Animal health service providers can play an important role in limiting drug resistance by promoting responsible and prudent use of veterinary drugs. Recognizing this potential, international agencies ...and governments have called for these providers to receive drug stewardship training, particularly providers in low- and middle-income countries where top-down regulations (e.g., national regulation of veterinary prescriptions) are largely unfeasible. The success of these stewardship trainings to promote responsible and prudent use will depend on many factors, including understanding how livestock-keeping communities currently interact with animal health service providers. Here, we use a mixed methods approach to identify and understand animal health seeking practices among Maasai pastoralists in Tanzania. Combining qualitative interviews (N = 31) and structured surveys (N = 195), we show the majority of Maasai respondents (≈80 %) do not frequently consult animal health service providers with most relying on advice from family and friends. Logistic regression models of health seeking practices find that increasing age, education, observance of treatment failure, and herd disease burdens are associated with greater odds of seeking out health services. Quantitative results were supported by data from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews that showed Maasai view animal health service providers as measures of last resort, whose input is largely sought after self-treatment with veterinary drugs fail. We argue patterns of animal health seeking among the Maasai are partially the consequence of their high confidence in their own abilities in livestock disease and treatment and generally low confidence in the skills of animal health service providers. We link this high sense of self-efficacy to the culturally engrained process by which Maasai develop mastery in animal health and how the roles and norms in Maasai culture surrounding animal health influence Maasai perceptions of animal health professionals. Our results highlight the need for more research to understand Maasai perceptions of animal health service providers as well as the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of these providers. Finally, our study emphasizes that the success of drug stewardship trainings will require efforts to first understand the cultural and historical contexts driving health seeking practices that impact perceptions of animal health service providers and animal health practices more generally.
Although full-duplex relaying schemes are appealing in order to improve spectral efficiency, simultaneous reception and transmission in the same frequency results in self-interference, distorting the ...retransmitted signal and making the relay prone to oscillation. Current feedback cancellation techniques by means of adaptive filters are hampered by the fact that the useful and interference signals are highly correlated. We present a new adaptive algorithm which effectively and blindly restores the spectral shape of the desired signal. In contrast with previous schemes, the novel adaptive feedback canceller has low complexity, does not introduce additional delay in the relay station, and partly compensates for multipath propagation.
We study the problem of optimizing the end-to-end performance of a full-duplex filter-and-forward MIMO relay link, consisting of a source, a relay, and a destination node, by employing linear ...filtering at each node. The system model accounts for multipath propagation and self-interference at the relay, as well as transmitter impairments and limited dynamic range at every node. The design accommodates signals with arbitrary spectra and includes the direct link between the source and destination nodes. Under the minimum mean square error criterion, the resulting non-convex problem is approximated by a sequence of convex problems and solved by means of an alternating minimization method. Linear constraints allocate some of the degrees of freedom in the relay to guarantee a sufficiently small residual self-interference. Simulations quantify the impact of degrees of freedom, the dynamic range, and the balance between direct and relay paths on the link performance.
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