Normal Human Life Research Articles

An expert opinion on rescuing atypically pronucleated human zygotes by molecular genetic fertilization checks in IVF.

IVF laboratories routinely adopt morphological pronuclear assessment at the zygote stage to identify abnormally fertilized embryos deemed unsuitable for clinical use. In essence, this is a pseudo-genetic test for ploidy motivated by the notion that biparental diploidy is required for normal human life and abnormal ploidy will lead to either failed implantation, miscarriage, or significant pregnancy complications, including molar pregnancy and chorionic carcinoma. Here, we review the literature associated with ploidy assessment of human embryos derived from zygotes displaying a pronuclear configuration other than the canonical two, and the related pregnancy outcome following transfer. We highlight that pronuclear assessment, although associated with aberrant ploidy outcomes, has a low specificity in the prediction of abnormal ploidy status in the developing embryo, while embryos deemed abnormally fertilized can yield healthy pregnancies. Therefore, this universal strategy of pronuclear assessment invariably leads to incorrect classification of over 50% of blastocysts derived from atypically pronucleated zygotes, and the systematic disposal of potentially viable embryos in IVF. To overcome this limitation of current practice, we discuss the new preimplantation genetic testing technologies that enable accurate identification of the ploidy status of preimplantation embryos and suggest a progress from morphology-based checks to molecular fertilization check as the new gold standard. This alternative molecular fertilization checking represents a possible non-incremental and controversy-free improvement to live birth rates in IVF as it adds to the pool of viable embryos available for transfer. This is especially important for the purposes of 'family building' or for poor-prognosis IVF patients where embryo numbers are often limited.

Millets for food and health security: A review

Millets are small sized cereal food crops that are mostly native to Asia, especially India. The nutritional composition of these small grained crops has earned them the name of ‘Nutri-cereals’. These belong to ‘Pseudo’ cereals and are a member of the family ‘Poaceae’. In the field, these crops can withstand conditions generated by climate change and off-field their nutritional content helps them fight hunger and other health conditions thereby providing positive effects on health. Millets are rich in both macro and micronutrients, however, their health benefits are more pronounced due to the presence of micronutrients including vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, flavonoids, and polyphenols. The present world is struggling for food. Both, growing food and feeding the population is the biggest challenge, the whole world is facing today. Adverse climatic conditions are continuously challenging the productivity and yield of cereal crops and at the same time hidden hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and other degenerative diseases are affecting a large portion of the population due to unhealthy and non-nutritious food. Millets are a suitable answer to these problems. The present review is an attempt to explore the nutritional aspects of millets which makes it a suitable food option for the world’s population. The benefits of its nutritional composition to support a normal healthy human life are also attempted to discuss health security.

A missense mutation in Lama3 causes androgen alopecia

Hair loss disorders such as androgenetic alopecia have caused serious disturbances to normal human life. Animal models play an important role in exploring pathogenesis of disease and evaluating new therapies. NIH hairless mice are a spontaneous hairless mouse discovered and bred in our laboratory. In this study, we resequenced the genomes of NIH normal mice and NIH hairless mice and obtained 3,575,560 high-quality, plausible SNP loci and 995,475 InDels. The Euclidean distance algorithm was used to assess the association of SNP loci with the hairless phenotype, at a threshold of 0.62. Two regions of chromosome 18 having the highest association with the phenotype contained 345 genes with a total length of 13.98 Mb. The same algorithm was used to assess the association of InDels with the hairless phenotype at a threshold of 0.54 and revealed a region of 25.45 Mb in length, containing 518 genes. The mutation candidate gene Lama3 (NM_010680.2: c.652C>T; NP_034810.1: p. Arg217Cys) was selected based on the results of functional gene analysis and mutation prediction screening. Lama3 (R217C) mutant mice were further constructed using CRISPR/Cas9 technology, and the relationship between Lama3 point mutations and the hairless phenotype were clarified by phenotypic observation. The results showed that male Lama3 point mutation mice started to lose hair on the 80th day after birth, and the hair loss area gradually expanded over time. H&E staining of skin sections showed that the point mutation mice had increased sebaceous glands in the dermis and missing hair follicle structure (i.e., typical symptoms of androgenetic alopecia). This study is a good extension of the current body of knowledge about the function of Lama3, and the constructed Lama3 (R217C) mutant mice may be a good animal model for studying androgenetic alopecia.

