The issue of waste management has continued to attract global attention and several efforts have been made to find solutions to the problem of improper waste disposal mostly in the urban areas in the ...developing countries of the world. This study exploits the benefits of using social entrepreneurship in waste management and creation of wealth using primary school pupils in the central senatorial district of Ogun State. A descriptive survey research design was used for the study and 500 primary school pupils using volunteer sampling techniques. A self-constructed questionnaire titled “Students Perception on Social Entrepreneurship and Waste Management Questionnaire” (SPSEWMQ) (r =.82) was used as main instrument for the study. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics. The findings showed that social entrepreneurship helps pupils to gain skills of proper handling of waste, waste collection and disposal among others, also pupils benefited from the social entrepreneurship activities they embarked on in the area of helping them to develop skills of willingness to get things done, determination to achieve success, employment generation and wealth creation and social entrepreneurship activities did lead to gaining waste sorting skills by the pupils. It was recommended that social entrepreneurship skills should be developed in the pupils so as to participate as productive members of the society and that pupils should be encouraged to manage waste and turn it to wealth.
This study assessed the potentials of using digital games to develop problem-solving skills and values of patience, tolerance and perseverance which digital games tend to promote. The study provides ...answers on the contributions of digital games into the development of problem-solving skills and values in Social Studies students. It adopted a descriptive design using 200 level pre-service Social Studies teachers in a government owned tertiary institution in Ogun State. At first, purposeful sampling technique was used to select pre-service Social Studies teachers while volunteer sampling was used to select forty (40) respondents for the study. A structured questionnaire tagged “Digital Games and Development of Problem Solving and Values in Social Studies Questionnaire” (DGDPVSSQ) (r = .89) was used to get feedback from the students. Descriptive statistical analysis of mean and standard deviation was used for the analysis of data obtained from students’ experiences after the games exercise. The result showed that digital games help in developing the problem-solving skills of logical thinking, solution focus, and evaluation of options; as well as the values of persistence, will to achieve, rules application and determination in Social Studies students. Based on the findings, it is recommended that digital games learning will be of immense benefit in improving academic achievement of students in Social Studies and hence using digital games in Social Studies should be encouraged to attract the attention of the students and develop problem-solving skills, positive attitudes and values in the student.
The study examined the application of ICT in developing critical thinking among Social Studies pre-service teachers and assessed the role of gender on the application of ICT in Social Studies. Two ...hypotheses were tested in this study. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design A simple random sampling technique was used in selecting two out of three Colleges of Education in Kogi State and self-selecting sampling procedure was used in identifying the subjects. The researcher made use of 70 pre-service 200 level Social Studies students in the two selected government owned Colleges of Education in Kogi State. Thirty-five pre-service teachers were selected from each of the two colleges of education. Two instruments were used, namely, Controversial Issues and ICT Instructional Package (CIIIP) and Controversial Issues Achievement Test (CIAT) r = .86. The administration of the instrument lasted for six weeks. Data collected were analysed using ANCOVA. The results of the analysis indicate that ICT related strategies such as social media strategy contributed more significantly than conventional method in enhancing learning outcomes of the students in controversial issues discussion in Social Studies and there is moderating effect of academic ability on the students’ post-test achievement scores in controversial issues discussion in Social Studies. Based on the findings, it is recommended that ICT related strategies will be of immense benefit in improving academic achievement of students in Social Studies, hence the use of ICT in Social Studies classroom should be inculcated in the curriculum of Social Studies educators.
Aim: This work was conducted between the period of April 2022 and March 2023 to investigate the prevalence and predisposing factors of enteric parasites among children accessing medical healthcare at ...the Federal Medical Center keffi, Nasarawa State.
Study Design: The study was a cross-sectional study.
Methodology: Fresh stool specimens were collected into sterile bottles from children aged 1-15 (246 males and 194 females) who accessed medical healthcare at the Federal Medical Center keffi, Nasarawa State between the period of April 2022 and March 2023. Information such as age, gender, and drinking water sources were obtained from the subjects through a structured questionnaire. The stool specimens were observed visually for colour, consistency, and presence of blood, pus, and adult worms while the concentration of the eggs, cysts, and larvae of the intestinal parasites was carried out using the formol ether method and viewed with X10 and X40 magnifications of the binocular microscope. Data obtained from this study were analyzed using the chi-square test by the use of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version (21.0). Values obtained were considered significant at 95% probability.
