Rapid Action Research Articles

Safety and efficacy comparison of remimazolam and propofol for intravenous anesthesia during gastroenteroscopic surgery of older patients: A meta-analysis

BACKGROUND Remimazolam is characterized by rapid action and inactive metabolites. It is used as the general anesthetic for many clinical surgeries. In this study, we performed a meta-analysis to evaluate whether remimazolam is superior to propofol for gastroenteroscopy in older patients. AIM To compare the adverse events and efficacy of remimazolam and propofol during gastroenteroscopy in older adults. METHODS The PubMed, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library databases were queried for the relevant key words "remimazolam,” "and propofol,” "and gastrointestinal endoscopy or gastroscopy.” The search scope was "Title and Abstract,” and the search was limited to human studies and publications in English. Seven studies wherein remimazolam and propofol were compared were included for the meta-analysis. RESULTS We selected seven randomized controlled trials involving 1445 cases for the analysis. Remimazolam reduced the hypotension (relative risk, RR = 0.44, 95%CI: 0.29-0.66, P = 0.000), respiratory depression (RR = 0.46, 95%CI: 0.30-0.70, P = 0.000), injection pain (RR = 0.12, 95%CI: 0.05-0.25, P = 0.000), bradycardia (RR = 0.37, 95%CI: 0.24-0.58, P = 0.000), and time to discharge [weighted mean difference (WMD) = -0.58, 95%CI: -0.97 to -0.18, P = 0.005], compared to those after propofol administration. No obvious differences were observed for postoperative nausea and vomiting (RR = 1.09, 95%CI: 0.97-1.24, P = 0.151), dizziness (RR = 0.77, 95%CI: 0.43-1.36, P = 0.361), successful sedation rate (RR = 0.96, 95%CI: 0.93-1.00, P = 0.083), or the time to become fully alert (WMD = 0.00, 95%CI: -1.08-1.08, P = 0.998). CONCLUSION Remimazolam appears to be safer than propofol for gastroenteroscopy in older adults. However, further studies are required to confirm these findings.

Additive effects of emotional expression and stimulus size on the perception of genuine and artificial facial expressions: an ERP study

Seeing an angry individual in close physical proximity can not only result in a larger retinal representation of that individual and an enhanced resolution of emotional cues, but may also increase motivation for rapid visual processing and action preparation. The present study investigated the effects of stimulus size and emotional expression on the perception of happy, angry, non-expressive, and scrambled faces. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses of N = 40 participants who performed a naturalness classification task on real and artificially created facial expressions. While the emotion-related effects on accuracy for recognizing authentic expressions were modulated by stimulus size, ERPs showed only additive effects of stimulus size and emotional expression, with no significant interaction with size. This contrasts with previous research on emotional scenes and words. Effects of size were present in all included ERPs, whereas emotional expressions affected the N170, EPN, and LPC, irrespective of size. These results imply that the decoding of emotional valence in faces can occur even for small stimuli. Supra-additive effects in faces may necessitate larger size ranges or dynamic stimuli that increase arousal.

Bio-carbon coil aerogels from tea waste: A sustainable solution for efficient oil-water separation

Discharging wastewater containing oils, fats, and organic solvents into water bodies poses a significant threat to the already limited freshwater resources. In recent years, three-dimensional (3D) porous adsorbent materials, such as aerogel materials, have gained attention for their high separation effectiveness in adsorption technology. However, the poor mechanical strength of existing aerogel materials limits their application in oil–water separation. To address this challenge, this study proposes to use carbon coils obtained from tea waste as a template for producing low-cost, ultra-light, elastic, and highly recyclable bio-carbon coil aerogels (BCCA). The BCCA, featuring high porosity and a hierarchical porous structure, demonstrated exceptional performance in oil–water separation applications. Specifically, it exhibited a high adsorption capacity for organic solutions (39 ∼ 117 g/g) and oils (32 ∼ 41 g/g), respectively, along with excellent selectivity, rapid adsorption time of approximately 30s, and good reuse capability, maintaining an adsorption efficiency of 85 %. These remarkable properties can be attributed to the exceptional hydrophobicity of the BCCA, with a contact angle of 134°, and the rapid capillary action facilitated by the helical network structure. The use of tea waste-derived carbon coils as a precursor for producing efficient and sustainable carbon coil aerogels presents a promising solution for environmental remediation, particularly in oil–water separation applications. This research addresses the issue of wastewater contamination and contributes to the utilization of tea waste, a readily available and abundant biomass resource, in the development of value-added materials for environmental sustainability.

