IntroductionSouth Asia is home to more than 300 million smokeless tobacco (ST) users. Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as signatories to the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) have ...developed policies aimed at curbing the use of tobacco. The objective of this study is to assess the compliance of ST point-of-sale (POS) vendors and the supply chain with the articles of the FCTC and specifically with national tobacco control laws. We also aim to assess disparities in compliance with tobacco control laws between ST and smoked tobacco products.Methods and analysisThe study will be carried out at two sites each in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. We will conduct a sequential mixed-methods study with five components: (1) mapping of ST POS, (2) analyses of ST samples packaging, (3) observation, (4) survey interviews of POS and (5) in-depth interviews with wholesale dealers/suppliers/manufacturers of ST. We aim to conduct at least 300 POS survey interviews and observations, and 6–10 in-depth interviews in each of the three countries. Data collection will be done by trained data collectors. The main statistical analysis will report the frequencies and proportions of shops that comply with the FCTC and local tobacco control policies, and provide a 95% CI of these estimates. The qualitative in-depth interview data will be analysed using the framework approach. The findings will be connected, each component informing the focus and/or design of the next component.Ethics and disseminationEthical approvals for the study have been received from the Health Sciences Research Governance Committee at the University of York, UK. In-country approvals were taken from the National Bioethics Committee in Pakistan, the Bangladesh Medical Research Council and the Indian Medical Research Council. Our results will be disseminated via scientific conferences, peer-reviewed research publications and press releases.
In the current era of rapid industrialization, the foremost challenge is the management of industrial wastes. Activities such as mining and industrialization spill over a large quantity of toxic ...waste that pollutes soil, water, and air. This poses a major environmental and health challenge. The toxic heavy metals present in the soil and water are entering the food chain, which in turn causes severe health hazards. Environmental clean‐up and reclamation of heavy metal contaminated soil and water are very important, and it necessitates efforts of environmentalists, industrialists, scientists, and policymakers. Phytoremediation is a plant‐based approach to remediate heavy metal/organic pollutant contaminated soil and water in an eco‐friendly, cost‐effective, and permanent way. This review covers the effect of heavy metal toxicity on plant growth and physiological process, the concept of heavy metal accumulation, detoxification, and the mechanisms of tolerance in plants. Based on plants' ability to uptake heavy metals and metabolize them within tissues, phytoremediation techniques have been classified into six types: phytoextraction, phytoimmobilization, phytovolatilization, phytodegradation, rhizofiltration, and rhizodegradation. The development of research in this area led to the identification of metal hyper‐accumulators, which could be utilized for reclamation of contaminated soil through phytomining. Concurrently, breeding and biotechnological approaches can enhance the remediation efficiency. Phytoremediation technology, combined with other reclamation technologies/practices, can provide clean soil and water to the ecosystem.
The fatty acid (FA) and phospholipid composition of dietary lecithin may influence FA digestibility and milk production in cattle. Eight multiparous Holstein cows (99.4 ± 9.2 d in milk DIM; 48.9 ± ...3.8 kg milk/d) were enrolled in a 3 × 3 incomplete Latin square design with 3 treatments provided as continuous abomasal infusates spanning 14-d experimental periods: water (CON), soybean phospholipids (SOY; 74.5 g of deoiled soy lecithin), or sunflower phospholipids (SUN; 133.5 g of hydrolyzed sunflower lecithin). Cows were fed the same diet, which contained (% dry matter) 27.0% neutral detergent fiber (NDF), 15.6% crude protein (CP), 26.2% starch, and 5.87% FA. Treatments did not modify body weight, milk fat, protein, or lactose contents, or the efficiency of producing energy-corrected milk. Cows infused with SUN had greater milk yields than those receiving SOY or CON treatments. Cows infused with SUN had higher total solids, protein, and lactose yields than cows receiving the SOY or CON treatments. Sunflower phospholipids enhanced feed efficiency (milk yield/dry matter intake) relative to SOY or CON. Treatment did not affect intakes or apparent total-tract digestibilities for NDF, CP, starch, or 16-carbon (16C) FA. Cows receiving SUN had greater total FA and 18-carbon (18C) FA intakes than SOY or CON, but treatments did not impact their digestibility. Milk FA composition was modified by treatment. Cows receiving SUN had a greater concentration of polyunsaturated FA and lower concentrations of saturated FA and monounsaturated FA in milk relative to SOY or CON. In conclusion, the abomasal infusion of SUN improved milk production and milk FA composition, indicating potential benefits for dairy cow nutrition and milk quality.