Nanomedicine for the Detection and Treatment of Ocular Bacterial Infections.

Ocular bacterial infection is a prevalent cause of blindness worldwide, with substantial consequences for normal human life. Traditional treatments for ocular bacterial infections are ineffective, necessitating the development of novel techniques to enable accurate diagnosis, precise drug delivery, and effective treatment alternatives. With the rapid advancement of nanoscience and biomedicine, increasing emphasis has been placed on multifunctional nanosystems to overcome the challenges posed by ocular bacterial infections. Given the advantages of nanotechnology in the biomedical industry, it can be utilized to diagnose ocular bacterial infections, administer medications, and treat them. In this review, the recent advancements in nanosystems for the detection and treatment of ocular bacterial infections are discussed; this includes the latest application scenarios of nanomaterials for ocular bacterial infections, in addition to the impact of their essential characteristics on bioavailability, tissue permeability, and inflammatory microenvironment. Through an in-depth investigation into the effect of sophisticated ocular barriers, antibacterial drug formulations, and ocular immune metabolism on drug delivery systems, this review highlights the challenges faced by ophthalmic medicine and encourages basic research and future clinical transformation based on ophthalmic antibacterial nanomedicine. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

PPChain: A Blockchain for Pandemic Prevention and Control Assisted by Federated Learning.

Taking COVID-19 as an example, we know that a pandemic can have a huge impact on normal human life and the economy. Meanwhile, the population flow between countries and regions is the main factor affecting the changes in a pandemic, which is determined by the airline network. Therefore, realizing the overall control of airports is an effective way to control a pandemic. However, this is restricted by the differences in prevention and control policies in different areas and privacy issues, such as how a patient's personal data from a medical center cannot be effectively combined with their passenger personal data. This prevents more precise airport control decisions from being made. To address this, this paper designed a novel data-sharing framework (i.e., PPChain) based on blockchain and federated learning. The experiment uses a CPU i7-12800HX and uses Docker to simulate multiple virtual nodes. The model is deployed to run on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 3090Ti GPU. The experiment shows that the relationship between a pandemic and aircraft transport can be effectively explored by PPChain without sharing raw data. This approach does not require centralized trust and improves the security of the sharing process. The scheme can help formulate more scientific and rational prevention and control policies for the control of airports. Additionally, it can use aerial data to predict pandemics more accurately.

Преднамеренная искусственная деформация у населения позднесарматского времени (палеопатологический аспект)

Introduction. Intentional artificial head deformation is one of the most striking features of the late Sarmatian nomads from the Eastern European steppes. For quite a long time, archaeologists and anthropologists tried to solve the issues associated with this custom’s emergence and existence in the population of the 2nd – 4 th centuries AD. Later, the question of the deforming structure’s impact on the normal life of a person became a separate research line for the phenomenon of artificial cranial deformation in the late Sarmatians. Methods and materials. 155 craniums of sexually mature late Sarmatian populations (2nd – 4th centuries AD) originating from under the burial mounds in the territory of the Lower Volga region were the material for the study. Comparison of pathological conditions occurrence between the deformed and undeformed skull groups was carried out using nonparametric tests: Pearson’s chi-squared test (χ2) and Fisher’s exact test. Results. Comparative analysis of pathological conditions occurrence on deformed and undeformed skulls in late Sarmatian time has shown that the only deviation in which the compared series differ significantly is temporomandibular joint arthritis. Discussion. The frequency and degree of articular disease development in late Sarmatians with intentional artificial head deformities increase with age. The age-related variability of arthrotic changes in the mandibular joint area indicates the involutionary nature of this condition. At the same time, the absence of statistical differences between age groups in the distribution frequencies of this pathology and its wide distribution in young individuals under 35 years of age suggest that artificial skull deformation is one of the factors stimulating its development. Conclusions. Degenerative changes in the temporomandibular joint area are a statistically more widespread pathology in deformed skulls. The absence of gender differences between the deformed and undeformed skulls in the late Sarmatians, as well as the groups of pathologies associated with diet and the degree of negative factors impacting the natural and social environment, indicates that this custom in the late Sarmatian society did not carry the function of gender or social differentiation. The use of a modifying structure for deliberate artificial cranial deformation is quite compatible with normal human life, and its use did not subsequently lead to the development of serious skull and brain pathologies.

