Conference Report Research Articles

Report of the 13th Annual Conference of the Worldwide Airports Lawyers Association (WALA), in Paris, France, on 28-30 June 2023

The 13th Worldwide Airports Lawyers Association (WALA) Annual Conference (WALA is a global association that unites airport lawyers, aviation industry professionals, and stakeholders to collaborate, share knowledge, and address legal issues in the field of airport law. See further, https://abiaxair.com/wala2023/links.php), splendidly hosted by Groupe Aéroports de Paris (ADP), https://www.parisaeroport.fr/en/homepage-group convened on 28–30 June 2023 in the enchanting city of Paris. The three-day event featured a diverse agenda including the Pre-conference Seminar dedicated to airport commercialization, the Airport Law Conference replete with fourteen different sessions, and a momentous addition – the First Urban Air Mobility Legal Forum. Through intellectually stimulating exchanges, WALA XIII paved the way for a future of airport law in support of a sustainable, innovative, and robust civil aviation sector. Conference report, WALA, Worldwide Airport, Lawyers Association

What’s Up With Integrated Packaging and Wireless Power: MTT-S Inter-Society Technology Panels at IMS 2023 [Conference Report

What’s Up With Integrated Packaging and Wireless Power: MTT-S Inter-Society Technology Panels at IMS 2023 [Conference Report

Zpráva z konference „Second Central and Eastern European Legal History Conference“

Conference report

Zpráva o konferencii „Aktuální otázky právní úpravy cestovního ruchu VII.“

Conference report

Healthcare missions pre-congress ICMDA World Congress, Arusha, Tanzania

A conference report on healthcare mission engagement including biblical basis, historical threads, current state of global health, vocation, cross-cultural communication, mobilizing and supporting workers, and leadership.

Tissue T cells in prophylactic and therapeutic vaccination responses

In this conference report, I highlight the potential to target tissue-resident T cells to enhance prophylactic and therapeutic vaccine immunity. I describe our recent findings on exploiting frontline sentinal immunosurveillance by liver-resident immunity for functional cure of hepatitis B. We showed that therapeutic vaccine-induced HBV-specific T cells are constrained by liver-resident NK cells; cytokine-activation and PD-L1 blockade of NK cells converted them into helpers able to instead boost HBV-specific T cells. Turning to tissue-resident T cells in the lung, we found this pool can include T cells able to recognise SARS-CoV-2, including cross-reactive responses present prior to the pandemic. The importance of inducing T cells with future prophylactic vaccines was underscored by their selective expansion in a subset of donors aborting SARS-CoV-2 infection without detectable antibodies.

EURAS 2023 – (Responsible) Standardisation for Smart Systems - Conference report

EURAS 2023 took place 28-30.06.2023 in Aachen, Germany. The 27th edition of the conference was heavily focused on standardisation while it also included another event called SIIT (Standardisation and Innovation in Information Technology) within its program. For 2023, the conference's main theme was "(Responsible) Standardisation for Smart Systems". The topics varied from one end of standardization to another, and in this brief report, I will go through the content discussed at the event.

Conference report: WHO meeting summary on mRNA-based tuberculosis vaccine development

Tuberculosis (TB) is a global health emergency. Across the globe, approximately 2 billion people are currently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), and of those, 5–10% may progress to become ill and potentially transmit the bacterium. In 2021, nearly 10.6 million people developed TB disease and 1.6 million died. There is an urgent need for accelerated development of new TB-focused interventions, in particular, improved TB vaccines. However, progress in developing highly effective TB vaccines has been slow and is chronically under-resourced. The mRNA vaccine platform may offer an opportunity to accelerate development of new TB vaccines.In April 2023, the World Health Organization convened global experts to discuss the feasibility and potential value of mRNA-based vaccines for TB. Here we report on meeting deliberations related to the current TB vaccine pipeline and potential novel antigens, the status of efforts to identify correlates of protection, potential clinical development strategies and considerations for community acceptance of new TB vaccines based on this relatively new platform. The role of industry collaborations, ethics, social science, and responsibility to the global community regarding transparency and manufacturing capacity building were discussed through expert presentations and panel sessions. The overall conclusion of the meeting is that mRNA-based vaccines constitute a potentially powerful new tool for reducing the global burden of TB.