UV-light-responsive Ag/TiO2/PVA nanocomposite for photocatalytic degradation of Cr, Ni, Zn, and Cu heavy metal ions

The rapid growth of industrialization has led to the uncontrolled pollution of the environment, and rapid action is needed. This study synthesized Ag/TiO2/polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) nano photocatalyst for promising light-derived photocatalytic removal of heavy metal ions. The design of experiment (DOE) was used to study the effect of important factors (pH, reaction time, and photocatalyst dosage) to maximize the final performance of the photocatalyst. In the optimized condition, the Ag/TiO2/PVA nano-photocatalyst removed more than 94% of Cr6+ in 180 min, and the efficiency was more than 70% for Cu2+, Zn2+, and Ni2+ metal ions. The adsorption of the heavy metal ions on the photocatalyst was described well with the Langmuir isotherm, while the pseudo-second-order linear kinetic model fitted with the experimental data. The nano-photocatalyst's stability was confirmed after maintaining its performance for five successive runs. The enhanced photocatalytic activity for the heavy metal ions removal can be attributed to the presence of metallic silver nanoparticles (electron transfer and plasmonic fields mechanisms) and PVA, which delayed the recombination of electron–hole. The synthesized ternary Ag/TiO2/PVA nano-photocatalyst showed promising performance for the elimination of heavy metal ions and can be used for environmental remediation purposes.

Towards an automatic classification of welding defect by convolutional neural network and robot classifier

The control process of welding requires manual operations, and this consumes time. Robot classifier can help by automatic detection of welding defect and by taking rapid actions to correct in situ the defect. This paper presents a convolutional neural network (CNN) model developed to classify the welding defect like splash, twisty, overlap, edge and copper adhesion based on machine vision. Using a resistance spot welding (RSW) dataset the CNN model was trained and evaluated to achieve the best performance. The batch size was varied to quantify its effect on the precision of the model. The model can predict the type of welding surface by confidence of 99.86%.

Public Morality: A Proposition for Effective Public Governance in Africa with Emphasis on Kenya

Purpose: The purpose of this literature review paper, discusses some of the public governance challenges that Africa faces today. The Paper intertwines: religion, governance, and morality; and presupposes that morality plays a role in good governance. The paper discusses considered basis of morality: Religion, Family, Education and the Rule-of-Law, and sketchily highlights some antiquity views on the subject.
 Materials and Methods: This study is a literature review on public morality in the public square. It starts by giving a general panoramic view, on Africa, before situating its focus on Kenya. The study interweaves religion, public governance and morality; and presupposes that morality plays a key role in good public governance. Based on this presupposition, the paper starts with a para further discusses public governance in Africa, focusing on Kenya. The study examines considered foundations of morality that are not only key but essential in Africa, with emphasis on the role of morality in effective public governance. The paper also considers the concepts of: Public Morality and Morality, and highlights the differing theories advanced in the literature, endeavor to define these concepts Morality and Public Morality. The study identifies and lists key pillars, essential for good public governance.
 Findings: The finding of this study based on the Kenyan scenario, is that the mere legislation of laws does not necessarily results in public morality. This literature review identified the following gaps: Studies indicative of whether immediate action and the appliance punitive measures, upon infringement of the laws, serve as a deterrent; the need to assess the correlation of number of Kenya’s anti-corruption legislations and their impact or lack thereof.
 Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: In respect to the Kenyan scenario, the researcher has made some recommendations in the fight against corruption. Pending a thorough research, this paper has made the following stop-gap recommendation for addressing Kenya’s paradoxical situation; Kenya needs to focus on consistent and indiscriminative enforcement of the rule of law; When these laws are infringed on, there is need to carry out speedy but thorough investigation and prosecution of offender. The researcher opines that rapid turnaround time of the wheels of prosecutorial process and arraignment of suspects to the courts of justice is a clear communication to perpetrators and would be perpetrators. In addition, the rapid turn and investigative actions taken may act as a deterrent measure and stern warning to potential perpetrators; as a.