Satisfaction of higher education students with blackboard learning system during Covid-19

Purpose- With the advent of the novel COVID-19 disease, the world has become facing an extraordinary situation that has changed the course of normal human life upside down and pushed them towards compulsory, recent technology-based alternative solutions, education being not an exception. Higher education institutions in Turkey rushed from the first moments to avoid the disruption of education process, and transformed into the full-fledged online learning system. Current study addressed aims to investigate how satisfied higher education students are with the transformation to Blackboard Learning System in İstanbul, Turkey during COVID-19. The study compares undergraduate and postgraduate students’ perceptions via thirty items divided into six axes, which are included in a single model. Methodology- An online questionnaire survey sent through BLS itself and WhatsApp was filled out by a total of 294 student respondents, wherein afterwards an inferential and descriptive study with quantitative approach has been employed for analyzing their perceptions. Findings- The results are indicative that the Usefulness, Engagement, Communication and Ease of Use, Self-efficacy, and Challenges axes respectively have a statistically significant effect on students’ perceptions concerning satisfaction with the BLS. As the Usefulness and Engagement axes have the highest contribution to students’ satisfaction with the BLS, the Challenges axis has the least contribution. The findings state that satisfaction of postgraduate students, in terms of Self-efficacy, Communication and Ease of Use and Challenges axes, along with a clear supremacy over the Overall axes level is higher than undergraduate students. Moreover, all demographic dimensions except gender, place of living, the kind of device preferred and the willingness in using BLS in the future, influence students’ perceptions. Conclusion- It can be concluded that the transformation into BLS during COVID-19 has been satisfactory for higher education students, especially for postgraduate students. Some traits and drawbacks of BLS have been inferred along with recommendations which may contribute to successful implementation of BLS. Keywords: Blackboard Learning System, COVID-19, Satisfaction, Learning Management System, Higher Education JEL Codes: I10, I20, I23

An Effective Model for Predicting Phage-Host Interactions Via Graph Embedding Representation Learning With Multi-Head Attention Mechanism

In the treatment of bacterial infectious diseases, overuse of antibiotics may lead to not only bacterial resistance to antibiotics but also dysbiosis of beneficial bacteria which are essential for maintaining normal human life activities. Instead, phage therapy, which invades and lyses specific pathogenic bacteria without affecting beneficial bacteria, becomes more and more popular to treat bacterial infectious diseases. For the effective phage therapy, it requires to accurately predict potential phage-host interactions from heterogeneous information network consisting of bacteria and phages. Although many models have been proposed for predicting phage-host interactions, most methods fail to consider fully the sparsity and unconnectedness of phage-host heterogeneous information network, deriving the undesirable performance on phage-host interactions prediction. To address the challenge, we propose an effective model called GERMAN-PHI for predicting Phage-Host Interactions via Graph Embedding Representation learning with Multi-head Attention mechaNism. In GERMAN-PHI, the multi-head attention mechanism is utilized to learn representations of phages and hosts from multiple perspectives of phage-host associations, addressing the sparsity and unconnectedness in phage-host heterogeneous information network. More specifically, a module of GAT with talking-heads is employed to learn representations of phages and bacteria, on which neural induction matrix completion is conducted to reconstruct the phage-host association matrix. Results of comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GERMAN-PHI performs better than the state-of-the-art methods on phage-host interactions prediction. In addition, results of case study for two high-risk human pathogens show that GERMAN-PHI can predict validated phages with high accuracy, and some potential or new associated phages are provided as well.

