Protein rich wastes from aquaculture systems result in total ammonia nitrogen (TAN), total organic carbon (TOC) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). A number of conventional approaches have been ...adopted for the removal of these wastes in aquaculture ponds and hatcheries with varying degrees of success but they face critical problems such as membrane fouling, high cost or the generation of toxic by-products. To overcome such issues, electrochemical technology is commonly employed. The advantages of electrochemical treatment include high efficiency, ambient operating conditions, small equipment sizes, minimal sludge generation and rapid start-up. An even better system involves bio-electrochemical reactors (BERs), which have the potential to generate energy from wastewater (by means of microbial fuel cells) or a valuable product such as hydrogen (using microbial electrolysis cells). Mechanisms of cathodic nitrate reduction and anodic oxidation in electrochemical and bio-electrochemical technology are reported in this review. Also some work on the simultaneous removal of nitrate and organic matter by Electro-Fenton and microbial fuel cells are elaborated upon. It is apparent that BERs can remove contaminants at high efficiencies (≈
99%) whilst giving least impact upon the environment.
► Conventional nitrate and organic carbon removal generate environmental issues. ► Electrochemical technology can remove both contaminants in a
green manner. ► Mechanisms of contaminant removal in electrochemical reactors are discussed. ► Mechanisms of contaminant removal in
bio-
electrochemical reactors are discussed. ► 99% removal of organic matter and nitrate achieved with bio-electrochemical cell.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global public health problem that has substantial consequences on the physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health of women. This study examined the ...association between women's attitudes towards wife-beating and their utilization of reproductive healthcare services.
Two waves of Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data were analyzed using multivariate regression. Outcome variables were a set of reproductive healthcare services, namely contraception use, modern contraception use, antenatal visit by skilled health professionals (SHP), delivery in healthcare facilities, delivery by SHP and postnatal check up by SHP. Attitudes towards abuse were assessed by a set of five questions that asked the situation under which 'hitting or beating' one's wife is justifiable.
Around 32% of the participants reported that hitting or beating wife by husband was justified in certain situations. There is a gradient in the relationship between number of healthcare services accessed and number of situations justified for beating wife. Women who strongly reject the justification of wife beating were more likely than those who reject that weakly to report contraception use, antenatal care by SHP, delivery in healthcare facilities, delivery care by SHP, and postnatal care by SHP.
Women's attitudes towards 'wife beating' have a significant association with reproductive healthcare seeking behavior. The impact of this malpractice on women's health and consequences thereafter need to be brought in the forefront of public health campaign.
Solar water heating systems and their market trends Raisul Islam, M.; Sumathy, K.; Ullah Khan, Samee
Renewable & sustainable energy reviews,
January 2013, 2013, 2013-1-00, 20130101, Volume:
17, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
One of the most widely known solar thermal applications is solar water heating. In terms of installation expenditures and energy cost over the total life of the system, solar water heating technology ...has proven to be cost efficient for several domestic and industrial applications. Technological practicability of these systems has long been recognized and is presently employed in commercial sectors of many countries. This paper presents an overview of various types of solar assisted water heating systems and their market potential. Residential solar water heating is a promising age old technology, which has been evolved and developed both in the range and quality as a successful packaged market–product. The first part of this paper analyzes the performances along with how unique they are of different types of solar water heating systems and the later part of the paper covers its economic aspects.
Abiotic stresses have a detrimental impact on plant growth and productivity and are a major threat to sustainable crop production in rapidly changing environments. Proline, an important amino acid, ...plays an important role in maintaining the metabolism and growth of plants under abiotic stress conditions. Many insights indicate a positive relationship between proline accumulation and tolerance of plants to various abiotic stresses. Because of its metal chelator properties, it acts as a molecular chaperone, an antioxidative defence molecule that scavenges reactive oxygen species (ROS), as well as having signalling behaviour to activate specific gene functions that are crucial for plant recovery from stresses. It also acts as an osmoprotectant, a potential source to acquire nitrogen as well as carbon, and plays a significant role in the flowering and development of plants. Overproduction of proline in plant cells contributes to maintaining cellular homeostasis, water uptake, osmotic adjustment and redox balance to restore the cell structures and mitigate oxidative damage. Many reports reveal that transgenic plants, particularly those overexpressing genes tailored for proline accumulation, exhibit better adaptation to abiotic stresses. Therefore, this review aims to provide a comprehensive update on proline biosynthesis and accumulation in plants and its putative regulatory roles in mediating plant defence against abiotic stresses. Additionally, the current and future directions in research concerning manipulation of proline to induce gene functions that appear promising in genetics and genomics approaches to improve plant adaptive responses under changing climate conditions are also highlighted.
Proline has multifaceted functions to combat abiotic stress in plants.
