The mass gathering event (MGE) industry is growing globally, including in countries such as Canada. MGEs have been associated with a greater prevalence of injury and illness when compared with daily ...life events, despite most participants having few comorbidities. As such, adequate health, safety, and emergency medical planning is required. However, there is no single entity regulating these concerns for MGEs, resulting in the responsibility for health planning lying with event organizers. This study aims to compare the legislative requirements for MGE medical response systems in the 13 provinces and territories of Canada.
This study is a cross-sectional descriptive analysis of Canadian legislation. Lists of publicly available legislative requirements were obtained by means of the emergency medical services directors and Health Ministries. Descriptive statistics were performed to compare legislation.
Of the 13 provinces and territories, 10 responded. For the missing 3, a law library review confirmed the absence of specific legislation. Most (
= 6; 60%) provinces and territories referred to provisions in their Public Health laws. Four confirmed that MGE medical response was a municipal or local concern to be addressed by the event organizers.
No provinces could list specific legislation guiding safety, health, and medical response for an MGE.
Mortality related to opioid overdose in the U.S. has risen sharply in the past decade. In California, opioid overdose death rates more than tripled from 2018 to 2021, and deaths from synthetic ...opioids such as fentanyl increased more than seven times in those three years alone. Heightened attention to this crisis has attracted funding and programming opportunities for prevention and harm reduction interventions. Drug checking services offer people who use drugs the opportunity to test the chemical content of their own supply, but are not widely used in North America. We report on qualitative data from providers and clients of harm reduction and drug checking services, to explore how these services are used, experienced, and considered.
We conducted in-depth semi-structured key informant interviews across two samples of drug checking stakeholders: "clients" (individuals who use drugs and receive harm reduction services) and "providers" (subject matter experts and those providing clinical and harm reduction services to people who use drugs). Provider interviews were conducted via Zoom from June-November, 2022. Client interviews were conducted in person in San Francisco over a one-week period in November 2022. Data were analyzed following the tenets of thematic analysis.
We found that the value of drug checking includes but extends well beyond overdose prevention. Participants discussed ways that drug checking can fill a regulatory vacuum, serve as a tool of informal market regulation at the community level, and empower public health surveillance systems and clinical response. We present our findings within three key themes: (1) the role of drug checking in overdose prevention; (2) benefits to the overall agency, health, and wellbeing of people who use drugs; and (3) impacts of drug checking services at the community and systems levels.
This study contributes to growing evidence of the effectiveness of drug checking services in mitigating risks associated with substance use, including overdose, through enabling people who use and sell drugs to test their own supply. It further contributes to discussions around the utility of drug checking and harm reduction, in order to inform legislation and funding allocation.
•181 Music festival visitors smothered an instrumented dummy with a pillow.•Participant characteristics and drug and alcohol use were collected through a questionnaire.•Collected data were compared ...to smothering force and smothering modus operandi.•Smothering force increased with participant body height and drug and alcohol use.
Smothering to death is most often done with a soft cover, such as a pillow. This is one of the hardest to diagnose causes of death. Knowing more about how people perform such an act and whether there is any correlation between perpetrator characteristics and smothering approaches may help in solving criminal cases involving smothering.
A total of 181 visitors of a music festival were asked to smother a dummy with a pillow. Each participant provided their age, gender, dominant hand, length, weight, alcohol use (last 24h) and drug use (last 24h) in a questionnaire. Forces applied by the participant on the dummy head with the pillow were continuously measured and the smothering modus operandi (described by aspects such as the placement of the hands, feet and body weight) was obtained from video recordings.
Participants with high alcohol consumption provided higher smothering forces. Increases were also found for taller participants and those who had used drugs. Smothering seemed most effective when placing both hands on the pillow on the head and when placing the center of mass as much directly above the dummy head as possible. A stable, central stance also benefitted smothering effectiveness.
Forensic case work may potentially benefit from these results in the future by linking the current results to the location of hand and finger marks on a pillow.
The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of user acceptance of Biometric Technologies (BT) at outdoor music festivals in the United Kingdom. While research on such technologies, ...such as facial recognition is limited in the events context, they have already been deployed at music festivals to deal with issues of security, safety and crowd management. Using an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a self-administered questionnaire was completed by young adults in the United Kingdom who had previously been to a music festival. The study found factors such as privacy, reliability and accuracy did not have a significant impact on user acceptance. Other factors, such as trust, compatibility and convenience were found to have a significant positive impact on perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and attitude to use. As the findings indicate that accuracy and privacy do not impact BT acceptance, the paper explores how organizers can be transparent and accountable as to their intentions to use BT, so as to justify the usefulness of BT to attendees, artists, regulators and authorities.