Development of the recipe and technology of semi-finished mock cutlets of functional purpose

Increase in animal protein resources is of great importance on a global scale. Proteins of animal origin provide the human body with basic macroand micronutrients and support normal human life and activities. Poultry meat occupies a significant proportion in the state program of production and sale of animal proteins. From year to year, the growth and consumption of poultry meat (30...35 %) is constantly increasing. Mechanically deboned poultry meat is characterized by less technological potential and is in need of increase its functional and technological properties in the formation of food systems with specified properties.The article shows the possibility of expanding the assortment of meat chopped semi-finished products (cutlets) of functional purpose using a compositional mixture in a recipe that helps to increase biological and nutritional value.The purpose of the research is to develop the recipe and technology of mechanically deboned poultry meat semi-finished products (cutlets) of functional purpose using non-traditional raw materials, namely compositional mixture (CM).The qualitative and quantitative composition of the compositional mixture for cutlets of functional purpose from mechanically deboned poultry meat has been substantiated and selected.The influence of the dosage of the compositional mixture consisting of a solid Adygh cheese«Mate» (powder), oatmeal and garlic powder, on the consumer properties of mechanically deboned poultry meat has been investigated. The quality indicators (organoleptic and physico-chemical ones) cutlets of functional purposes have been investigated.The recipe and technology of functional cutlets has been developed where wheat bread is replaced completely (100%) with a compositional mixture and coating with oatmeal flour. This technology has shown the best quality indicators.

Fractional Order Operator for Symmetric Analysis of Cancer Model on Stem Cells with Chemotherapy

Cancer is dangerous and one of the major diseases affecting normal human life. In this paper, a fractional-order cancer model with stem cells and chemotherapy is analyzed to check the effects of infection in individuals. The model is investigated by the Sumudu transform and a very effective numerical method. The positivity of solutions with the ABC operator of the proposed technique is verified. Fixed point theory is used to derive the existence and uniqueness of the solutions for the fractional order cancer system. Our derived solutions analyze the actual behavior and effect of cancer disease in the human body using different fractional values. Modern mathematical control with the fractional operator has many applications including the complex and crucial study of systems with symmetry. Symmetry analysis is a powerful tool that enables the user to construct numerical solutions of a given fractional differential equation in a fairly systematic way. Such an analysis will provide a better understanding to control the of cancer disease in the human body.

Partial twinning and the boundaries of a person

In special cases of partial twinning, two heads, each supporting a more-or-less normal human mental life, emerge from a single torso. It is often argued that there must be two people in such a case, even if there is only one biological organism. That would pose a problem for 'animalism', the view that people are organisms. The paper argues that it is very hard to say what sort of non-organisms the people in such cases would be. Reflection on partial twinning is no more comfortable for those who think we're not organisms than for those who think we are. We may have to accept that a single person could have two separate mental lives.

«Человека никто не может освободить…»

The author reflects on the fate of his generation – the generation of graduates of the Faculty of Philosophy in 1976, against the background of his personal history, trying to understand and explain why almost 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet power, after discovering the monstrous truth about its crimes, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and liberation from the “only right” ideology, people of different generations who lived under the USSR, and even very young people born after the collapse of the USSR, nostalgic for the Soviet system? How is it possible to know about the gulag and still erect monuments to Stalin? Why is it that after the experience of freedom and of a short but still normal human life, one must defend one’s freedom and human dignity again? And how is it that the country failed to seize the unique opportunity to change and become part of the world and returned to the rails of isolation and xenophobia? The author considers one of the important reasons of the incident that prevailed in modern Russia social infantilism, which was the consequence of the genetic heritage of serfdom, and “wild” individualism, which does not involve responsibility towards “others”.