Further evidence confirms the association between smoking and dry socket: a motivational opportunity for tobacco cessation.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. Electronic search included PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases up to March 2022 using appropriate keywords. The review included all observational studies (case-control, cohort and cross-sectional studies) published in English after 2000, comparing the prevalence of dry socket between smokers and non-smokers after simple or surgical tooth extraction. Exclusion criteria included patients with other post-extraction complications, prevalence of different risk factors, and unrelated study designs (literature reviews, case reports, expert opinion, and conference reports). Two independent investigators screened the records (by title, abstract, and full text), and selected the eligible studies according to the predefined criteria. Collected data from each study included author name and country, year of publication, gender and age of patients, smoking status, inclusion and exclusion criteria, medical history and oral hygiene, prevalence of dry socket, type of tooth and extraction technique, symptoms and treatment. Risk of bias was assessed according to the (NHLBI, NIH) Quality Assessment Tool For Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies, while the level of evidence was assessed using the classification of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine levels for diagnosis. Two independent reviewers conducted the assessments, and any disagreements were addressed through discussion. Eleven studies from ten different countries representing a total of 10,195 patients (3007 smokers and 7188 non-smokers) were included in the final analysis. Nine studies were classified as having "good" quality and two as "intermediate," while all of the studies have the third or fourth level of evidence (through 5-graded scale). The prevalence of dry socket in smokers was about 13.2% (95% CI: 5.8-23.1%) and in non-smokers about 3.8% (95% CI: 2.1-6.0%). Meta-analysis showed that regular tobacco smoking was associated a more than 3-fold increase in the odds of dry socket after tooth extraction. Despite heterogeneity among the included studies (different age groups and types of teeth extracted), there was a consistent association between cigarette smoking and an elevated risk of developing dry socket post tooth extraction.

Conference Reports

After the pandemic, it is great that conferences and workshops are more or less "back to normal". I really enjoy meeting colleagues - some of them for the first time after four years - in person, listening to their talks, having entertaining chats, and nice dinners. Thanks to Daniele, Igor and Marco, this SIGLOG newsletter includes two conference reports. Daniele reports on CADE-29 and FSCD 2023 that were jointly held in Rome in early July. It was the first time that these conferences were co-located and this joiner was a success; I am sure that more of such joint events will happen in the near future. Igor and Marco report on LICS 2023 that was held end of July in Boston. This was the 38th edition of LICS, the flagship conference of SIGLOG.

Conference Report

Conference Report

Report of the First IEEE International Summer School (Online) on Environments—Classes, Agents, Roles, Groups, and Objects and Its Applications [Conference Reports

Report of the First IEEE International Summer School (Online) on Environments—Classes, Agents, Roles, Groups, and Objects and Its Applications [Conference Reports

Conference on Control Technology and Applications 2024 [Conference Reports

Conference on Control Technology and Applications 2024 [Conference Reports

Transforming Drug Development for Neurological Disorders: Proceedings from a Multidisease Area Workshop

Neurological disorders represent some of the most challenging therapeutic areas for successful drug approvals. The escalating global burden of death and disability for such diseases represents a significant worldwide public health challenge, and the rate of failure of new therapies for chronic progressive disorders of the nervous system is higher relative to other non-neurological conditions. However, progress is emerging rapidly in advancing the drug development landscape in both rare and common neurodegenerative diseases. In October 2022, the Critical Path Institute (C-Path) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) organized a Neuroscience Annual Workshop convening representatives from the drug development industry, academia, the patient community, government agencies, and regulatory agencies regarding the future development of tools and therapies for neurological disorders. This workshop focused on five chronic progressive diseases: Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and inherited ataxias. This special conference report reviews the key points discussed during the three-day dynamic workshop, including shared learnings, and recommendations that promise to catalyze future advancement of novel therapies and drug development tools.

