The deadliest coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is taking thousands of lives worldwide and presents an extraordinary challenge to mental resilience. This study assesses mental health status during ...the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated factors among informal waste workers in Bangladesh. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in June 2020 among 176 informal waste workers selected from nine municipalities and one city corporation in Bangladesh. General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) was used to assess respondents' mental health. The study found that 80.6% of the individuals were suffering from psychological distress; 67.6% reported anxiety and depression, 92.6% reported social dysfunction, and 19.9% reported loss of confidence. The likelihood of psychological distress (Risk ratio RR: 1.23, 95% confidence interval CI: 1.02-1.48) was significantly higher for female than male. Multiple COVID-19 symptoms of the family members (RR: 1.20, 95% CI: 1.03-1.41), unawareness about COVID-19 infected neighbor (RR: 1.21, 95% CI: 1.04-1.41), income reduction (RR: 1.60, 95% CI: 1.06-2.41) and daily household meal reduction (RR: 1.34; 95% CI: 1.03-1.73) were also found to be associated with psychological distress. These identified factors should be considered in policy-making and support programs for the informal waste workers to manage the pandemic situation as well as combating COVID-19 related psychological challenges.
Prenatal and early childhood lead exposures impair cognitive development. We aimed to evaluate the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels (BLLs) among pregnant women in rural Bangladesh and to ...identify sources of lead exposure. We analyzed the BLLs of 430 pregnant women randomly selected from rural communities in central Bangladesh. Fifty-seven cases were selected with the highest BLLs, ≥ 7 μg/dL, and 59 controls were selected with the lowest BLLs, < 2 μg/dL. An exposure questionnaire was administered and soil, rice, turmeric, water, traditional medicine, agrochemical, and can samples were analyzed for lead contamination. Of all 430 women, 132 (31%) had BLLs > 5 μg/dL. Most women with elevated BLLs were spatially clustered. Cases were 2.6 times more likely than controls to consume food from a can (95% CI 1.0–6.3, p = 0.04); 3.6 times more likely to use Basudin, a specific brand of pesticide (95% CI 1.6–7.9, p = 0.002); 3.6 times more likely to use Rifit, a specific brand of herbicide (95% CI 1.7–7.9, p = 0.001); 2.9 times more likely to report using any herbicides (95% CI 1.2–7.3, p = 0.02); and 3.3 times more likely to grind rice (95% CI 1.3–8.4, p = 0.01). Five out of 28 food storage cans were lead-soldered. However, there was minimal physical evidence of lead contamination from 382 agrochemical samples and 129 ground and unground rice samples. Among 17 turmeric samples, one contained excessive lead (265 μg/g) and chromium (49 μg/g). Overall, we found evidence of elevated BLLs and multiple possible sources of lead exposure in rural Bangladesh. Further research should explicate and develop interventions to interrupt these pathways.
•Prenatal blood lead levels and lead sources are assessed in rural Bangladesh.•Elevated blood lead levels are found among pregnant women.•Multiple possible sources of lead are identified; all related to food.•Future lead prevention studies should investigate food storage and production.
We conducted a cross sectional study to assess 1) the association between access to basic sanitation and fecal contamination of sentinel toy balls and 2) if other sanitation factors such as shared ...use and cleanliness are associated with fecal contamination of sentinel toy balls. We assessed sanitation facilities in 454 households with a child aged 6-24 months in rural Bangladesh. We defined "basic" sanitation as access to improved sanitation facilities (pit latrine with a slab or better) not shared with other households. In each household, an identical toy ball was given to the target child. After 24 hours, the balls were rinsed to enumerate fecal coliforms as an indicator of household fecal contamination. Households with basic sanitation had lower fecal coliform contamination than households with no access to basic sanitation (adjusted difference in means: -0.31 log
colony forming units CFU/toy ball; 95% confidence interval CI: -0.61, -0.01). Shared sanitation facilities of otherwise improved type were more likely to have visible feces on the latrine slab compared with private facilities. Among households with access to improved sanitation, households with no visible feces on the latrine slab had less toy ball contamination than households with visible feces on the latrine slab (adjusted difference in means: -0.38 log
CFU/toy ball; 95% CI: -0.77, 0.02). Access to basic sanitation may prevent fecal contamination of the household environment. An Improved sanitation facility used by an individual household may be better in preventing household fecal contamination compared with improved facilities shared with other households.
