Design of a HACCP plan for indigenous chicken slaughter house in Kenya

Indigenous chicken rearing is seen as a poverty alleviation and food security strategy especially in rural households in Africa. Chicken meat is a delicacy in almost every household in Kenya. It is a common food in restaurants and hotels that serve fast foods in urban areas. Demand for and consumption of indigenous chicken meat in Kenya has been on the rise. Many slaughterhouses have been set up in strategic locations close to towns or in towns to allow for quick supply of the dressed chicken carcass to consumers. Poultry meat is a low acid food and has been associated with the presence of foodborne pathogens such as Campylobacter, Escherichia coli, Salmonella enteritidis, and Staphylococcus aureus, especially when processing conditions are not hygienic. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) is based on a scientific verifiable process to identify, control, reduce or eliminate any potential hazards to guarantee food safety. The current study was conducted based on the actual production conditions of the slaughter house. It was initiated through a survey that looked into the operations of the slaughter house on the basis of good manufacturing practices, as well as standard operation and sanitation procedures. From the results of the study and the gap audit analysis based on a checklist, the HACCP study was commissioned. The study aimed at developing a HACCP system; based on the seven HACCP principles and a critical scrutiny of several existing models. Four Critical Control Points (CCPs) were identified and a HACCP plan, complete with perquisite programs was presented to deal with the identified hazards and, therefore, present the consumers with high quality and safe products. Design of a model for the application and operationalization of HACCP system was undertaken as an important step in ensuring consumers enjoy safe products from the indigenous chicken meat prepared from the slaughter house.Key words: Indigenous chicken, slaughter house, HACCP, Critical control points (CCPs

Energy efficiency performance improvements for ant-based routing algorithm in wireless sensor networks

The main problem for event gathering in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the restricted communication range for each node. Due to the restricted communication range and high network density, event forwarding in WSNs is very challenging and requires multihop data forwarding. Currently, the energy-efficient ant based routing (EEABR) algorithm, based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic, is one of the state-of-the-art energy-aware routing protocols. In this paper, we propose three improvements to the EEABR algorithm to further improve its energy efficiency. The improvements to the original EEABR are based on the following: (1) a new scheme to intelligently initialize the routing tables giving priority to neighboring nodes that simultaneously could be the destination, (2) intelligent update of routing tables in case of a node or link failure, and (3) reducing the flooding ability of ants for congestion control. The energy efficiency improvements are significant particularly for dynamic routing environments. Experimental results using the RMASE simulation environment show that the proposed method increases the energy efficiency by up to 9% and 64% in converge-cast and target-tracking scenarios, respectively, over the original EEABR without incurring a significant increase in complexity. The method is also compared and found to also outperform other swarm-based routing protocols such as sensor-driven and cost-aware ant routing (SC) and Beesensor

Oxytocin Attenuates the Stress-Induced Reinstatement of Alcohol-Seeking in Male Rats: Role of the Central Amygdala

Factors such as stress and anxiety often contribute to alcohol-dependent behavior and can trigger a relapse of alcohol addiction and use. Therefore, it is important to investigate potential pharmacological interventions that may alleviate the influence of stress on addiction-related behaviors. Previous studies have demonstrated that the neuropeptide oxytocin has promising anxiolytic potential in mammals and may offer a pharmacological target to diminish the emotional impact on reinstatement of alcohol-seeking. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of oxytocin on stress-induced alcohol relapse and identify a neural structure mediating this effect through the use of an ethanol self-administration and yohimbine-induced reinstatement paradigm. While yohimbine administration resulted in the reinstatement of ethanol-seeking behavior, the concurrent administration of yohimbine and oxytocin attenuated this effect, suggesting that oxytocin may disrupt stress-induced ethanol-seeking behavior. The central amygdala (CeA) is a structure that drives emotional responses and robustly expresses oxytocin receptors. Intra-CeA oxytocin similarly attenuated the yohimbine-induced reinstatement of ethanol-seeking behavior. These results demonstrate that oxytocin has the potential to attenuate stress-induced relapse into ethanol-seeking behavior, and that this mechanism occurs specifically within the central amygdala

Neurofunctional Abnormalities during Sustained Attention in Severe Childhood Abuse

<div><p>Childhood maltreatment is associated with adverse affective and cognitive consequences including impaired emotion processing, inhibition and attention. However, the majority of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in childhood maltreatment have examined emotion processing, while very few studies have tested the neurofunctional substrates of cognitive functions and none of attention. This study investigated the association between severe childhood abuse and fMRI brain activation during a parametric sustained attention task with a progressively increasing load of sustained attention in 21 medication-naïve, drug-free young people with a history of childhood abuse controlling for psychiatric comorbidities by including 19 psychiatric controls matched for psychiatric diagnoses, and 27 healthy controls. Behaviorally, the participants exposed to childhood abuse showed increased omission errors in the task which correlated positively trend-wise with the duration of their abuse. Neurofunctionally, the participants with a history of childhood abuse, but not the psychiatric controls, displayed significantly reduced activation relative to the healthy controls during the most challenging attention condition only in typical attention regions including left inferior and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, insula and temporal areas. We therefore show for the first time that severe childhood abuse is associated with neurofunctional abnormalities in key ventral frontal-temporal sustained attention regions. The findings represent a first step towards the delineation of abuse-related neurofunctional abnormalities in sustained attention, which may help in the development of effective treatments for victims of childhood abuse.</p></div

Knowledge, beliefs and attitude towards malaria control and prevention among students in tertiary institutions in the Gambia