Identifying failure types in cyber-physical water distribution networks using machine learning models

Abstract Water cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have experienced anomalies from cyber-physical attacks as well as conventional physical and operational failures (e.g., pipe leaks/bursts). In this regard, rapidly distinguishing and identifying a facing failure event from other possible failure events is necessary to take rapid emergency and recovery actions and, in turn, strengthen system's resilience. This paper investigated the performance of machine learning classification models – support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and artificial neural networks (ANNs) – to differentiate and identify failure events that can occur in a water distribution network (WDN). Datasets for model features related to tank water levels, nodal pressure, and water flow of pumps and valves were produced using hydraulic model simulation (WNTR and epanetCPA tools) for C-Town WDN under pipe leaks/bursts, cyber-attacks, and physical attacks. The evaluation of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score for the three models in failure type identification showed the variation of their performances depending on the specific failure types and data noise levels. Based on the findings, this study discussed insights into building a framework consisting of multiple classification models, rather than relying on a single best-performing model, for the reliable classification and identification of failure types in WDNs.

CXCL12+ dermal fibroblasts promote neutrophil recruitment and host defense by recognition of IL-17.

The skin provides an essential barrier for host defense through rapid action of multiple resident and recruited cell types, but the complex communication network governing these processes is incompletely understood. To define these cell-cell interactions more clearly, we performed an unbiased network analysis of mouse skin during invasive S. aureus infection and revealed a dominant role for CXCL12+ fibroblast subsets in neutrophil communication. These subsets predominantly reside in the reticular dermis, express adipocyte lineage markers, detect IL-17 and TNFα, and promote robust neutrophil recruitment through NFKBIZ-dependent release of CXCR2 ligands and CXCL12. Targeted deletion of Il17ra in mouse fibroblasts resulted in greatly reduced neutrophil recruitment and increased infection by S. aureus. Analogous human CXCL12+ fibroblast subsets abundantly express neutrophil chemotactic factors in psoriatic skin that are subsequently decreased upon therapeutic targeting of IL-17. These findings show that CXCL12+ dermal immune acting fibroblast subsets play a critical role in cutaneous neutrophil recruitment and host defense.

The effectiveness of legal framework of Arctic vessel-source black carbon governance.

The Arctic is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, of which vessel-source black carbon aerosols serving as a prominent catalyst for these changes. This situation is poised to worsen as sea ice melts and shipping lanes change. Rapid action aimed at mitigating short-term climate forcing factors can yield almost immediate climate benefits in the Arctic. This article provides an overview of the legal framework governing black carbon in the Arctic, considering three distinct perspectives: the global, regional, and national dimensions. These perspectives encompass global forums represented by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC), with a focus on recent developments concerning black carbon governance, notably the amendments to MARPOL Annex VI and Annex I. Regionally, forums represented by the Arctic Council and the European Union are examined. Black carbon emissions exhibit migratory characteristics, yet the primary legal responsibilities for emission reduction are concentrated within Arctic states. Therefore, this article also delves into the laws and practices of Arctic coastal states in their efforts to combat black carbon emissions, using Canada and Norway as examples. The analysis of institutional effectiveness in this article indicates that, at present, specialized legislation on black carbon is either vague or non-existent. The current Arctic ship-source black carbon governance system faces issues related to leadership ambiguity in its institutional structure, a limited scope of responsible entities, and a lack of diverse implementation measures. Simultaneously, the governance system is questioned for having weak or non-legally binding regulations at the level of legal enforcement. The article anticipates the introduction of more mandatory regulations while also encouraging the selection of non-coercive policy tools. Accordingly, this article argues that a coordinated governance system centered on IMO and the Arctic Council needs to be established. Such a framework should adopt a more inclusive approach to stimulate positive interactions between regulations, aiming to create a broader winning alliance based on the existing foundations.