Drought stress at the germination stage is an important environmental stress limiting crop yield. Hence, our study investigated comparative root transcriptome profiles of four contrasting soybean ...genotypes viz., drought‐tolerant (PI342618B/DTP and A214/DTL) and drought‐sensitive (NN86‐4/DSP and A195/DSL) under drought stress using RNA‐Seq approach. A total of 4850 and 6272 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in tolerant (DTP and DTL) and sensitive (DSP and DSL) genotypes, respectively. Principle component analysis (PCA) and correlation analysis revealed higher correlation between DTP and DTL. Both gene ontology (GO) and MapMan analyses showed that the drought response was enriched in DEGs associated with water and auxin transport, cell wall/membrane, antioxidant activity, catalytic activity, secondary metabolism, signaling and transcription factor (TF) activities. Out of 981 DEGs screened from above terms, only 547 showed consistent opposite expression between contrasting genotypes. Twenty‐eight DEGs of 547 were located on Chr.08 rich in QTLs and “Hotspot regions” associated with drought stress, and eight of them showed non‐synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism. Hence, 10 genes (including above eight genes plus two hub genes) were predicated as possible candidates regulating drought tolerance, which needs further functional validation. Overall, the transcriptome profiling provided in‐depth understanding about the genetic mechanism and candidate genes underlying drought tolerance in soybean.
In e-healthcare applications integrity of the received information is of prime importance for ensuring the accurate diagnosis. The integrity of electronic medical record (EMR) is possible only when ...the medical images and other relevant data received are tamper free. Reversibility of medical images after certain degree of processing is always a desired property in medical images as it aids proper diagnosis. This paper proposes a novel reversible image authentication (RIA) scheme for tamper detection and authentication of medical images. In the proposed RIA scheme, the medical image is divided into 4 × 4 blocks followed by embedding fragile watermark bit (for authentication) in each of these blocks. Along with authentication, the localization of tamper is achieved accurately by using LSB embedding along with mean modification approach. The security of the watermark has been enhanced with Arnold cat map, Gray coding and AES-128 encryption. The experimental results show that the scheme offers better fragility against all intentional/unintentional signal processing attacks. The comparison results between proposed RIA scheme and similar state-of-the-art schemes show superiority of our scheme in terms of imperceptivity, fragility and tamper localization. For a payload of 16 kb, the average PSNR achieved for 50 Gray scale images of size 512 × 512 is more than 47 dB. In addition, the scheme offers very less complexity; the embedding and extraction times are around 0.6 s and 0.5 s respectively. Given the features of proposed scheme it could serve as a potential candidate for transfer of EMR in an e-healthcare system.
With the exponential rise of multimedia technology and networked infrastructure, electronic healthcare is coming up a big way. One of the most important challenges in an electronic healthcare setup ...is the authentication of medical images, received by an expert at a far-off location from the sender. With an aim to address the critical authentication issue, this paper presents a fragile watermarking technique capable of tamper detection and localization in medical/general images. We divide the cover image into 4 × 4 non overlapping pixel blocks; with each block further sub-divided into two 4 × 2 blocks, called as Upper Half Block (UHB) and Lower Half Block (LHB). The information embedded in LHB facilitates tamper detection while as that embedded in UHB facilities tamper localization. The experimental results show that, in addition to tamper detection and localization capability, the proposed technique has lesser computational complexity when compared to other state-of-art techniques. Further, the proposed scheme results in average PSNR of 51.26 dB for a payload of one bit per pixel (1bpp) indicating that the watermarked images obtained are of high visual quality.
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-driven smart health and emotional care is revolutionizing the healthcare industry by embracing several technologies related to multimodal physiological data ...collection, communication, intelligent automation, and efficient manufacturing. The authentication and secure exchange of electronic health records (EHRs), comprising of patient data collected using wearable sensors and laboratory investigations, is of paramount importance. In this article, we present a novel high payload and reversible EHR embedding framework to secure the patient information successfully and authenticate the received content. The proposed approach is based on novel left data mapping (LDM), pixel repetition method (PRM), RC4 encryption, and checksum computation. The input image of size <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">M \times N </tex-math></inline-formula> is upscaled by using PRM that guarantees reversibility with lesser computational complexity. The binary secret data are encrypted using the RC4 encryption algorithm and then the encrypted data are grouped into 3-bit chunks and converted into decimal equivalents. Before embedding, these decimal digits are encoded by LDM. To embed the shifted data, the cover image is divided into <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">2\times 2 </tex-math></inline-formula> blocks and then in each block, two digits are embedded into the counter diagonal pixels. For tamper detection and localization, a checksum digit computed from the block is embedded into one of the main diagonal pixels. A fragile logo is embedded into the cover images in addition to EHR to facilitate early tamper detection. The average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the stego-images obtained is 41.95 dB for a very high embedding capacity of 2.25 bits per pixel. Furthermore, the embedding time is less than 0.2 s. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques in terms of payload, imperceptibility, computational complexity, and capability to detect and localize tamper. All the attributes affirm that the proposed scheme is a potential candidate for providing better security and authentication solutions for IoMT-based smart health.