Fifty cases of schizophrenia were assessed in Combined Military Hospital (CMH), Dhaka and National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, to ascertain the pattern of demographic ...features and symptom presentation in current national perspective. The study includes period from July 2004 to September 2005. Most of the patients belonged to the age ranging from 14 to 45 years throughout whole Bangladesh. It was found that 54% of the patients were male and 46% were female. The lowest age of onset was 14 year for both sexes and the highest age of onset was 45 year in female and 41 years in male. Among the schizophrenic patients 50% were unmarried and 50% were married and most of them belonged to lower economic class. In this study both the urban and rural percentage were equal (50%). Most of the patients were unemployed or recently disengaged from work place with a lower educational back ground. The most frequent patterns of symptom irrespective of demographic variables were persecutory ideas or delusion (76%). Analysis revealed that delusion of reference, grandiose delusions, delusion of control or possession of thought were significantly high among the male patients compared to female patients (p < 0.05), but no statistically significant difference was observed with other symptoms (p>0.05). Analysis found that no statistically significant difference was observed between urban and rural patients (p > 0.05) except visual and other hallucinations e.g. gustatory, olfactory which was significantly high among the urban patients (p < 0.05). The next frequent symptom was perceptual disturbances in the form of auditory hallucination (70%). Delusion of reference was about 70% along with delusion about control or possession of thoughts being approximately 42%. Key Words: Demographic features, Common presentations, Schizophrenia doi: 10.3329/jafmc.v5i1.2848 JAFMC Bangladesh. Vol 5, No 1 (June) 2009 pp.29-33
A refractive index (RI) sensor with an ultrawide detection range (1.24-1.40) based on photonic crystal fiber (PCF) utilizing surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is proposed and analyzed which works in ...the near-infrared (NIR) wavelength region (1160-1840 nm). The sensor structure consists of 20 air-holes with a square-shaped core that renders easy fabrication. The full-vectorial-based finite element method (FEM) is used to build and investigate the impact of various geometric values on the sensor's sensing characteristics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-ever PCF-SPR sensor based on Gallium doped Zinc Oxide (GZO). The designed sensor attains enhanced wavelength sensitivity (WS) of 17000 nm/RIU (Refractive Index Unit) and amplitude sensitivity (AS) of -135.817RI\mathrm{U}^{-1}. Besides, the sensor exhibits higher detection accuracy such as wavelength resolution of 5.88\times 10^{-6}\mathrm{R}\mathrm{I}\mathrm{U}^{-1} and amplitude (ampl) resolution of 7. 36\times 10^{-6}\mathrm{R}\mathrm{I}\mathrm{U}. Due to ultra-wide detection range, higher sensitivity, use of alternative plasmonic material (GZO), lower material cost, outer annular detection channel proposed sensor is suitable to identify unknown RI of various samples in sensing applications.
Ce document est une analyse systématique des causes de la guerre entre la Géorgie et la Russie en 2008. La première section donne un bref historique du conflit. La deuxième section propose trois ...hypothèses pour déterminer la cause immédiate de la guerre . La dernière section analyse la validité des hypothèses sur les effets de l'évolution des structures de pouvoir, la rhétorique nationaliste et de faux optimisme sur la guerre et ce sur la base des discussions théoriques.
The protein inference problem represents a major challenge in proteomics research. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-heuristic approach i.e. PIssGA to infer proteins from a given peptide ...sequence identified from tandem mass spectrometry in shotgun proteomics. Although most of the works available in the literature mainly adopts parsimonious pressure i.e. prefer least number of inferred proteins, our model is neither strictly parsimonious nor strictly optimistic, rather a tunable model that provides the flexibility to infer proteins either parsimoniously or optimistically or somewhere in between. Another important feature of PIssGA is its efficiency in search that makes the approach ultra first. We used Sigma49 dataset to test our method and found the proposed algorithm extremely fast and moderately accurate.
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