Imlifidase in kidney transplantation.

Kidney transplantation, the gold-standard therapeutic approach for patients with end-stage kidney disease, offers improvement in patient survival and quality of life. However, broad sensitization against human leukocyte antigens often resulting in a positive crossmatch against the patient's living donor or the majority of potential deceased donors in the allocation system represents a major obstacle due to a high risk for antibody-mediated rejection, delayed graft function and allograft loss. Kidney-paired donation and desensitization protocols have been established to overcome this obstacle, with limited success. Imlifidase, a novel immunoglobulin G (IgG)-degrading enzyme derived from Streptococcus pyogenes and recombinantly produced in Escherichia coli, is a promising agent for recipients with a positive crossmatch against their organ donor with high specificity towards IgG, rapid action and high efficacy in early pre-clinical and clinical studies. However, the rebound of IgG after a few days can lead to antibody-mediated rejection, making the administration of potent immunosuppressive regimens in the early post-transplant phase necessary. There is currently no comparative study evaluating the efficiency of imlifidase therapy compared with conventional desensitization protocols along with the lack of randomized control trials, indicating the clear need for future large-scale clinical studies in this field. Besides providing a practical framework for the clinical use of the agent, our aim in this article is to evaluate the underlying mechanism of action, efficiency and safety of imlifidase therapy in immunologically high-risk kidney transplant recipients.

Effective Treatment of Helicobacter pylori Infection Using Supramolecular Antimicrobial Peptide Hydrogels.

Helicobacter pylori can cause various gastric conditions including stomach cancer in an acidic environment. Although early H. pylori infections can be treated by antibiotics, prolonged antibiotic administrations may lead to the development of antimicrobial resistance, compromising the effectiveness of the treatments. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been reported to possess unique advantages against antimicrobial-resistant bacteria due to their rapid physical membrane disruptions and anti-inflammation/immunoregulation properties. Herein, we have developed an AMP hydrogel, which can be orally administered for the treatment of H. pylori infection. The hydrogel has potent antimicrobial activity against H. pylori, achieving bacterial eradication within minutes of action. Compared with the AMP solution, the hydrogel formulation significantly reduced the cytotoxicity and enhanced proteolytic stability. In vivo experiments suggested that the hydrogel formed at pH 4 had superior therapeutic effects to those at pH 7 and 10 hydrogels, attributed to its rapid release and bactericidal action within the acidic stomach environment. Compared to conventional antibiotic treatments, the AMP hydrogel had the advantages of fast bacterial killing in the gastric juice and obviated proton pump inhibitors during the treatment. Although both the AMP hydrogel and antibiotics suppressed the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the former uniquely promoted inflammation resolution. These results indicate that the AMP hydrogels with effectiveness and biosafety may be potential candidates for the clinical treatment of H. pylori infections.

Integrating Peer Support Workers into Mental Health Programs

Objective: Canadian Mental Health Association - Calgary Region (CMHA Calgary) works to reduce the impact of mental illness and addiction in the community. This is actioned through mental health programming focused on education, prevention, and early intervention. The organization places high value on the inclusion of lived experience in mental health programming in the form of Peer Support (PS). CMHA Calgary’s five-year strategic plan included a goal to formally integrate Peer Support Workers (PSWs) into all established programs with thought and intention. Research Design and Methods: CMHA Calgary integrated peers into mental health programs using a collaborative and developmental approach. The project team developed an evaluation framework as a guide to collect feedback and understand the impact of the pilot initiative. Results: This approach allowed for real-time responses and data collection, which lead to rapid action to improve the approach before it was spread to other programs. The project allowed for the development of program materials for future application. Conclusions: This project provided CMHA Calgary with tangible, actionable information on how to integrate PSWs into all of their programs.