A scientific convention on World Homoeopathy Day: ‘Homoeoparivar – Sarvajan Swasthya, One Health One Family’ – A conference report

A scientific convention on World Homoeopathy Day: ‘Homoeoparivar – Sarvajan Swasthya, One Health One Family’ – A conference report

72nd Annual Denver X-ray Conference Report

72nd Annual Denver X-ray Conference Report

Planet.Health: An Ecosystem Approach to Imagine and Coordinate for Planetary Health Futures

Planet.Health addresses imagination and coordination challenges for planetary health through innovative approaches to social organising. This report presents the findings from the inaugural Planet.Health event in 2022, including the Planet.Health unconference. An unconference is a participant-driven event format that provides flexibility for emergent ideas and connections. In this (un)conference report, we share the challenges, achievements, and lessons learned during the initial year of activities in the leadup to and following the Planet.Health unconference event. We also discuss how the intersection of web3 and planetary health—a major focus of the first year—provides an alternative lens for envisioning, innovating, and coordinating beyond conventional social and institutional frameworks. We explore the potential impact of web3 technologies and decentralised social, economic, and financial networks and highlight the implications of these approaches for addressing planetary crises and supporting a flourishing human–environment relationship. As a new contribution to the planetary health field, this work emphasises the importance of building decentralised systems to foster creative actions and inspire global engagement for planetary wellbeing. The report concludes with some practical insights on how we begin to build and sustain decentralised social networks, including a discussion of the benefits and limitations of these approaches.

Labour conditions in dual-cadre community health worker programmes: a systematic review

Health care delivered by community health workers reduces morbidity and mortality while providing a considerable return on investment. Despite growing consensus that community health workers, a predominantly female workforce, should receive a salary, many community health worker programmes take the form of dual-cadre systems, where a salaried cadre of community health workers works alongside a cadre of unsalaried community health workers. We aimed to determine the presence, prevalence, and magnitude of exploitation in national dual-cadre programmes. We did a systematic review of available evidence from peer-reviewed databases and grey literature from database inception to Aug 2, 2021, for studies on unsalaried community health worker cadres in dual-cadre systems. Editorials, protocols, guidelines, or conference reports were excluded in addition to studies about single-tier community health worker programmes and those reporting on only salaried cadres of community health workers in a dual-cadre system. We extracted data on remuneration, workload, task complexity, and self-reported experiences of community health workers. Three models were created: a minimum model with the shortest time and frequency per task documented in the literature, a maximum model with the longest time, and a median model. Labour exploitation was defined as being engaged in work below the country's minimum wage together with excessive work hours or complex tasks. The study was registered with PROSPERO, CRD42021271500. We included 117 reports from 112 studies describing community health workers in dual-cadre programmes across 19 countries. The majority of community health workers were female. 13 (59%) of 22 unsalaried community health worker cadres and one (10%) of ten salaried cadres experienced labour exploitation. Three (17%) of 18 unsalaried community health workers would need to work more than 40 h per week to fulfil their assigned responsibilities. Unsalaried community health worker cadres frequently reported non-payment, inadequate or inconsistent payment of incentives, and an overburdensome workload. Unsalaried community health workers in dual-cadre programmes often face labour exploitation, potentially leading to inadequate health-care provision. Labour laws must be upheld and the creation of professional community health worker cadres with fair contracts prioritised, international funding allocated to programmes that rely on unsalaried workers should be transparently reported, the workloads of community health workers should be modelled a priori and actual time use routinely assessed, community health workers should have input in policies that affect them, and volunteers should not be responsible for the delivery of essential health services. None.

Z vědeckého života: zpráva z mezinárodní vědecké konference Opravné systémy a opravné prostředky v trestním řízení

Conference Report

Conference Report 33rd European Congress on Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID): New developments in pediatric oncology infectious disease supportive care.

Infections continue to be major causes of morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised children and adolescents with cancer or undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. This report summarizes new clinical research data presented at the 33rd European Congress on Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases on infections in this vulnerable population, with a focus on the epidemiology, diagnosis, and prevention of invasive fungal diseases and de-escalation strategies in neutropenic patients with fever of unknown origin.