In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including Bangladesh, modern contraception use remains lower than desired, resulting in a higher unmet need. A potential factor contributing to lower ...contraceptive use is reduced access to and use of lower tiers of government healthcare facilities, including home visits by family welfare assistants (FWAs), as well as women's visits to community and satellite clinics. These relationships, however, are still unexplored in Bangladesh and LMICs more broadly. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of lower tiers of government healthcare facilities on unmet needs for contraception and contraception use in Bangladesh. Data from 17,585 sexually active married women were analyzed from the 2017 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey. The outcome variables were any contraceptive use, modern contraceptive use, unmet need for contraception, and unmet need for modern contraception. The explanatory variables considered were respondents' home visits by FWAs, respondents' visits to a community clinic, and respondents' visits to a satellite clinic. Multilevel mixed-effect Poisson regression with robust variance was used to determine the association between the outcome and explanatory variables, adjusted for individual-, household-, and community-level factors. Approximately 18% of respondents were visited by FWAs in the three months prior to the survey date and only 3.4% and 3.1% of women attended community and satellite clinics, respectively. Women who reported being visited by FWAs in the three months prior to the survey were approximately 36% less likely to report an unmet need for modern contraception and 42% more likely to report using modern contraception than women who did not report such a visit. A higher likelihood of unmet need for contraception and a lower likelihood of contraception use were found among women who did not visit these community or satellite clinics or visited these clinics for other reasons than collecting contraception as compared to women who visited these clinics to collect contraception. Home visits by FWAs to respondents' homes to provide contraception as well as respondents' visits to satellite and community clinics play a major role in Bangladesh to ensure contraception use and reduce the unmet need for contraception. However, their coverage is quite low in Bangladesh. The findings suggest an urgent need for greater government initiatives to increase the number of FWAs and proper monitoring of them at the field level.
Household air pollution (HAP) from cooking with solid fuels has become a leading cause of death and disability in many developing countries including Bangladesh. We assess the association between HAP ...and risk of selected adverse birth and maternal health outcomes.
Data for this study were extracted from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey conducted during 2007-2014. Selected adverse birth outcomes were acute respiratory infection (ARI) among children, stillbirth, low birth weight (LBW), under-five mortality, neonatal mortality and infant mortality. Maternal pregnancy complications and cesarean delivery were considered as the adverse maternal health outcomes. Place of cooking, use of solid fuel within the house boundary and in living room were the exposure variables. To examine the association between exposure and outcome variables, we used a series of multiple logistic regression models accounted for complex survey design.
Around 90% of the respondents used solid fuel within the house boundary, 11% of them used solid fuel within the living room. Results of multiple regression indicated that cooking inside the house increased the risk of neonatal mortality (aOR,1.25; 95% CI, 1.02-1.52), infant mortality (aOR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.00-1.40), ARI (aOR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.08-1.33), LBW (aOR, 1.25; 95% CI, 1.10-1.43), and cesarean delivery (aOR,1.18; 95% CI, 1.01-1.29). Use of solid fuel, irrespective of cooking places, increased the risk of pregnancy complications (aOR, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.19-1.55). Compared to participants who reported cooking outside the house, the risk of ARI, LBW were significantly high among those who performed cooking within the house, irrespective of type of cooking fuel.
Indoor cooking and use of solid fuel in household increase the risk of ARI, LBW, cesarean delivery, and pregnancy complication. These relationships need further investigation using more direct measures of smoke exposure and clinical measures of health outcomes. The use of clean fuels and structural improvement in household design such as provision of stove ventilation should be encouraged to reduce such adverse health consequences.
Data related to health were collected by following the guidelines of ICF international and Bangladesh Medical Research Council. The registration number of data collection was 132,989.0.000, and the data-request was registered on March 11, 2015.
•This paper proposes a reliable technique for the health prognosis of rolling element bearings.•The proposed algorithm is tested and validated on the PRONOSTIA dataset.•The proposed method shows the ...excellent prognostic performance.
Induction motors most often fail due to faults in the rolling element bearings. Such failures can cause long and unscheduled downtime in a production facility, which can result in huge economic losses. The prediction of imminent failures and estimation of a bearing's remaining useful life (RUL) is vital for avoiding abrupt shutdowns and scheduling maintenance. In this paper, a reliable technique for the health prognosis of rolling element bearings is proposed, which infers a bearing's health through a dimensionless health indicator (HI) and estimates its RUL using dynamic regression models. The HI measures the instantaneous vibration level of the bearing with respect to a normal baseline value. The regression models are recursively updated to capture the evolving trend in the bearing's health indicator and are then used to project the future values of the health indicator and estimate the RUL of the bearing. The RUL of a bearing is estimated after determining the time to start prediction (TSP) using a new approach. The proposed algorithm is tested and validated on the PRONOSTIA dataset, and its prognostic performance is compared with two state-of-the-art techniques that are based on the extended Kalman filter and an exponential model that is improved using particle filters. The experimental results demonstrate the excellent prognostic performance of the proposed method due to its ability to determine an appropriate TSP and dynamic calibration of the regression models to adopt to the evolving trend in the bearing health indicator.