Automatedly identify dryland threatened species at large scale by using deep learning

Dryland biodiversity is decreasing at an alarming rate. Advanced intelligent tools are urgently needed to rapidly, automatedly, and precisely detect dryland threatened species on a large scale for biological conservation. Here, we explored the performance of three deep convolutional neural networks (Deeplabv3+, Unet, and Pspnet models) on the intelligent recognition of rare species based on high-resolution (0.3 m) satellite images taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We focused on a threatened species, Populus euphratica, in the Tarim River Basin (China), where there has been a severe population decline in the 1970s and restoration has been carried out since 2000. The testing results showed that Unet outperforms Deeplabv3+ and Pspnet when the training samples are lower, while Deeplabv3+ performs best as the dataset increases. Overall, when training samples are 80, Deeplabv3+ had the best overall performance for Populus euphratica identification, with mean pixel accuracy (MPA) between 87.31 % and 90.2 %, which, on average is 3.74 % and 11.29 % higher than Unet and Pspnet, respectively. Deeplabv3+ can accurately detect the boundaries of Populus euphratica even in areas of dense vegetation, with lower identification uncertainty for each pixel than other models. This study developed a UAV imagery-based identification framework using deep learning with high resolution in large-scale regions. This approach can accurately capture the variation in dryland threatened species, especially those in inaccessible areas, thereby fostering rapid and efficient conservation actions.

Social prescribing: Moving pediatric care upstream to improve child health and wellbeing and address child health inequities.

Social prescribing is a means for trusted individuals in clinical and community settings to connect people who have non-medical, health-related social needs to non-clinical supports and services within the community through a non-medical prescription. Evaluations of social prescribing programs for the pediatric population have demonstrated statistically significant improvements in participants' mental, physical, and social wellbeing and reductions in healthcare demand and costs. Experts have pointed to the particularly powerful impact of social prescribing on children's mental health, suggesting that it may help to alleviate the strain on the overburdened mental health system. Social prescribing shows promise as a tool to move pediatric care upstream by addressing non-medical, health-related social needs, hence why there is an urgent need to direct more attention towards the pediatric population in social prescribing research, policy, and practice. This demands rapid action by researchers, policymakers, and child health professionals to support advancements in this area.

A novel data driven anticipatory framework for the communicable syndrome

Preceding pandemic trends uncovered the weakness of existing healthcare management. As a result, there is an urgent need to build a resilient pandemic-lockdown model to relieve health systems from crashing and equip them with the latest tools and techniques for rapid actions to manage future pandemics efficiently. Therefore, this research work aims at proposing an adaptable framework called the Automated Selection of Streets for Lockdown (ASSLD) to mitigate the exponential progression of the epidemic from the perspective of urban resilience. Intuitive selection of pandemic-affected streets was accomplished by first applying the shortest path algorithm over the respective spatial network and then validating the selection through spatial analysis using space syntax syntactic measures. Medical records for victims of a preceding contagious viral infection were used as a dataset to prepare test beds against which the ASSLD model was regressively validated. Multiple linear regression was used to analyse the impact of space syntax syntactic measures along with socio-economic factors on the number of replicating victims. The findings indicated that space syntax syntactic variables along with certain socioeconomic factors, provided more granular means of measuring the spatial elements (streets) as diffusion hubs for a communicable disease. This paper presents in detail proof of concept with results applied to actual data obtained from a preceding communicable syndrome outbreak.