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•Pixel Repetition Method (PRM) has been proposed and utilized to implement a semi-reversible data hiding scheme.•RC4 has been used for providing an additional layer of security to ...embedded EPR/data.•Hybrid edge detection has been utilized to maximize the detected edges for better imperceptivity.•ISB hiding has been used for reducing computational complexity.
A high capacity and semi-reversible data hiding scheme based on Pixel Repetition Method (PRM) and hybrid edge detection for scalable medical images has been proposed in this paper. PRM has been used to scale up the small sized image (seed image) and hybrid edge detection ensures that no important edge information is missed. The scaled up version of seed image has been divided into 2×2 non overlapping blocks. In each block there is one seed pixel whose status decides the number of bits to be embedded in the remaining three pixels of that block. The Electronic Patient Record (EPR)/data have been embedded by using Least Significant and Intermediate Significant Bit Substitution (ISBS). The RC4 encryption has been used to add an additional security layer for embedded EPR/data. The proposed scheme has been tested for various medical and general images and compared with some state of art techniques in the field. The experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme besides being semi-reversible and computationally efficient is capable of handling high payload and as such can be used effectively for electronic healthcare applications.
Nanotechnology has greatly expanded the applications of nanoparticles (NPs) domain in the scientific field. In this context, the zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs) and 24-epibrassinolide (EBL) has ...been revealed to positively regulate plant metabolism and growth. In the present study, we investigated the role of ZnO-NPs and EBL in the regulation of plant growth, photosynthetic efficiency, enzymes activities and fruit yield in tomato. Foliar treatment of ZnO-NPs at three levels (10, 50 or 100 ppm) and EBL (10−8 M) were applied separately or in combination to the foliage of plant at 35–39 days after sowing (DAS); and the control plants were treated with double distilled water (DDW) only at the same time interval. Among different tested concentrations of ZnO-NPs and/or EBL, the combined spray of 50 ppm of ZnO-NPs and 10−8 M of EBL proved to be best, and considerably increased the growth, photosynthetic efficiency, biochemical enzymes activities as well as fruit yield. Besides, the performance of the antioxidant enzymes viz catalase, peroxidase and superoxide dismutase were also increased after the combined application of ZnO-NPs and EBL in Lycopersicon esculentum. Therefore, it is suggested that combined application of 50 ppm of ZnO-NPs and 10−8 M of EBL is the best combination can be applied to increase the performance and yield of L. esculentum.
Introduction
Despite the fact that adolescents have been at higher risk of distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, the effect of pandemic on psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) is not well described.
...Objectives
The study’s objective is to evaluate if PLEs are induced in young individuals aged 18-24 during the pandemic.
Methods
A total of 201 college students from Pakistan (ages 18-24) were recruited for a cross-sectional research. We investigated the incidence of PLEs in Pakistan during the pandemic, their links to socio-demographic factors, COVID-19-related characteristics, depression, anxiety, and sleep difficulties. Community Assessment of Psychic Experience’s positive symptom component (CAPE), Patient Health Questionnaire, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale, and IBM SPSS 25 were used.
Results
CAPE-Frequency and CAPE-stress were positively associated with PHQ total (p<0.0010); GAD total (p<0.001); time spent indoors due to COVID-19 (p<0.001). Psychiatric disorder other than bipolar disorder or psychosis (p<0.001 for CAPE-frequency and stress), family history of psychiatric disorders (p<0.001 for CAPE-frequency and stress), chronic medical disease (p=0.021 CAPE-frequency and p=0.026 CAPE-stress), illegal drug usage (p<0.001 for CAPE-frequency and stress) were associated with CAPE-Frequency and CAPE-stress. In linear stepwise regression analysis, the best model predicted CAPE-Frequency explained 77.4% of variance with the following variables: PHQ total (B=0.552, SE= 0.08, t=6.909, p<0.001), GAD total (p<0.001), duration at home (p<0.001), and psychiatric disorder in family (p<0.001).
Conclusions
PLEs have been linked with anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Individuals with a mental condition, family history of psychiatric disorder, chronic medical illness, illicit drug use, and increased time spent at home experienced more PLEs and stress.
Disclosure
No significant relationships.
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