Introduction Mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B infection is one of the major routes of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in Africa. Amusingly, Africa is the only region yet to meet the ...World Health Organization's target of reducing the prevalence of HBV infection to less than 1% among children under 5 years of age by 2020. In Ghana, little has been documented about midwives’ views on the factors impacting the successful implementation of mother-to-child transmission via HBV prevention programs. Objective This study explored midwives’ views on the challenges associated with the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HBV infection in the La-Nkwantanang municipality. Methods The study adopted an exploratory descriptive qualitative design and involved 14 midwives who were purposively recruited from a primary-level health facility in the La-Nkwantanang Municipality, Accra. Individual face-to-face interviews were conducted using an in-depth interview guide. The data were content analyzed using the six steps recommended by Braun and Clark. Results Three main themes, namely, health professional or midwife factors and patient and health facility factors, negatively impacted the prevention of maternal-to-child transmission program. The five subthemes identified in this study included lack of awareness, financial constraints, and unavailability of logistics and protocols. The study recognized that midwives face many challenges even though they have a strong desire to prevent vertical transmission of HBV. Conclusion The implementation of a mother-to-child transmission program is negatively impacted by many intrinsic, client, and health facility factors. Midwives who act as major stakeholders need to be periodically trained on the components and protocols for managing pregnant women living with HBV. The necessary logistics and management protocols need to be urgently provided. The skills and education obtained from the training will empower midwives to be knowledgeable about how to deliver quality care and provide education and support for HBV-infected pregnant women. The provision of logistics needed for the successful implementation of the program could avert delays associated with the administration of the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine and immunoglobulin to exposed newborns.
ABSTRACT
Photoionizing radiation and stellar winds from massive stars deposit energy and momentum into the interstellar medium (ISM). They might disperse the local ISM, change its turbulent ...multi-phase structure, and even regulate star formation. Ionizing radiation dominates the massive stars’ energy output, but the relative effect of winds might change with stellar mass and the properties of the ambient ISM. We present simulations of the interaction of stellar winds and ionizing radiation of 12, 23, and 60 M⊙ stars within a cold neutral (CNM, n0 = 100 cm−3), warm neutral (WNM, n0 = 1, 10 cm−3), or warm ionized (WIM, n0 = 0.1 cm−3) medium. The flash simulations adopt the novel tree-based radiation transfer algorithm TreeRay. With the On-the-Spot approximation and a temperature-dependent recombination coefficient, it is coupled to a chemical network with radiative heating and cooling. In the homogeneous CNM, the total momentum injection ranges from 1.6 × 104 to 4 × 105 M⊙ km s−1 and is always dominated by the expansion of the ionized HII region. In the WIM, stellar winds dominate (2 × 102 to 5 × 103 M⊙ km s−1), while the input from radiation is small (∼ 102 M⊙ km s−1). The WNM (n0 = 1 cm−3) is a transition regime. Energetically, stellar winds couple more efficiently to the ISM (∼ 0.1 percent of wind luminosity) than radiation (< 0.001 percent of ionizing luminosity). For estimating the impact of massive stars, the strongly mass-dependent ratios of wind to ionizing luminosity and the properties of the ambient medium have to be considered.
We report high-quality, H or CO rotation curves (RCs) to several Re for 41 large, massive, star-forming disk galaxies (SFGs) across the peak of cosmic galaxy evolution (z ∼ 0.67-2.45), taken with the ...ESO-VLT, the LBT and IRAM-NOEMA. Most RC41 SFGs have reflection-symmetric RCs plausibly described by equilibrium dynamics. We fit the major axis position-velocity cuts using beam-convolved forward modeling generated in three dimensions, with models that include a bulge and turbulent disk component embedded in a dark matter (DM) halo. We include priors for stellar and molecular gas masses, optical light effective radii and inclinations, and DM masses from abundance-matching scaling relations. Two-thirds or more of the z ≥ 1.2 SFGs are baryon dominated within a few Re of typically 5.5 kpc and have DM fractions less than maximal disks (median 〈 f DM ( R e ) 〉 = 0.12 ). At lower redshift (z < 1.2), that fraction is less than one-third. DM fractions correlate inversely with the baryonic angular momentum parameter, baryonic surface density, and bulge mass. Inferred low DM fractions cannot apply to the entire disk and halo but more plausibly reflect a flattened, or cored, inner DM density distribution. The typical central "DM deficit" in these cores relative to Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) distributions is ∼30% of the bulge mass. The observations are consistent with rapid radial transport of baryons in the first-generation massive gas-rich halos forming globally gravitationally unstable disks and leading to efficient build-up of massive bulges and central black holes. A combination of heating due to dynamical friction and AGN feedback may drive DM out of the initial cusps.
The SILCC (SImulating the Life-Cycle of molecular Clouds) project aims to self-consistently understand the small-scale structure of the interstellar medium (ISM) and its link to galaxy evolution. We ...simulate the evolution of the multiphase ISM in a (500 pc)2 × ±5 kpc region of a galactic disc, with a gas surface density of
$\Sigma _{_{\rm GAS}} = 10 \;{\rm M}_{\odot }\,{\rm pc}^{-2}$
. The flash 4 simulations include an external potential, self-gravity, magnetic fields, heating and radiative cooling, time-dependent chemistry of H2 and CO considering (self-) shielding, and supernova (SN) feedback but omit shear due to galactic rotation. We explore SN explosions at different rates in high-density regions (peak), in random locations with a Gaussian distribution in the vertical direction (random), in a combination of both (mixed), or clustered in space and time (clus/clus2). Only models with self-gravity and a significant fraction of SNe that explode in low-density gas are in agreement with observations. Without self-gravity and in models with peak driving the formation of H2 is strongly suppressed. For decreasing SN rates, the H2 mass fraction increases significantly from <10 per cent for high SN rates, i.e. 0.5 dex above Kennicutt–Schmidt, to 70–85 per cent for low SN rates, i.e. 0.5 dex below KS. For an intermediate SN rate, clustered driving results in slightly more H2 than random driving due to the more coherent compression of the gas in larger bubbles. Magnetic fields have little impact on the final disc structure but affect the dense gas (n ≳ 10 cm−3) and delay H2 formation. Most of the volume is filled with hot gas (∼80 per cent within ±150 pc). For all but peak driving a vertically expanding warm component of atomic hydrogen indicates a fountain flow. We highlight that individual chemical species populate different ISM phases and cannot be accurately modelled with temperature-/density-based phase cut-offs.
