 (January 2022): 205520762210741. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076221074126.
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The single biggest factor driving health outcomes is patient behavior. The CHR Model (County Health Rankings Model) weights socioeconomic factors, lifestyle behaviors, and physical environment factors collectively at 80% in driving impact on health outcomes, to the 20% weight for access to and quality of clinical care. Commercial determinants of health affect everyone today and unhealthy choices worsen pre-existing economic, social, and racial inequities. Yet there is a disproportionate focus on therapeutic intervention to the exclusion of shaping patient behaviors to improve healthcare. If the recent pandemic taught us a critically important lesson, it is the imperative to look beyond clinical care. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long-standing systemic health and social inequities put various groups of people at higher risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19, including many racial and ethnic minority groups. The virus was simply more efficient in detecting such vulnerabilities than the guardians of these physiologies. These insights from the pandemic come at the heel of a confluence of three major accelerants that may radically reshape our approaches to hot-spotting vulnerabilities and managing them before they manifest in a derangement or disease. They are the recent strides in behavioral economics and behavior science; advances in remote monitoring and personal health technologies; and developments in artificial intelligence and data sciences. These accelerants allow us to imagine a previously impossible vision—we can now build and maintain a unified health algorithm for every individual that can dynamically track the two interdependent streams of risk, clinical and behavioral.
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Zhou, Xu, Bingjie Duan, Xugang Wu, and Pengfei Wang. "SAViP: Semantic-Aware Vulnerability Prediction for Binary Programs with Neural Networks." Applied Sciences 13, no. 4 (February 10, 2023): 2271. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app13042271.
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Vulnerability prediction, in which static analysis is leveraged to predict the vulnerabilities of binary programs, has become a popular research topic. Traditional vulnerability prediction methods depend on vulnerability patterns, which must be predefined by security experts in a time-consuming manner. The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has yielded new options for vulnerability prediction. Neural networks allow vulnerability patterns to be learned automatically. However, current works extract only one or two types of features and use traditional models such as word2vec, which results in the loss of much instruction-level information. In this paper, we propose a model named SAViP to predict vulnerabilities in binary programs. To fully extract binary information, we integrate three kinds of features: semantic, statistical, and structural features. For semantic features, we apply the Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training task of the RoBERTa model to the assembly code to build our language model. Using this model, we innovatively combine the beginning token and the operation-code token to create the instruction embedding. For the statistical features, we design a 56-dimensional feature vector that contains 43 kinds of instructions. For the structural features, we improve the ability of the structure2vec network to obtain the characteristic of the network by emphasizing node self-attention. Through these optimizations, we significantly increase the accuracy of vulnerability prediction over existing methods. Our experiments show that SAViP achieves a recall of 77.85% and Top 100∼600 accuracies all above 95%. The results are 10% and 13% higher than those of the state-of-the-art V-Fuzz, respectively.
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Lytle, Megan, Dawn Carr, and Patricia Homan. "FINANCIAL HARDSHIPS AND MEDICATION ADHERENCE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC." Innovation in Aging 6, Supplement_1 (November 1, 2022): 831. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igac059.2983.
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Abstract Medication nonadherence is associated with numerous negative health outcomes among older adults, including myocardial infarction, stroke, preventable hospitalizations, and increased risk of decline in self-reported health status. Maintaining continuous use and access to needed medications in later life has important implications for quality and length of life. A primary barrier shown to interfere with medication adherence in older adults is an inability to pay for medication. Relative to their younger counterparts, older adults have more financial protections that increase access to needed prescription medication through health insurance coverage. Despite these added protections, older adults are more likely to experience financial insecurity, with some evidence suggesting that COVID-19 accentuated existing vulnerabilities. Data are derived from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), leveraging data drawn from the 2016, 2018, and 2020 study waves (n=3,185). Logistic models were used to evaluate the association between five COVID-19 related financial setbacks (i.e., inability to pay mortgage/rent, credit card bills, utility or insurance bills, medical bills, and inadequate money for food), and medication nonadherence among adults 60+. Results show that net of pre-COVID financial vulnerabilities and socioeconomic status, individuals who reported being unable to pay medical bills and those unable to pay rent/mortgage after the start of the pandemic reported higher odds (19% higher and 230% higher odds, respectively) of not taking/filling their prescription medication due to cost. Results suggest that greater financial protections for housing and medical bills among financially vulnerable older adults will increase medication adherence.