Results: An overall prevalence of 27.26% was obtained in the study participants with a total of five species of intestinal parasites identified. The parasites include; Entamoeba coli, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia lamblia, Strongyloides stercoralis, and Trichomonas hominis. Entamoeba. histolytica was the most prevalent (15.45%) while S. stercoralis was the least prevalent (1.36%). In this study, males recorded a higher prevalence of Entamoeba. histolytica (16.49%) than females (14.63%) likewise for E. coli (5.14%) and (4.07%), Strongyloides stercoralis (1.55%) and (1.22%) respectively. In contrast, females recorded a higher prevalence of Giardia lamblia (2.85%) than males (2.58%) and Trichomonas hominis (3.25%) and (1.03%) respectively. The prevalence of intestinal parasites varied significantly among the age groups, with the age group 1-5 years being the most susceptible to E. histolytica (45.71%). Children who drank river water had the highest prevalence of parasitic infection (57.14%) while those who drank borehole water had the lowest majority (14.29%).
Conclusion: The high prevalence of intestinal parasites observed in this study in relation to the sources of drinking water of the subjects suggests a major predisposing factor to intestinal parasitic infections. Therefore, the provision of potable drinking water and public enlightenment on proper hygiene practices in the study area is of great importance.
Independent Nigeria is confronted with a plethora of citizenship (socio-political) issues and problems which various informal citizenship advocacy programmes have been unable to resolve. Also, sundry ...formal school programmes like social studies curriculum used to develop effective citizenship failed due to implementation lapses. This failure led to the severing of citizenship issues from social studies to form a new subject called civic education. Thus, this research was conducted to appraise the effective implementation of the school civic curriculum at the basic and senior secondary levels in Lagos and Ogun states, in the south-western geo-political zone of Nigeria. Three sets of stakeholders who are key civic curriculum implementers were selected as participants: twenty-nine teacher educators at colleges and universities; two hundred and ninety-eight civic teachers and five hundred and seventy learners at basic and senior secondary levels. Open and closed questionnaires and focus group discussion were administered on these participants. The study adopted an ethno-nationalistic, critical and global citizenship theoretical framework to underpin the study. This was because the issue and activity based curriculum objectives were to develop effective citizenship along nationalistic (political) citizenship with the marginal intent of developing critical/global (apolitical) citizenship. The study showed that classroom civic curriculum implementation focused more on learners' knowledge constructions with less emphasis on developing skills and dispositions due to inadequate school extracurricular programmes. In line with the objectives, teachers focus more on political knowledge at the expense of nongovernmental (apolitical) issues. The above findings were due to the inadequate recruitment of civic teachers leading to personnel improvisation which entailed seconding teachers lacking civic content knowledge and pedagogical skills to teach the subject. Also, the study showed eclectic pedagogical classroom practices whereby teachers mixed active (learner-based) pedagogies with didactic (teacher-based) teaching style to implement classroom civic education. The study also found that focus on knowledge construction and teacher-centred pedagogies reflected inadequate and/or irregular training which resulted in civic teachers' self-empowerment to improve their content knowledge and teaching skills. Teachers lacked mediation tools like textbooks and other teaching aids to properly implement civic content in the classroom. Evidently, implementation lapses that hindered social studies objectives are also a barrier to effective implementation of civic education curriculum in our schools.
The discovery of the first infectious variant in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has posed concerns over global health due to the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent variants. While the majority of ...patients experience flu-like symptoms such as cold and fever, a small percentage, particularly those with compromised immune systems, progress from mild illness to fatality. COVID-19 is caused by a RNA virus known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Our approach involved utilizing immunoinformatic to identify vaccine candidates with multiple epitopes and ligand-binding regions in reported SARS-CoV-2 variants. Through analysis of the spike glycoprotein, we identified dominant epitopes for T-cells and B-cells, resulting in a vaccine construct containing two helper T-cell epitopes, six cytotoxic T-cell epitopes, and four linear B-cell epitopes. Prior to conjugation with adjuvants and linkers, all epitopes were evaluated for antigenicity, toxicity, and allergenicity. Additionally, we assessed the vaccine Toll-Like Receptors complex (2, 3, and 4). The vaccine construct demonstrated antigenicity, non-toxicity, and non-allergenicity, thereby enabling the host to generate antibodies with favorable physicochemical characteristics. Furthermore, the 3D structure of the B-cell construct exhibited a ProSA-web z-score plot with a value of -1.71, indicating the reliability of the designed structure. The Ramachandran plot analysis revealed that 99.6% of the amino acid residues in the vaccine subunit were located in the high favored observation region, further establishing its strong candidacy as a vaccination option.