Bioactive glass incorporated dressing matrix for rapid hemostatic action with antibacterial activity

Uncontrolled bleeding stands as a leading cause of preventable death in both civilian trauma and military battlefield scenarios. Existing hemostatic dressings like HemCon, Celox, and QuickClot, often lack instant hemostasis at the bleeding site and may have biodegradability and exothermic issues. To address the above in this communication, we have synthesized a hemostatic glass (acronym AlBG, CaO-SiO2 system, incorporated with Al2O3 and ZnO) by sol gel route and carried out detail physicochemical characterizations, e.g., XRD, FESEM, FTIR, BET and particle size analysis etc. The AlBG of particle size range 140–253 nm was incorporated into the nonwoven surgical cotton gauze to obtain AlBGscg. In vitro biological assays including cytocomtability, hemocompatibility assays of the above coated gauze was undertaken using NIH3T3 of which, the later showed optimum hemocompatibility with <6 % lysis of red blood cells. Potent antibacterial action on both gram positive and gram negative strains were obtained with significant zone of inhibition of 17 ± 0.34 mm and 16 ± 0.56 mm, respectively. Importantly, significant reduction of the clotting time (31.81 ± 0.12 % for P time and 33.3 ± 0.23 % for aPTT) compared to the control group, indicated activation of both intrinsic and extrinsic coagulation pathways. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images exhibited an enhanced in vitro blood clot formation in case of AlBGscg in comparison to the control (uncoated surgical cotton gauze), visually. Additionally, a noticeable reduction of ∼30 % in the time required for the blood clot formation, in case of AlBGscg, was observed. The in vivo hemostatic potential of AlBGscg was evaluated in Wistar rats through femoral artery injury and was compared with commercially available surgical cotton gauze. The results demonstrated substantial reduction in the time required for hemostasis (approximately 50 % reduction), a lower amount of blood loss (7.33 % with AlBGscg compared to 22.31 % with surgical cotton gauze), and importantly, there were no incidents of re-bleeding observed with AlBGscg, highlighting its promise as a candidate for effective hemostasis.

Afforestation as an Option to Reduce Desertification in Salah al-Din Governorate Challenges and Solutions

Afforestation is one of the most important factors that contribute to combating desertification. It is the first link in destroying or building the ecosystem. The presence of trees is able to enhance the biological capacity of the land. Reduce dust storms. And the determinant in the climate changes that worry the world. Therefore, the enactment of laws that prevent unauthorized cutting of trees, and the holding of conferences and seminars on a global scale began with the necessity of rapid action in the face of the great shortage in numbers of trees. Countries began to establish campaigns to plant millions of trees annually.&#x0D; And in implementation of the requirements of the United Nations Convention on Desertification, to which Iraq joined in the year 2009, the National Action Program was established in Iraq to draw up the ten-year strategic plan 2008-2018, and it showed great seriousness in finding ways to reduce desertification, as well as to fulfill its obligations towards international environmental agreements. The program concluded that: 92% of the area of Iraq is threatened by desertification, which is considered a warning bell that calls for effective and rapid action to curb this environmental problem.&#x0D; Salah al-Din governorate, like the rest of Iraq, suffers from the spread of desertification in a large way, as it is among the central governorates north of the capital, Baghdad. It is astronomically located at 43.35 longitude and 34.27 latitude. Its population is about 1,500,000 according to the 2014 census, and its area is approximately 11,000,000 dunums. This is due to the joining of some areas from the neighboring governorates administratively, and sometimes their exit as well. The arable area is 6,085,932 dunums. As for the lands that are desertified and threatened with desertification, they amount to 5,372,334 dunums, and there is a significant deterioration in the natural pastures, which have an area of 1,782,239 acres.&#x0D; Therefore, this study was to find out the number of trees that should be planted by knowing the area of lands threatened with desertification in the governorate. It was estimated according to the minimum number of trees in each dunum, which was agreed upon by a scientist. It was 58,000,000 trees. When starting to draw up a plan to plant this number of trees, there were three problems. Major, which is that it needs allocations of up to 800 billion and large numbers of human resources. If a million trees are planted, which is what all of Iraq aspires to plant in the field of desertification, we need 58 years to reach the goal. This is if the project was adopted by the government sector&#x0D; Therefore, there was an option to involve the landowners in the afforestation program, where the state imposes the planting of a certain number of trees annually on each agricultural holding within the areas threatened with desertification, provided that the state supplies the seedlings free of charge with an irrigation system. When studying it, it was found that there are about 40,000 artesian wells distributed throughout the region, and if only 500 trees are planted for each well, it means that we can plant 20 million trees without large financial allocations. The government sector adopted the implementation of planting the same number of trees&#x0D; This requires developing a program to implement this project with the participation of all ministries and agencies in order to reach a mechanism for implementing this study, and among its procedures is to stop all administrative transactions for the farmer unless the owner of the holding is committed to implementing the planting of the required number of trees.