Urban heat island effects and climate change are climatic phenomena responsible for periods of extreme heat in summer which severely impact citizens’ well-being and health. In this alarming context ...which questions the livability of our cities, Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) are considered an unavoidable component of the complex strategy in diminishing urban temperatures. The present work aims to show the relevance of NBSs in urban temperature regulation through the estimation of their potential to improve outdoor thermal comfort of the heritage site Matadero Madrid. To this end, this article evaluates the effects of a scenario combining different solutions including NBSs and identifies which solutions are the most effective. The results show that this scenario has an impact on direct solar radiation and wind speed but does not affect air temperature and relative humidity. Furthermore, even if this scenario combining a fabric canopy, tree canopy, and green area significantly improves thermal conditions, it does not allow us to reach an optimal level of thermal comfort for visitors. To consider the implementation of more meaningful interventions, existing legal, administrative, and cultural limitations of the case study should be omitted. This would enable us to identify which restrictions could be adapted, thus unlocking the adaptation potential of Matadero Madrid.
Sustainable practices aiming to reduce environmental impacts have become key guiding principles of events, but initiatives focusing on the economic impacts and on supporting the local economy and ...society are also gaining more emphasis in event planning and management. Music festivals attracting larger audiences are becoming especially aware of the importance of sustainability as well as of their role in the process of raising participants’ awareness of it. The paper aims to assess the initiatives of the Street Music Festival in Veszprém, Hungary, one of the flagship events of the city, from both the participants’ and the organisers’ perspective. For the investigation of participant attitudes, a questionnaire survey was conducted, while the organisers’ views on sustainability were sought through interviews. The findings show that although respondents rate the importance of sustainability as very high, their contribution to responsible consumption is far from what could be considered sustainable, therefore better communication of the initiatives or stricter rules need to be introduced. The interviewees revealed that organisers consider economic sustainability just as important as the environmental issues, and gave an insight into the rationale behind sustainability enhancing initiatives, some of which have a marketing function as well as protecting the environment.
•Illicit drug consumption has been monitored during Music Days.•Non-peered audience reduces the affinity drug consumption in festival.•Alcohol consumption is an alternative to illicit drug in public.
...Illicit drugs consumption can be back-calculated based on the analysis of drug residues in wastewater using the wastewater-based epidemiology method. The Music Day, held on June 21 in France since 1982, has grown to global proportions and is now celebrated as World Music Day. This large outdoor event takes place in many cities with people allowed to play music in the streets. As psychotropic drugs are often associated with music events, the goal of this study is to investigate the use of illicit drugs on this day in Bordeaux, the fifth largest urban area in France.
Daily sampling campaigns of composite wastewater were carried out for seven days in two wastewater treatment plants in Bordeaux in 2017 (Music Day) and 2018.
World Music Day in Bordeaux has no observable effect on illicit drug consumption even if this event has massive public participation: this is the first report of the absence of an illicit drug consumption increase in a festival of such magnitude, corroborating the effect of others’ views and opinions, because this event takes place publicly in the street and not among peers. Different hypothesizes are put forward to explain this fact: inappropriate type of event for drug consumption, effect of other festivals, and influence of the event’s timing on a weekday.
Music festivals have always had a key role in the production and reproduction of urban identities, regardless of the various leading political systems. This paper focuses on the Golden Stag Pop Music ...Festival (Brasov, Romania) as a particular case study in-depth investigated. It emphasizes the festival's distinctive and complex issues: from a former communist era festival (a rather unusual form of heritage), it was rebranded as a completely new post-communist musical event. The festival plays an important role in the post-socialist place-making of Brasov. The study aims to unpack the issues of rebranding this festival as part of the cultural legacy of communism enhancing the local placemaking. The research uses a multi-method approach all-through the study with quantitative and qualitative analysis. In addition, ethnographic research and visual methodologies were used to examine this emblematic music festival. The findings are designed to inspire local urban agendas of all involved actors to rebrand the festival, thus refashioning the cultural legacy of communism and enhancing the local placemaking.
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