BACKGROUNDEven though Malaria caused by five parasite species, two of which – Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax is preventable, curable and treatable, it continues to pose a significant health threat to many communities around the world. Particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, The Gambia is one of the African countries that has seen a significant reduction in malaria cases. Malaria cases in The Gambia had decreased gradually from 346.9 per 100,000 persons in 2004 to 66 per 100,000 people in 2018. The fight against malaria is great progress for the future. AIMThis study aimed at assessing the knowledge, attitude and practice of students attending tertiary institutions in The Gambia in regard to Malaria prevention and control. METHODOLOGYFrom May to June 2021, a standardized pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire was used to obtain information from 431 students in four public institutions in The Gambia. The University of The Gambia (UTG) Brikama Campus, The Gambia College-Brikama Campus, Management Development Institution (MDI) and The Gambia Technical Training Institution (GTTI. Respondents were chosen using a random sampling approach of students who were found on campuses and consented to participate. Sample size was determined using the formula described by Thrusfield (2007) based on a 95% confidence interval. It was first entered into excel and then exported to SPSS version 22 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Ill., USA) for data analyses. RESULTThe aetiology, symptoms and therapy of malaria were all well-understood by the respondents. Age (P-value=0.005) and program of study (P-value=0.014) were highly significant with students’ knowledge on the mode of transmission of malaria as for students belief of the disease. Institution of learning Odd ratio (1.385, P value=0.003) was the only factor which affected students perception of malaria. Gender (Odd ratio=2.491, P-value=0.005) and the institution of learning (Odd ratio=1.506, P-value=0.003) were factors which had a high statistical significance with students practice of sleep under an ITNs. CONCLUSIONThis study reported a high level of knowledge, poor attitude and practice towards malaria control interventions among students attending tertiary institutions in The Gambia. Students from the UTG and GTTI showed a better positive knowledge than those from the other participants. Their curriculum studies and social activities (individual students’ unions) exposed them to a higher level of awareness. RECOMMENDATIONSHealth-related programs on malaria prevention and control should be organized to raise awareness in through television and radio or any other media. Health education should be a compulsory topic or module in institutions

Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting and Management for Wireless Sensor Networks

Radio Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting holds a promising future for generating a small amount of electrical power to drive partial circuits in wirelessly communicating electronics devices. Reducing power consumption has become a major challenge in wireless sensor networks. As a vital factor affecting system cost and lifetime, energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is an emerging and active research area. This chapter presents a practical approach for RF Energy harvesting and management of the harvested and available energy for wireless sensor networks using the Improved Energy Efficient Ant Based Routing Algorithm (IEEABR) as our proposed algorithm. The chapter looks at measurement of the RF power density, calculation of the received power, storage of the harvested power, and management of the power in wireless sensor networks. The routing uses IEEABR technique for energy management. Practical and real-time implementations of the RF Energy using Powercast harvesters and simulations using the energy model of our Libelium Waspmote to verify the approach were performed. The chapter concludes with performance analysis of the harvested energy, comparison of IEEABR and other traditional energy management techniques, while also looking at open research areas of energy harvesting and management for wireless sensor networks.Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables, Book chapte

Drone-Based Environmental Monitoring and Image Processing Approaches for Resource Estimates of Private Native Forest

This paper investigated the utility of drone-based environmental monitoring to assist with forest inventory in Queensland private native forests (PNF). The research aimed to build capabilities to carry out forest inventory more efficiently without the need to rely on laborious field assessments. The use of drone-derived images and the subsequent application of digital photogrammetry to obtain information about PNFs are underinvestigated in southeast Queensland vegetation types. In this study, we used image processing to separate individual trees and digital photogrammetry to derive a canopy height model (CHM). The study was supported with tree height data collected in the field for one site. The paper addressed the research question “How well do drone-derived point clouds estimate the height of trees in PNF ecosystems?” The study indicated that a drone with a basic RGB camera can estimate tree height with good confidence. The results can potentially be applied across multiple land tenures and similar forest types. This informs the development of drone-based and remote-sensing image-processing methods, which will lead to improved forest inventories, thereby providing forest managers with recent, accurate, and efficient information on forest resources

Oxytocin Attenuates Yohimbine-Induced Reinstatement of Alcohol-Seeking in Female Rats via the Central Amygdala

Alcohol use disorder is a significant public health concern, further exacerbated by an increased risk of relapse due to stress. In addition, factors such as biological sex may contribute to the progression of addiction, as females are especially susceptible to stress-induced relapse. While there have been many studies surrounding potential pharmacological interventions for male stress-induced ethanol reinstatement, research regarding females is scarce. Recently, the neuropeptide oxytocin has gained interest as a possible pharmacological intervention for relapse. The present study examines how oxytocin affects yohimbine-induced reinstatement of ethanol-seeking in female rats using a self-administration paradigm. Adult female rats were trained to press a lever to access ethanol in daily self-administration sessions. Rats then underwent extinction training before a yohimbine-induced reinstatement test. Rats administered with yohimbine demonstrated significantly higher lever response indicating a reinstatement of ethanol-seeking behavior. Oxytocin administration, both systemically and directly into the central amygdala, attenuated the effect of yohimbine-induced reinstatement of ethanol-seeking behavior. The findings from this study establish that oxytocin is effective at attenuating alcohol-relapse behavior mediated by the pharmacological stressor yohimbine and that this effect is modulated by the central amygdala in females. This provides valuable insight regarding oxytocin’s potential therapeutic effect in female stress-induced alcohol relapse