Abstract
We present 3D ‘zoom-in’ simulations of the formation of two molecular clouds out of the galactic interstellar medium. We model the clouds – identified from the SILCC simulations – with a ...resolution of up to 0.06 pc using adaptive mesh refinement in combination with a chemical network to follow heating, cooling and the formation of H2 and CO including (self-) shielding. The two clouds are assembled within a few million years with mass growth rates of up to ∼10−2 M⊙ yr−1 and final masses of ∼50 000 M⊙. A spatial resolution of ≲0.1 pc is required for convergence with respect to the mass, velocity dispersion and chemical abundances of the clouds, although these properties also depend on the cloud definition such as based on density thresholds, H2 or CO mass fraction. To avoid grid artefacts, the progressive increase of resolution has to occur within the free-fall time of the densest structures (1–1.5 Myr) and ≳200 time-steps should be spent on each refinement level before the resolution is progressively increased further. This avoids the formation of spurious, large-scale, rotating clumps from unresolved turbulent flows. While CO is a good tracer for the evolution of dense gas with number densities n ≥ 300 cm−3, H2 is also found for n ≲ 30 cm−3 due to turbulent mixing and becomes dominant at column densities around 30–50 M⊙ pc−2. The CO-to-H2 ratio steadily increases within the first 2 Myr, whereas XCO ≃ 1–4 × 1020 cm−2 (K km s−1)−1 is approximately constant since the CO(1−0) line quickly becomes optically thick.
Abstract
This paper provides an update of our previous scaling relations between galaxy-integrated molecular gas masses, stellar masses, and star formation rates (SFRs), in the framework of the star ...formation main sequence (MS), with the main goal of testing for possible systematic effects. For this purpose our new study combines three independent methods of determining molecular gas masses from CO line fluxes, far-infrared dust spectral energy distributions, and ∼1 mm dust photometry, in a large sample of 1444 star-forming galaxies between
z
= 0 and 4. The sample covers the stellar mass range log(
M
*
/
M
⊙
) = 9.0–11.8, and SFRs relative to that on the MS,
δ
MS = SFR/SFR(MS), from 10
−1.3
to 10
2.2
. Our most important finding is that all data sets, despite the different techniques and analysis methods used, follow the same scaling trends, once method-to-method zero-point offsets are minimized and uncertainties are properly taken into account. The molecular gas depletion time
t
depl
, defined as the ratio of molecular gas mass to SFR, scales as (1 +
z
)
−0.6
× (
δ
MS)
−0.44
and is only weakly dependent on stellar mass. The ratio of molecular to stellar mass
μ
gas
depends on (
1
+
z
)
2.5
×
(
δ
MS
)
0.52
×
(
M
*
)
−
0.36
, which tracks the evolution of the specific SFR. The redshift dependence of
μ
gas
requires a curvature term, as may the mass dependences of
t
depl
and
μ
gas
. We find no or only weak correlations of
t
depl
and
μ
gas
with optical size
R
or surface density once one removes the above scalings, but we caution that optical sizes may not be appropriate for the high gas and dust columns at high
z
.
In the cold dark matter cosmology, the baryonic components of galaxies-stars and gas-are thought to be mixed with and embedded in non-baryonic and non-relativistic dark matter, which dominates the ...total mass of the galaxy and its dark-matter halo. In the local (low-redshift) Universe, the mass of dark matter within a galactic disk increases with disk radius, becoming appreciable and then dominant in the outer, baryonic regions of the disks of star-forming galaxies. This results in rotation velocities of the visible matter within the disk that are constant or increasing with disk radius-a hallmark of the dark-matter model. Comparisons between the dynamical mass, inferred from these velocities in rotational equilibrium, and the sum of the stellar and cold-gas mass at the peak epoch of galaxy formation ten billion years ago, inferred from ancillary data, suggest high baryon fractions in the inner, star-forming regions of the disks. Although this implied baryon fraction may be larger than in the local Universe, the systematic uncertainties (owing to the chosen stellar initial-mass function and the calibration of gas masses) render such comparisons inconclusive in terms of the mass of dark matter. Here we report rotation curves (showing rotation velocity as a function of disk radius) for the outer disks of six massive star-forming galaxies, and find that the rotation velocities are not constant, but decrease with radius. We propose that this trend arises because of a combination of two main factors: first, a large fraction of the massive high-redshift galaxy population was strongly baryon-dominated, with dark matter playing a smaller part than in the local Universe; and second, the large velocity dispersion in high-redshift disks introduces a substantial pressure term that leads to a decrease in rotation velocity with increasing radius. The effect of both factors appears to increase with redshift. Qualitatively, the observations suggest that baryons in the early (high-redshift) Universe efficiently condensed at the centres of dark-matter haloes when gas fractions were high and dark matter was less concentrated.
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