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Wang, Lu, Xin Li, Ruiheng Wang, Yang Xin, Mingcheng Gao, and Yulin Chen. "PreNNsem: A Heterogeneous Ensemble Learning Framework for Vulnerability Detection in Software." Applied Sciences 10, no. 22 (November 10, 2020): 7954. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app10227954.
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Automated vulnerability detection is one of the critical issues in the realm of software security. Existing solutions to this problem are mostly based on features that are defined by human experts and directly lead to missed potential vulnerability. Deep learning is an effective method for automating the extraction of vulnerability characteristics. Our paper proposes intelligent and automated vulnerability detection while using deep representation learning and heterogeneous ensemble learning. Firstly, we transform sample data from source code by removing segments that are unrelated to the vulnerability in order to reduce code analysis and improve detection efficiency in our experiments. Secondly, we represent the sample data as real vectors by pre-training on the corpus and maintaining its semantic information. Thirdly, the vectors are fed to a deep learning model to obtain the features of vulnerability. Lastly, we train a heterogeneous ensemble classifier. We analyze the effectiveness and resource consumption of different network models, pre-training methods, classifiers, and vulnerabilities separately in order to evaluate the detection method. We also compare our approach with some well-known vulnerability detection commercial tools and academic methods. The experimental results show that our proposed method provides improvements in false positive rate, false negative rate, precision, recall, and F1 score.
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Spitschak, Alf, Shailendra Gupta, Krishna P. Singh, Stella Logotheti, and Brigitte M. Pützer. "Drug Repurposing at the Interface of Melanoma Immunotherapy and Autoimmune Disease." Pharmaceutics 15, no. 1 (December 27, 2022): 83. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics15010083.
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Cancer cells have a remarkable ability to evade recognition and destruction by the immune system. At the same time, cancer has been associated with chronic inflammation, while certain autoimmune diseases predispose to the development of neoplasia. Although cancer immunotherapy has revolutionized antitumor treatment, immune-related toxicities and adverse events detract from the clinical utility of even the most advanced drugs, especially in patients with both, metastatic cancer and pre-existing autoimmune diseases. Here, the combination of multi-omics, data-driven computational approaches with the application of network concepts enables in-depth analyses of the dynamic links between cancer, autoimmune diseases, and drugs. In this review, we focus on molecular and epigenetic metastasis-related processes within cancer cells and the immune microenvironment. With melanoma as a model, we uncover vulnerabilities for drug development to control cancer progression and immune responses. Thereby, drug repurposing allows taking advantage of existing safety profiles and established pharmacokinetic properties of approved agents. These procedures promise faster access and optimal management for cancer treatment. Together, these approaches provide new disease-based and data-driven opportunities for the prediction and application of targeted and clinically used drugs at the interface of immune-mediated diseases and cancer towards next-generation immunotherapies.
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Kumari, Aparna, Rushil Kaushikkumar Patel, Urvi Chintukumar Sukharamwala, Sudeep Tanwar, Maria Simona Raboaca, Aldosary Saad, and Amr Tolba. "AI-Empowered Attack Detection and Prevention Scheme for Smart Grid System." Mathematics 10, no. 16 (August 10, 2022): 2852. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/math10162852.
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The existing grid infrastructure has already begun transforming into the next-generation cyber-physical smart grid (SG) system. This transformation has improved the grid’s reliability and efficiency but has exposed severe vulnerabilities due to growing cyberattacks and threats. For example, malicious actors may be able to tamper with system readings, parameters, and energy prices and penetrate to get direct access to the data. Several works exist to handle the aforementioned issues, but they have not been fully explored. Consequently, this paper proposes an AI-ADP scheme for the SG system, which is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based attack-detection and prevention (ADP) mechanism by using a cryptography-driven recommender system to ensure data security and integrity. The proposed AI-ADP scheme is divided into two phases: (i) attack detection and (ii) attack prevention. We employed the extreme gradient-boosting (XGBoost) mechanism for attack detection and classification. It is a new ensemble learning methodology that offers many advantages over similar methods, including built-in features, etc. Then, SHA-512 is used to secure the communication that employs faster performance, allowing the transmission of more data with the same security level. The performance of the proposed AI-ADP scheme is evaluated based on various parameters, such as attack-detection accuracy, cycles used per byte, and total cycles used. The proposed AI-ADP scheme outperformed the existing approaches and obtained 99.12% accuracy, which is relatively high compared to the pre-existing methods.
