Books on the topic 'Virus-free'

Management of anaphylaxis 814Management of needlestick and contamination incidents 1 816Management of needlestick and contamination incidents 2: hepatitis B virus post-exposure prophylaxis 820Management of needlestick and contamination incidents 3: human immunodeficiency virus post-exposure prophylaxis 822Psychiatric emergencies 824In OH practice, anaphylaxis can occur in association with the administration of immunizations. All OH departments that administer vaccines must have adequate facilities for resuscitation. Resuscitation equipment should be latex free, particularly in the health care industry where the incidence of type 1 hypersensitivity to latex among employees is significant. OH staffs who administer vaccines should be retrained in resuscitation protocols annually....

Microbes 16Antimicrobial agents 17Human immunodeficiency virus 18Tuberculosis 20Infectious mononucleosis 21Malaria 22Syphilis 24Lyme disease 25Leishmaniasis 26• Single-celled organisms with their double-stranded DNA lying free in cytoplasm surrounded by a cell membrane and cell wall.• Most grow in air (aerobes), but can grow without it (facultative anaerobes). Some only grow in the absence of oxygen (strict anaerobes)....

Rabies virus is epidemic in most parts of the world. It can replicate in all warm-blooded animals in which it causes a devastating neurological illness, which almost invariably results in death. Rabies is a disease of animals and human infection is a ‘spillover’ event occurring most commonly following a bite from an infected dog. Infection is seen in different patterns; rabies with little or no wildlife involvement, sometimes known as urban or street rabies, or in the wildlife population with spillover into domesticated animals (sylvatic).Eleven distinct species of lyssavirus are now recognized: species 1 is the most common strain found predominately in terrestrial animals. Species 2-7 are found in bat species with the exception of Mokola virus (species 4). Despite the availability of effective vaccines significant mortality still occurs, mostly in the tropics. The majority of rabies free countries are islands which are able to remain rabies free by import controls. Effective animal vaccines are available and dog rabies is well controlled in most parts of the developed world with dog vaccination. However, it remains an intractable problem in many countries in Asia and Africa due to lack of infrastructure, cost of vaccines and difficulty to control dog population. In recent years progress in controlling wildlife rabies has been achieved in west Europe using vaccine in bait, which offers promise for other regions with complex epidemiology.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented higher education with an unprecedented challenge: How could institutions continue the basic work of teaching and research while maintaining safe environments for their faculty, staff, and students? In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise traces Duke University’s response to the pandemic to show how higher education broadly met that challenge head-on. Bliwise interviews people across the campus: from bus drivers and vaccine researchers to student activists, dining hall managers, and professors in areas from English to ecology. He explores the shift to teaching online and the reshaping of research programs; how surveillance testing and reconfiguring residence halls and dining sites helped limit the virus spread on campus; the efforts to promote student well-being and to sustain extracurricular programs; and what the surge in COVID-19 cases meant for the university health system. Bliwise also shows how broad cultural conversations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, climate change, free speech on campus, and systemic racism unfolded in this changed campus environment. Although the pandemic put remarkable pressures on the campus community, Bliwise demonstrates that it ultimately reaffirmed the importance of the campus experience in all its richness and complexity.

The advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has been an exciting breakthrough in our understanding of the genetic aetiology of autoimmune diseases. Substantial overlap has been found in susceptibility genes across multiple diseases, from connective tissue diseases and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, and psoriasis. Major technological advances now permit genotyping of millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Group analysis of SNPs by haplotypes, aided by completion of the Hapmap project, has improved our ability to pinpoint causal genetic variants. International collaboration to pool large-scale cohorts of patients has enabled GWAS in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), systemic sclerosis and Behçet's disease, with studies in progress for ANCA-associated vasculitis. These 'hypothesis-free' studies have revealed many novel disease-associated genes. In both SLE and systemic sclerosis, identified genes map to known pathways including antigen presentation (MHC, TNFSF4), autoreactivity of B and T lymphocytes (BLK, BANK1), type I interferon production (STAT4, IRF5) and the NFκ‎B pathway (TNIP1). In SLE alone, additional genes appear to be involved in dysregulated apoptotic cell clearance (ITGAM, TREX1, C1q, C4) and recognition of immune complexes (FCGR2A, FCGR3B). Future developments include whole-genome sequencing to identify rare variants, and efforts to understand functional consequences of susceptibility genes. Putative environmental triggers for connective tissue diseases include infectious agents, especially Epstein-Barr virus; cigarette smoking; occupational exposure to toxins including silica; and low vitamin D, due to its immunomodulatory effects. Despite numerous studies looking at toxin exposure and connective tissue diseases, conclusive evidence is lacking, due to either rarity of exposure or rarity of disease.