The objective of this study was to determine how changes in pre-pregnancy contraceptive methods used between 2011 and 2017/18 contributed to the changes in pregnancy resulting from contraceptive ...methods failure in Bangladesh. We used 2011 and 2017/18 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data. Pre-pregnancy contraceptive methods failure was our outcome of interest, which was determined using women's response about whether they became pregnant while using contraceptives before the most recent pregnancy. The year of the survey was the main explanatory variable. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the characteristics of the respondents. The difference in contraceptive methods failure across the socio-demographic characteristics was assessed by Chi-squared test. Multilevel poison regressions were used to determine the changes in the prevalence ratio of contraceptive methods failure across the survey years. Contraceptive methods failure rate increased between the surveys, from 22.8% in 2011 to 27.3% in 2017/18. Also, male condom use increased by 2.8%, while withdrawal/periodic abstinence and/or other methods decreased by 2.9%. The failure rates in these two categories of contraceptive methods increased substantially by 4.0% and 9.0%, respectively. Compared to the 2011 survey, the prevalence ratio (PR) of contraceptive methods failure was 20% (PR 1.2, 95% CI 1.1-1.3) high in the 2017/18 survey. This PR declined 13% (PR 1.1, 95% CI 1.04-1.2) once the model was adjusted for women's and their partner's characteristics along with the last contraceptives used. This study provides evidence of increasing rates of pregnancy due to contraceptive failure in Bangladesh. Given that this type of pregnancy is known to cause adverse pregnancy outcomes, including abortion, pregnancy complications, maternal and early child morbidity and mortality, policy and programs are needed to reduce its prevalence. Effective coordination between the contraception providers at the healthcare facilities and the households and a proactive role of family planning workers to make couples aware of the effective use of contraceptives are recommended.
Globally the rates of caesarean section (CS) have steadily increased in recent decades. This rise is not fully accounted for by increases in clinical factors which indicate the need for CS. We ...investigated the socio-demographic predictors of CS and the average annual rates of CS in Bangladesh between 2004 and 2014.
Data were derived from four waves of nationally representative Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) conducted between 2004 and 2014. Rate of change analysis was used to calculate the average annual rate of increase in CS from 2004 to 2014, by socio-demographic categories. Multi-level logistic regression was used to identify the socio-demographic predictors of CS in a cross-sectional analysis of the 2014 BDHS data.
CS rates increased from 3.5% in 2004 to 23% in 2014. The average annual rate of increase in CS was higher among women of advanced maternal age (≥35 years), urban areas, and relatively high socio-economic status; with higher education, and who regularly accessed antenatal services. The multi-level logistic regression model indicated that lower (≤19) and advanced maternal age (≥35), urban location, relatively high socio-economic status, higher education, birth of few children (≤2), antenatal healthcare visits, overweight or obese were the key factors associated with increased utilization of CS. Underweight was a protective factor for CS.
The use of CS has increased considerably in Bangladesh over the survey years. This rising trend and the risk of having CS vary significantly across regions and socio-economic status. Very high use of CS among women of relatively high socio-economic status and substantial urban-rural difference call for public awareness and practice guideline enforcement aimed at optimizing the use of CS.
Strawberry is an excellent source of natural antioxidants with high capacity of scavenging free radicals. This study evaluated the effects of two plant probiotic bacteria, Bacillus amylolequefaciens ...BChi1 and Paraburkholderia fungorum BRRh-4 on growth, fruit yield and antioxidant contents in strawberry fruits. Root dipping of seedlings (plug plants) followed by spray applications of both probiotic bacteria in the field on foliage significantly increased fruit yield (up to 48%) over non-treated control. Enhanced fruit yield likely to be linked with higher root and shoot growth, individual and total fruit weight/plant and production of phytohormone by the probiotic bacteria applied on plants. Interestingly, the fruits from plants inoculated with the isolates BChi1 and BRRh-4 had significantly higher contents of phenolics, carotenoids, flavonoids and anthocyanins over non-treated control. Total antioxidant activities were also significantly higher (p < 0.05) in fruits of strawberry plants treated with both probiotic bacteria. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of significant improvement of both yield and quality of strawberry fruits by the application of plant probiotic bacteria BChi1 and BRRh-4 in a field condition. Further study is needed to elucidate underlying mechanism of growth and quality improvement of strawberry fruits by probiotic bacteria.
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