Advances in Biosensing Technologies for Diagnosis of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted normal human life worldwide. Due to its rapid community spread and high mortality statistics, the development of prompt diagnostic tests for a massive number of samples is essential. Currently used traditional methods are often expensive, time-consuming, laboratory-based, and unable to handle a large number of specimens in resource-limited settings. Because of its high contagiousness, efficient identification of SARS-CoV-2 carriers is crucial. As the advantages of adopting biosensors for efficient diagnosis of COVID-19 increase, this narrative review summarizes the recent advances and the respective reasons to consider applying biosensors. Biosensors are the most sensitive, specific, rapid, user-friendly tools having the potential to deliver point-of-care diagnostics beyond traditional standards. This review provides a brief introduction to conventional methods used for COVID-19 diagnosis and summarizes their advantages and disadvantages. It also discusses the pathogenesis of COVID-19, potential diagnostic biomarkers, and rapid diagnosis using biosensor technology. The current advancements in biosensing technologies, from academic research to commercial achievements, have been emphasized in recent publications. We covered a wide range of topics, including biomarker detection, viral genomes, viral proteins, immune responses to infection, and other potential proinflammatory biomolecules. Major challenges and prospects for future application in point-of-care settings are also highlighted.

Characteristics of the amino acid composition of flour types for gluten-free pasta production

Research on the study of the formulation of gluten-free pasta and the selection of raw materials for their production, depending on the amino acid composition, is necessary for the prevention and treatment of diseases such as phenylketonuria and celiac disease, non-celiac non-allergic sensitivity. In the world it occurs with a frequency of 1: 100. More than 472 people are registered in Kazakhstan. Wheat gliadin is characterized by a deficient content of essential amino acids: methionine, cysteine, threonine, tryptophan, arginine, histidine, especially limiting lysine. However, wheat contains non-essential amino acids (glutamic acid, proline in an amount of 16-44 %), which have the ability to be synthesized in the human body, have a toxic effect on people with signs of gluten intolerance. For the treatment and prevention of these diseases, the gluten content should not exceed 20 ppm/kg of the consumed product. The only way out for all patients, except for the treatment of comorbidities, is the observance of a strict gluten-free diet. Gluten-free types of flour from corn and rice do not contain the necessary amounts of essential amino acids, in particular lysine. Legume proteins, including chickpeas, are well balanced in terms of amino acid composition compared to cereal proteins. It has been determined that food sorghum contains all the basic substances necessary for normal human life: proteins from 11-16 %, including lysine 0.17 % - 0.33 %, starch from 60 - 66 %, fat up to 5,5 %. Purpose: selection of cereals and legumes by amino acid composition for the production of gluten-free pasta. The resarch of the amino acid composition of the studied types of flour showed that the combined use of gluten-free buckwheat, corn, rice flour in various compositions and ratios with sorghum or chickpea flour increases the nutritional value of gluten-free pasta products.

Landslide susceptibility analysis based on a PSO-DBN prediction model in an earthquake-stricken area

In recent years, the major geological hazard of landslides has greatly impact normal human life. Deep belief networks (DBN) is a commonly used deep learning model, and the DBN hyperparameter determination problem is the key to its application. To improve the accuracy of regional landslide susceptibility prediction, this paper introduces the particle swarm algorithm (PSO) to determine the hyperparameters of the DBN; this is applied to regional landslide susceptibility prediction. Firstly, PSO is used to optimize the hyperparameters of the DBN and obtain a set of hyperparameters with the optimal fitness function. A landslide susceptibility prediction model based on PSO-DBN is then constructed and the K-fold cross-validation method is used to determine its accuracy. The model is applied to landslide susceptibility prediction in the most impacted area of the Wenchuan earthquake to analyze the model’s accuracy. Finally, model susceptibility analysis is performed. The research results show that the final optimal model accuracy of the PSO-DBN model is 95.52%, which is approximately 28.31% and 15.35% higher than that of the logistic regression (LR) model and the common DBN model, respectively. The Kappa coefficient is 0.883, which is higher than that of the LR model. Compared with the LR model and the common DBN model, Kappa coefficient is improved by approximately 0.542 and 0.269 respectively; the area under the curve (AUC) is 0.951, which is improved by approximately 0.201 and 0.080 compared to the LR model and the common DBN model. The susceptibility of the model to the inertia factor is low, the average change in model accuracy (when the inertia factor changes by 0.1) is approximately 0.1%, and the overall stability of the model is high. The landslide susceptibility level is very high. The area includes 219 landslide points, which account for 39.2% of total landslide points. In the area with a high level of landslide susceptibility are 191 landslide points, accounting for 34.2% of total landslide points. Together, the two contain approximately 73.4% of the landslide points. This indicates that the model prediction results agree well with the spatial distribution characteristics of the landslide.