The bacteria
Vibrio cholerae
causes cholera, an acute diarrheal infection that can lead to dehydration and even death. Over 100,000 people die each year as a result of epidemic diseases; vaccination ...has emerged as a successful strategy for combating cholera. This study uses bioinformatics tools to create a multi-epitope vaccine against cholera infection using five structural polyproteins from the
V. cholerae
(CTB, TCPA, TCPF, OMPU, and OMPW). The antigenic retrieved protein sequence were analyzed using BCPred and IEDB bioinformatics tools to predict B cell and T cell epitopes, respectively, which were then linked with flexible linkers together with an adjuvant to boost it immunogenicity. The construct has a theoretical PI of 6.09, a molecular weight of 53.85 kDa, and an estimated half-life for mammalian reticulocytes in vitro of 4.4 h. These results demonstrate the construct’s longevity. The vaccine design was docked against the human toll-like receptor (TLR) to evaluate compatibility and effectiveness; also other additional post-vaccination assessments were carried out on the designed vaccine. Through in silico cloning, its expression was determined. The results show that it has a CAI value of 0.1 and GC contents of 58.97% which established the adequate expression and downstream processing of the vaccine construct, and our research demonstrated that the multi-epitope subunit vaccine exhibits antigenic characteristics. Additionally, we carried out an in silico immunological simulation to examine the immune reaction to an injection. Our results strongly suggest that the vaccine candidate on further validation would induce immune response against the
V. cholerae
infection.
Schistosoma haematobium has been identified as a significant cause of urogenital disease, as well as a risk factor for bladder cancer and HIV/AIDS. The parasites are obtained trans-dermally by ...swimming or wading in contaminated freshwater, and they are also transmitted to humans by freshwater snails. The organisms infect the vasculature of the gastrointestinal or genitourinary tracts. Worms live in blood vessels and lay eggs that become embedded in the bladder wall, causing chronic immune-mediated disease and squamous cell carcinoma growth. The primary goal of this research is to predict and design a novel synthetic protein containing multiple immunodominant B cell epitopes using three schistosome proteins: XP-012801068.2, XP-012801892.2, and XP-012793835.2 softwares were used to analyze the proteins' primary, secondary, and tertiary structures (BepiPred, BcPred).The B cell construct was then evaluated using I-TASSER server, and physicochemical properties, as well as homology modeling of the 3 D structure of the protein, was obtained. In silico analyses revealed regions with high immunogenicity. For XP-012801068.2, three epitopes are found between residues 292-334, 3-22, and 314-333; for XP-012801892.2, three epitopes are found in the residues 184-236, 81-100, and 329-348 for XP-012793835.2, four epitopes are found in the residues 185-222, 469-512, 649-713, and 338-357. The construct's has an average length of 308 bp, instability index of 49.96, theoretical PI of 4.2 and a C score −1.59. Furthermore, these parameters analyzed reveals that the constructed multi-epitope peptide has the potential to provide a theoretical basis for the development of a Schistosoma haematobium diagnostic kit.
Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma
•Breast cancer has emerged as the most common female cancers in Nigeria in the past few decades.•Multi-stage sampling method was used to recruit 332 women in Ogbomoso South Local Government Area,Oyo ...State Nigeria.•Most women were aware of breast cancer but knowledge and practice of breast cancer screening were low in the study population.•There is urgent need for community-based awarness campaigns on breast cancer screening.
Breast cancer has emerged as the most common female malignancy globally and in Nigeria in the past few decades. Little is currently known at the household level about breast cancer screening practices of the Nigerian women.
The study assessed awareness, knowledge and practice of women in Ogbomoso South Local Government Area (LGA) on breast cancer screening.
The study employed Community-based cross-sectional design and multi-stage sampling technique was used to recruit 332 consenting women. Interviewer-guided, self-administered, semi-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.
The mean age of the respondents was 40.8 ± 13 years; 44.9% of the women had ever screened for breast cancer. Factors that were significantly associated with practice of breast cancer screening included having tertiary education (p < 0.001), ever use of family planning methods (p = 0.018), ever heard of breast cancer (p < 0.001), ever heard of breast examination (p<0.001), having relatives who had died of breast cancer (p = 0.018) and having good knowledge of the disease (p < 0.001). Women who were aware of screening were eight times more likely to have practised breast cancer screening compared to those who had no knowledge (aOR 7.6, 95%CI 4.1–14.2).
Knowledge and practice of breast cancer screening were low among community based women. There is urgent need to intensify breast cancer awareness campaigns among this population in Nigeria.