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Parray, Ateeb Ahmad, Muhammad Riaz Hossain, Rafia Sultana, Bachera Aktar, and Sabina Faiz Rashid. "“Younger women had more access to COVID-19 information”: An intersectional analysis of factors influencing women and girls’ access to COVID-19 information in Rohingya and host communities in Bangladesh." PLOS Global Public Health 2, no. 12 (December 5, 2022): e0000459. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000459.
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The Rohingya and Bangladeshi host communities live at a heightened risk of COVID-19 impact due to their pre-existing vulnerabilities, religious beliefs, and strict socio-cultural and gender norms that render primarily women and girls vulnerable. However, the extent of this vulnerability varies within and across population groups in the host and Rohingya communities. The intersectionality lens helps identify, recognize, and understand these factors that create inequities within populations. This study explored the factors that influenced the women and girls’ access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic through an intersectional lens. This paper presents partial findings from the exploratory qualitative part of mixed-method research conducted in ten Rohingya camps and four wards of the adjacent host communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Data were extracted from 24 in-depth interviews (12 in each community) conducted from November 2020 to March 2021 with diverse participants, including adolescent girls, younger women, adult women, pregnant and lactating mothers, persons with disabilities, older adults, and single female-household heads. All participants provided verbal informed consent before the interviews. In the case of the adolescents, assent was taken from the participants, and verbal informed consent was taken from their parents/guardians. The ethical clearance of this study was sought from the institutional review board of BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University. We find that the women and girls living in Rohingya communities exhibit a more profound structural interplay of factors within their socio-ecological ecosystem depending on their age, power, and position in the society, physical (dis)abilities, and pre-existing vulnerabilities stemming from their exodus, making them more vulnerable to COVID-19 impact by hindering their access to information. Unlike Rohingya, the host women and girls explain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their access to information through the lens of intergenerational poverty and continuous strain on existing resources, thereby highlighting shrinking opportunities due to the influx, COVID-19 infodemic and misinformation, access to digital devices amongst the adolescents, and restricted mobility mainly due to transport, school closures, and distance-related issues. Moreover, the socio-cultural beliefs and the gender norms imposed on women and adolescent girls played an essential role in accessing information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and consequently influenced their perception of and response to the disease and its safety protocols. Socio-cultural gender norms led to mobility restrictions, which compounded by lockdowns influenced their access to information resulting in dependency on secondary sources, usually from male members of their families, which can easily mislead/provide mis/partial information. The younger age groups had more access to primary sources of information and a broader support network. In comparison, the older age groups were more dependent on secondary sources, and their social networks were limited to their family members due to their movement difficulty because of age/aging-related physical conditions. This study explored and analyzed the intersectional factors that influenced the women and girls’ access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic from two contexts with varying degrees of pre-existing vulnerability and its extent. These include gender, age, state of vulnerability, power and privilege, socio-economic status, and physical (dis)ability. It is imperative that services geared towards the most vulnerable are contextualized and consider the intersectional factors that determine the communities’ access to information.
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Kotlarz, Parker, Yasmine B. Nabulsi, and Joseph Cahill. "A-59 Psychosis and Coma in COVID-19: A Case Report." Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 36, no. 6 (August 30, 2021): 1101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acab062.77.