Evaluation of Vulnerability-Related Risk Factors in Patients with Spinal Cord Injuries during Covid-19 Pandemic

Background: Spinal cord injury is a chronic disease with increasing prevalence which causes various disorders in normal human life.
 Objectives: This study endeavored to determine the risk factors related to the vulnerability in patients with SCIs During Covid-19 Pandemic in Ilam.
 Methods: This study was conducted by utilization of a variety of descriptive cross-sectional studies in 2021. Questionnaires were used to collect information Tilburg vulnerability survey, Resilience survey and wax social support survey. For gaining samples with suitable disperse in the study properties and purposes, a list of patients was chosen and all of them were contacted to be informed about participating in the study. Completed surveys analyzed by SPSS16.
 Results: Result showed, average score and standard deviation of vulnerability score in patients with SCI. Accordingly M(SD) measured to be 6.40(1.38) in physical dimension of vulnerability, 1.56(0.89) in mental dimension of vulnerability and 0.81(0.76) in social dimension of vulnerability. result of study, M(SD) was calculated to be 20.20(3.59) in family dimension, 18.76(3.83) in friends’ dimension and 21.70(3.69) in other people dimension.
 Conclusions: Suggested to consider demographic variables affecting the health-related components in order to improve the condition of patients with SCI during the outbreak of Covid-19 disease.

Utilization of Deep Learning-Based Crowd Analysis for Safety Surveillance and Spread Control of COVID-19 Pandemic

Crowd monitoring analysis has become an important challenge in academic researches ranging from surveillance equipment to people behavior using different algorithms. The crowd counting schemes can be typically processed in two steps, the images ground truth density maps which are obtained from ground truth density map creation and the deep learning to estimate density map from density map estimation. The pandemic of COVID-19 has changed our world in few months and has put the normal human life to a halt due to its rapid spread and high danger. Therefore, several precautions are taken into account during COVID-19 to slowdown the new cases rate like maintaining social distancing via crowd estimation. This manuscript presents an efficient detection model for the crowd counting and social distancing between visitors in the two holy mosques, Al Masjid Al Haram in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Also, the manuscript develops a secure crowd monitoring structure based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) model using real datasets of images for the two holy mosques. The proposed framework is divided into two procedures, crowd counting and crowd recognition using datasets of different densities. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model, some metrics are employed for crowd analysis, which proves the monitoring efficiency of the proposed model with superior accuracy. Also, it is very adaptive to different crowd density levels and robust to scale changes in several places.