This GSoD In Focus Special Brief provides an overview of the state of democracy in Asia and the Pacific at the end of 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, and assesses some of the preliminary impacts that the pandemic has had on democracy in the region in 2020. Key fact and findings include: • Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across Asia and the Pacific faced a range of democratic challenges. Chief among these were continuing political fragility, violent conflict, recurrent military interference in the political sphere, enduring hybridity, deepening autocratization, creeping ethnonationalism, advancing populist leadership, democratic backsliding, shrinking civic space, the spread of disinformation, and weakened checks and balances. The crisis conditions engendered by the pandemic risk further entrenching and/or intensifying the negative democratic trends observable in the region prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. • Across the region, governments have been using the conditions created by the pandemic to expand executive power and restrict individual rights. Aspects of democratic practice that have been significantly impacted by anti-pandemic measures include the exercise of fundamental rights (notably freedom of assembly and free speech). Some countries have also seen deepened religious polarization and discrimination. Women, vulnerable groups, and ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and discriminated against in the enforcement of lockdowns. There have been disruptions of electoral processes, increased state surveillance in some countries, and increased influence of the military. This is particularly concerning in new, fragile or backsliding democracies, which risk further eroding their already fragile democratic bases. • As in other regions, however, the pandemic has also led to a range of innovations and changes in the way democratic actors, such as parliaments, political parties, electoral commissions, civil society organizations and courts, conduct their work. In a number of countries, for example, government ministries, electoral commissions, legislators, health officials and civil society have developed innovative new online tools for keeping the public informed about national efforts to combat the pandemic. And some legislatures are figuring out new ways to hold government to account in the absence of real-time parliamentary meetings. • The consideration of political regime type in debates around ways of containing the pandemic also assumes particular relevance in Asia and the Pacific, a region that houses high-performing democracies, such as New Zealand and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), a mid-range performer (Taiwan), and also non-democratic regimes, such as China, Singapore and Viet Nam—all of which have, as of December 2020, among the lowest per capita deaths from COVID-19 in the world. While these countries have all so far managed to contain the virus with fewer fatalities than in the rest of the world, the authoritarian regimes have done so at a high human rights cost, whereas the democracies have done so while adhering to democratic principles, proving that the pandemic can effectively be fought through democratic means and does not necessarily require a trade off between public health and democracy. • The massive disruption induced by the pandemic can be an unparalleled opportunity for democratic learning, change and renovation in the region. Strengthening democratic institutions and processes across the region needs to go hand in hand with curbing the pandemic. Rebuilding societies and economic structures in its aftermath will likewise require strong, sustainable and healthy democracies, capable of tackling the gargantuan challenges ahead. The review of the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 uses qualitative analysis and data of events and trends in the region collected through International IDEA’s Global Monitor of COVID-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights, an initiative co-funded by the European Union.

Introduction During the Covid-19 pandemic, non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) aimed to minimise the spread of the virus as much as possible to avoid the most severe cases and the collapse of health systems. These measures included mobility restrictions in several countries, including Spain. Objective To assess the impact of mobility constraints on incidence, transmission, severe cases and mortality in the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. These constraints include: • Mandatory home confinement. • - Recommendation to stay at home. • - Perimeter closures for entry and/or exit from established areas. • - Restriction of night-time mobility (curfew). Methodology Systematic literature review, including documents from official bodies, systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The following reference databases were consulted until October 2021 (free and controlled language): Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, TripDB, Epistemonikos, Royal college of London, COVID-end, COVID-19 Evidence Reviews, WHO, ECDC and CDC. Study selection and quality analysis were performed by two independent researchers. References were filtered firstly by title and abstract and secondly by full text in the Covidence tool using a priori inclusion and exclusion criteria. Synthesis of the results was done qualitatively. The quality of the included studies was assessed using the AMSTAR-II tool. Results The literature search identified 642 studies, of which 38 were excluded as duplicates. Of the 604 potentially relevant studies, 12 studies (10 systematic reviews and 2 official agency papers) were included in the analysis after filtering. One of the official agency papers was from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the other paper was from the Ontario Agency for Health Promotion and Protection (OHP). The result of the quality assessment with the AMSTAR-II tool of the included systematic reviews was: 3 reviews of moderate quality, 6 reviews of low quality and 1 review of critically low quality. The interventions analysed in the included studies were divided into 2 categories: the first category comprised mandatory home confinement, recommendation to stay at home and curfew, and the second category comprised perimeter blocking of entry and/or exit (local, cross-community, national or international). This division is because the included reviews analysed the measures of mandatory home confinement, advice to stay at home and curfew together without being able to carry out a disaggregated analysis. The included systematic reviews for the evaluation of home confinement, stay-at-home advice and curfew express a decrease in incidence levels, transmission and severe cases following the implementation of mobility limitation interventions compared to the no measure comparator. These conclusions are supported by the quantitative or qualitative results of the studies they include. All reviews also emphasise that to increase the effectiveness of these restrictions it is necessary to combine them with other public health measures. In the systematic reviews included for the assessment of entry and/or exit perimeter closure, most of the studies included in the reviews were found to be modelling studies based on mathematical models. All systematic reviews report a decrease in incidence, transmission and severe case levels following the implementation of travel restriction interventions. The great heterogeneity of travel restrictions applied, such as travel bans, border closures, passenger testing or screening, mandatory quarantine of travellers or optional recommendations for travellers to stay at home, makes data analysis and evaluation of interventions difficult. Conclusions Mobility restrictions in the development of the Covid-19 pandemic were one of the main NPI measures implemented. It can be concluded from the review that there is evidence for a positive impact of NPIs on the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. The heterogeneity of the data from the included studies and their low quality make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of mobility limitations in a disaggregated manner. Despite this, all the included reviews show a decrease in incidence, transmission, hospitalisations and deaths following the application of the measures under study. These measures are more effective when the restrictions were implemented earlier in the pandemic, were applied for a longer period and were more rigorous in their application.