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Abstract Objective The objective of this case is to spotlight the potential neurological andneuropsychiatric symptoms associated with COVID-19. Method A 55-year-old African American male with a history of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obesity, tobacco use, and hypertension voluntarily presented to the local hospital with auditoryhallucinations and delusions. During an inpatient stay, the patient developed symptomsconsistent with COVID-19 and subsequently tested positive for the virus. Thirty-nine days after the initial positive COVID-19 test result, he remained in a coma with retained brainstem responses. An EEG demonstrated encephalopathy and MRI showed multiple, well-circumscribed white matter lesions consistent with acute demyelination (Figure 1). After three days of high-dose steroids and over a month in a coma, the patient began following simple commands. Unfortunately, on hospital day 66, the patient developed sudden hypotension and worsening respiratory status. Results While psychotic episodes in relation to COVID-19 are not widely reported, psychotic episodes are shown in three COVID-19 cases. Other reports have found significant changes in consciousness in COVID-19 patients with delayed awakening from a comatose state. Pre-existing inflammatory responses in those with psychiatric disease may be accelerated by the immune response due to COVID-19. Conclusion Mental status changes in those with psychiatric illness who have COVID-19 are worth exploring. It is unclear whether a history of COVID-19 may accelerate a neuropsychiatric process or other central nervous system diseases. Future research may want to examine the possible interrelationship between pre-existing neurological vulnerabilities and COVID-19. The possibility of high-dose steroid treatment for COVID-19 neuroinflammatory complications should be considered.
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ROSTOM, Meryem. "Gendering the pandemic: the effect of the Covid-19 lockdown on female students’ household labor allocation in Morocco." Journal of Quality in Education 12, no. 19 (May 30, 2022): 91–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.37870/joqie.v12i19.306.
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As the Covid-19 spread across the world, it has affected the lives of people from all walks of life. While confined to home after the imposed lockdowns and closure of educational institutions, girls were called upon to perform family chores and assume caregiving roles. This may result in limited time and energy to continue their learning at a distance. Using survey data collected in April and May 2020 from a sample of Moroccan female first year university students, the present paper analyzes the effect of household labor allocation during home confinement on female students’ remote learning. Findings demonstrate how the immediate effects of covid-19 pandemic showed themselves in education with girls being left behind, and display how the crisis has widened gender inequalities and created new challenges in a society where gender-based discrimination and traditional social norms already exist. Understanding the gender-differentiated impacts of the Covid-19 crisis is necessary to design policy responses that reduce pre-existing social and educational vulnerabilities and ensure that the gender parity progress achieved in recent decades is not reversed.
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Rijken, Conny, Leyla Khadraoui, and Marian Tankink. "(Preventing) Secondary Victimisation of Trafficking Victims through Law Enforcement Interventions." Journal of Human Trafficking, Enslavement and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence 2, no. 1 (July 8, 2021): 3–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.7590/266644721x16239186251233.
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Secondary victimisation during criminal proceedings is a serious risk for victims of trafficking who participate in these proceedings. Psychological consequences of trafficking and pre-existing vulnerabilities make them prone to secondary victimisation. Based on empirical research among trafficking victims, stakeholders and of criminal files, the article provides insights on the psychological consequences of human trafficking and identifies a number of risk factors. These are: lack of identification, lack of safety and trust, not being believed, repetition and intensity of hearings, disrespectful treatment, lack of empathy and lack of knowledge about victim's rights. These factors are discussed and contextualised in the current discourse with the ultimate aim to provide indications on the prevention of secondary victimisation. The article unveils the discrepancy between victims' expectations towards the police to take them out of a trafficking situation, even if they decline assistance and police's perceptions on their ability to intervene only if the victim accepts assistance. This leads to the call for further research in order to answer the question to intervene or not to intervene.
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Johnson, PsyD, Candice C., and Mirela A. Aldea, PhD. "Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health: potentially vulnerable groups and comorbidities." Journal of Emergency Management 19, no. 9 (July 1, 2021): 9–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.5055/jem.0604.