Application of the reverse osmosis method for the purification of drinking water

The article deals with the problem of clean water, as for Ukraine, which belongs to the states with a limited amount of water resources and a high level of their use. It has been substantiated that deviations from the standards of water quality, both surface and underground sources, reach 70-80%. Almost a third of the population of villages and towns of rural type in Ukraine consumes water from wells, the water in which is recognized as practically unfit for consumption, especially in terms of nitrate indicators, which have a negative impact on human health. Provided a comparative assessment of regulatory documents State sanitary norms and rules 2.2.4-171-10 "Hygienic requirements for drinking water intended for human consumption" and DSTU 7525: 2014 "Drinking water. Requirements and methods of quality control", in force on the territory of Ukraine, Council Directive 98/83/EC, which regulates water quality indicators at the international level. The modern views on the structure of drinking water as a dilute aqueous solution, where water is presented in the form of giant heterophase clusters, are considered and, based on this, the terms "prepared drinking water" and "natural drinking water" are defined. The problem of optimal adjustment of the qualitative and quantitative composition of drinking water is determined, which in the modern world is solved by methods of additional purification of water at the local level. It is shown that according to the principle of operation, household water purifiers can be divided into 4 main groups, namely: installations with a mechanical filter element; household filters of the sorption type; plants of an electrochemical type and plants of a membrane type based on the reverse osmosis process, which are widely represented on the world market today and are actively used at the local level (apartments, houses, kindergartens, schools), but they have a number of features and disadvantages. The mechanism of the processes in the system "initial water – membrane – prepared drinking water" with its outlined components is presented. The consequences of the use of reverse osmosis plants for the purification of drinking water are considered on the example of tap water, which has been purified in a plant with a membrane element TW30-1812-50 manufactured by DOW Chemical (USA) at an operating pressure of 18 atm. The presented results of changes in the quantitative and qualitative composition of water, namely, its fundamental components, as a result of post-treatment by reverse osmosis. Technological and economic disadvantages of reverse osmosis plants are substantiated. It has been confirmed that the reverse osmosis method is used to demineralize water and is capable of retaining almost all ions by 92–99%, and with a two-stage purification system up to 99.9%, that is, water is prepared by reverse osmosis purified from almostall mineral salts, including useful and necessary for normal human life.

A Study on the Characteristic Features of Covid-19 Deaths in a Regional Hospital in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Background: Covid-19 is an acute health emergency to human beings all over the world. This pandemic has destabilised the day-to-day life of almost everyone. It is a challenge to scientists and politicians to initiate a return to normal human life from the grip of Covid-19 so that the economies of countries do not stop growing.Objective: To study the characteristics of Covid-19 deaths in a regional hospital in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.Method: It is a retrospective record review study of the cases of patients in Mthatha Regional Hospital (MRH) in South Africa who were not able to be saved.Results: There were 100 deaths in MRH. Of these 57 (57%) were females and 43 (43%) males. The average age was 63.3 years. Shortness of breath was the most common presenting symptom followed by weakness, a cough and fever. More than half of the Covid-19 cases had associated co-morbidity such as hypertension (50%), diabetes (37%) and HIV (15%). The mean oxygen saturation (SpO2) at the time of admission was 75.5±17 on pulse oximetry. Conclusion: The covid-19 mortality was 1.3 times higher among females in the regional hospital under study. The majority of the victims were suffering hypertension and diabetes.

Impact of the COVID–19 pandemic on the life expectancy of the population of the Republic of Kazakhstan

The purpose of the article is to identify factors affecting life expectancy of the population in the context of the COVID–19 pandemic. Today the main aim all of humanity and each country individually is to improve and prolong human health. It should be noted that health, first of all, is the basis of normal human life. This is a multidimensional process that reflects the mental, physical and socio-economic well-being of people and the country as a whole, realizing themselves in society, covering the social, demographic and medical spheres. In addition, human health is the most important problem of society, labor potential and human capital. In connection with such issues, this article conducts a correlation analysis of factors affecting life expectancy in the Republic of Kazakhstan during COVID–19. This analysis shows that there is a significant and strong correlation between life expectancy, on the one hand, the level of digital literacy of the population and health care costs, on the other hand. Such factors as the number of doctors of all specialties and the number of medical staff positively affected the life expectancy of the population. Factors such as the number of hospital beds and the number of hospital organizations showed a negative relationship. Therefore, improving people’s health, increasing their life expectancy in modern conditions require significant improvement of the healthcare system, the introduction of digital technologies, medical information systems, as well as improving the digital literacy of the population.