Efficient selective uptake of Hg(Ⅱ) using a porous organic polymer rich in N and S atoms

The escalating issue of mercury (II) ions (Hg2+) pollution in water, primarily due to human activities, poses a significant environmental and health risk. Addressing the urgent need for efficient Hg2+ removal, this study introduces a novel porous organic polymer (TpTHU) synthesized through Schiff base condensation of thiourea (THU) and 1,3,5-Triformylphloroglucinol (Tp). TpTHU, enriched with sulfur and nitrogen, facilitates soft–soft interaction with Hg2+, offering a potent solution for mercury contamination. Our experimental results demonstrate TpTHU's remarkable adsorption capacity for Hg2+, reaching 1250 mg/g, attributed to its dense complexation sites. The adsorption behavior aligns well with the Brouers-Sotolongo model. Notably, TpTHU achieves 99.25% mercury removal within 120 min over a broad pH range (4 to 10), underscoring its rapid action. Additionally, in fixed-bed column experiments, TpTHU effectively lowers Hg2+ concentrations in industrial wastewater from 10.0 mg/L to below 5 μg/L, surpassing industrial emission standards. Through XPS analysis and density functional theory calculations, we elucidate the adsorption mechanism, affirming TpTHU's efficiency. With its straightforward synthesis, high efficacy, and excellent reusability, TpTHU emerges as a promising candidate for mitigating Hg2+ pollution in industrial wastewater.

Employee investigation and contact tracing program in a pediatric cancer hospital to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 among the workforce, patients, and caregivers.

Case investigations and contact tracing are essential disease control measures used by health departments. Early in the pandemic, they were seen as a key strategy to stop COVID-19 spread. The CDC urged rapid action to scale up and train a large workforce and collaborate across public and private agencies to halt COVID-19 transmission. We developed a program for case investigation and contact tracing that followed CDC and local health guidelines, compliant with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations and tailored to the needs and resources of our institution. Program staff were trained and assessed for competency before joining the program. From March 2020 to May 2021, we performed 838 COVID-19 case investigations, which led to 136 contacts. Most employees reported a known SARS-CoV-2 exposure from the community (n = 435) or household (n = 343). Only seven (5.1%) employees were determined as more likely than not to have SARS-CoV-2 infection related to workplace exposure, and when so, lapses in following the masking recommendations were identified. Between June 2021-February 2022, our program adjusted to the demand of the different waves, particularly omicron, by significantly reducing the amount of data collected. No transmission from employees to patients or caregivers was observed during this period. Prompt implementation of case investigation and contact tracing is possible, and it effectively reduces workplace exposures. This approach can be adapted to suit the specific needs and requirements of various healthcare settings, particularly those serving the most vulnerable patient populations.

The art of establishing mineral tolerances of dogs and cats.

For over six decades, nutritional science has provided well-developed, peer-reviewed nutrient recommendations to support the health of dogs and cats. These guidelines are updated based on new scientifically valid research and appropriate peer-review. Recent regulatory and scientific positions around health issues have resulted in strong opinions and desires for rapid regulatory action surrounding mineral nutrition, but with limited and conflicting scientific evidence. Pet Food Institute nutrition experts have come together to jointly author an article on the complexities of establishing mineral tolerances of dogs and cats to illustrate the limitations in defining mineral tolerances. This discussion covers how mineral requirements were determined, including the opportunities and pitfalls encountered. Scientific councils must review and clarify any proposed changes in conducting mineral nutrition research that might impact complete and balanced foods and surrounding regulations. It is important to clarify the multiple issues in mineral nutrition research and the necessity for thorough evaluation of data while avoiding arbitrary and potentially harmful guidelines.