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The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented emergency situation with significant stressors causing adverse impacts on mental health across the globe. Certain individuals are potentially more vulnerable during the outbreak, in particular those with medical vulnerabilities to COVID-19, eg, elderly, living with chronic illnesses, as well as individuals with pre-existing mental health issues such as anxiety disorders, depression, suicidality, and loss/grief. Additionally, individuals with persistent post-acute COVID-19 symptoms, eg, long haulers, are also a vulnerable population. During this international crisis, pandemic-related stressors, such as isolation/quarantine, lockdown, social distancing, homeschooling, loss of income or employment, and/or loss of loved ones could negatively affect these vulnerable subgroups and their overall life functioning. This paper aims to aid in the management of this international emergency by identifying potentially vulnerable subgroups because of the COVID-19 pandemic and by providing recommendations related to appropriate mental health referrals/interventions. This paper also aspires to enhance the knowledge of first responders and lay persons about vulnerability factors to readily help individuals struggling with mental health issues during the pandemic.
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Kader, Farah, and Clyde Lanford Smith. "Participatory Approaches to Addressing Missing COVID-19 Race and Ethnicity Data." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 12 (June 18, 2021): 6559. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126559.
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Varying dimensions of social, environmental, and economic vulnerability can lead to drastically different health outcomes. The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-19) pandemic exposes how the intersection of these vulnerabilities with individual behavior, healthcare access, and pre-existing conditions can lead to disproportionate risks of morbidity and mortality from the virus-induced illness, COVID-19. The available data shows that those who are black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) bear the brunt of this risk; however, missing data on race/ethnicity from federal, state, and local agencies impedes nuanced understanding of health disparities. In this commentary, we summarize the link between racism and COVID-19 disparities and the extent of missing data on race/ethnicity in critical COVID-19 reporting. In addition, we provide an overview of the current literature on missing demographic data in the US and hypothesize how racism contributes to nonresponse in health reporting broadly. Finally, we argue that health departments and healthcare systems must engage communities of color to co-develop race/ethnicity data collection processes as part of a comprehensive strategy for achieving health equity.
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Wang, Yu, Mingyan Zhou, Karen S. L. Lam, and Aimin Xu. "Protective roles of adiponectin in obesity-related fatty liver diseases: mechanisms and therapeutic implications." Arquivos Brasileiros de Endocrinologia & Metabologia 53, no. 2 (March 2009): 201–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0004-27302009000200012.
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Adiponectin is an insulin-sensitizing adipokine possessing multiple beneficial effects on obesity-related medical complications. This adipokine is secreted from adipocytes into the circulation as three oligomeric isoforms, including trimer, hexamer and the high molecular weight (HMW) oligomeric complex. Each oligomeric isoform of adiponectin possesses distinct biological properties and activates different signaling pathways in various target tissues. The hepato-protective activities have been demonstrated by many clinical and experimental studies. The decreased level of serum adiponectin represents an independent risk factor for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and liver dysfunctions in humans. In animals, elevation of circulating adiponectin by either pharmacological or genetic approaches leads to a significant alleviation of hepatomegaly, steatosis and necro-inflammation associated with various liver diseases. In adiponectin knockout mice, there is a pre-existing condition of hepatic steatosis and mitochondria dysfunction, which might contribute to the increased vulnerabilities of these mice to the secondary liver injuries induced by obesity and other conditions. This review aims to summarize recent advances on delination of the structural, molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the hepato-protective properties of adiponectin.
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Zulfiqar, Ghazal Mir. "Dirt, foreignness, and surveillance: The shifting relations of domestic work in Pakistan." Organization 26, no. 3 (November 22, 2018): 321–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508418812579.
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This article uses the site of a residential community within a gated university complex to examine a new urban wage model of domestic labor in Punjab, Pakistan. In a socio-historical context where employer–employee relations have traditionally been shaped by asymmetric reciprocal relations and kinship bonds based on class, caste, and gender hierarchies, the rise of a depersonalized wage system exposes women domestic workers to new insecurities and vulnerabilities. The findings from this ethnographic study show how notions of dirt and foreignness are employed symbolically and militarized surveillance employed in concrete terms to control worker bodies and enforce the wage model. This is enabled by spatial segregation between the intimate, feminized residential space and the private masculinized outer space encircling it within the walled complex. The women workers are, thus, caught between pre-capitalist forms of coercion and a market-based wage model. The study broadens existing scholarship on domestic work by examining domestic labor arrangements through the lens of a place-specific shifting of social and economic relations.