Cytochrome P450 is implicated in permethrin resistance in Anopheles coluzzii populations from Delta State, Nigeria

Insecticide resistance is one of the major impediments threatening the control of malaria vector populations in Nigeria. The failure of WHO recommended control, especially with permethrin used for insecticide treated nets (ITNs) and indoor spray could lead to increase morbidities and mortalities, if left unattended to. This calls for sound management approach achievable through adequate knowledge of spread and mechanism of resistance. Hence, this study evaluated resistance status and involvement of metabolic resistance in Anopheles coluzzii populations from Delta State to permethrin. Anopheline larvae were collected from three Local Government Areas (LGA) and reared to adult stage at Entomology Laboratory, Delta State University, Abraka. Adult female mosquitoes aged 3 – 5 days were exposed to 0.75% permethrin using WHO bioassay method. Also, cohort were exposed to PBO and further exposed to permethrin. Exposed mosquitoes were identified molecularly. All identified mosquitoes were An. coluzzii. Exposure of An. coluzzii populations from Ika South, Ndokwa East and Ethiope West Local Government Area to permethrin recorded 62, 74 and 83 % mortality respectively. Mortalities in synergist assay were 99, 99 and 100 % respectively. Differences in mortality between permethrin and PBO/permethrin-exposed population were significant (p<0.0001). Knockdown Time (KDT50 and KDT95) was lowest in Ethiope West LGA. Considering increase in mortality value of the populations with exposure to PBO, this study presents evidence for involvement of cytochrome P450 in development of resistance in permethrin-resistant Anopheles populations from Delta State

In vivo anti-plasmodial activities and toxic impacts of lime extract of a combination of Picralima nitida, Alstonia boonei and Gongronema latifolium in mice infected with Chloroquine-sensitive Plasmodium berghei.

Background: Lime extracts of powdered combination of seeds of Picralima nitida, stem bark of Alstonia boonei and leaves of Gongronema latifolium is a common remedy used in the treatment of malaria in South Western Nigeria.Objective: To determine the antiplasmodial activities of the combined herbal extracts and its impact on the haematological, hepatological and renological parameters in mice.Methods: The 4-day suppressive and curative tests were used to assess the antiplasmodial activities of the extract in mice infected with chloroquine-sensitive Plasmodium berghei at concentration of 200mg/kg, 400mg/kg and 800mg/kg body weight. The haematological parameters including red blood cells, white blood cells, packed cell volume and haemoglobin count were analysed with an auto analyser. The activities of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) were determined, while urea, protein and creatinine were analysed by standard procedural methods.Results: The 4-day suppressive test revealed that the test extract achieved percentage suppression of 39.0%, 41.6% and 54.68% for the 200mg/kg, 400mg/kg and 800mg/kg concentration respectively. Additionally, the curative test achieved a high percentage suppression of 80.97%, 83.84% and 86.16% at the 200mg/kg, 400mg/kg and 800mg/kg concentration respectively. The extracts did not induce significant change on haematological parameters (P>0.05), while significant elevation in the values of the ALT and AST (P<0.05) was observed and elevation of creatinine (P<0.05) at 800mg/kg.Conclusions: The results support the traditional use of the herbal combination in the treatment of malaria, however the liver cells were impacted by the extracts in bioassay conducted with mice.Keywords: In vivo anti-plasmodial lime extract, Picralima nitida, Alstonia boonei, Gongronema latifolium, mice infected with chloroquine-sensitive plasmodium berghei

Pharmacognosy: Importance and Drawbacks

In many nations of the world, a great number of deaths and morbidity arising from illnesses are witnessed due to lack of basic health care. Phytotherapy has continued to play a significant role in the prevention and treatment of diseases (communicable and noncommunicable). Interestingly, more than 80% of the global populations now adopt phytotherapy as a basic source of maintaining good healthy conditions, owing to the pronounced side effects, nonavailability, and expensive nature of conventional treatment options. While this review looked at the prospects and downsides of phytomedicine as it relates to the national health care system, it established the fact that although a number of medicinal plants had been resourceful (effective) against a range of diseases, with few developed into drugs based on the available phytotherapeutics, quite a large number of them are yet to scale through clinical trials to determine their safety and efficacy. It is believed that until this is done, we hope phytomedicine to be adopted or integrated into the national health care system in many countries

In vivo anti-plasmodial activities and toxic impacts of lime extract of a combination of Picralima nitida , Alstonia boonei and Gongronema latifolium in mice infected with Chloroquine-sensitive Plasmodium berghei.

Background: Lime extracts of powdered combination of seeds of Picralima nitida , stem bark of Alstonia boonei and leaves of Gongronema latifolium is a common remedy used in the treatment of malaria in South Western Nigeria. Objective: To determine the antiplasmodial activities of the combined herbal extracts and its impact on the haematological, hepatological and renological parameters in mice. Methods: The 4-day suppressive and curative tests were used to assess the antiplasmodial activities of the extract in mice infected with chloroquine-sensitive Plasmodium berghei at concentration of 200mg/kg, 400mg/kg and 800mg/kg body weight. The haematological parameters including red blood cells, white blood cells, packed cell volume and haemoglobin count were analysed with an auto analyser. The activities of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) were determined, while urea, protein and creatinine were analysed by standard procedural methods. Results: The 4-day suppressive test revealed that the test extract achieved percentage suppression of 39.0%, 41.6% and 54.68% for the 200mg/kg, 400mg/kg and 800mg/kg concentration respectively. Additionally, the curative test achieved a high percentage suppression of 80.97%, 83.84% and 86.16% at the 200mg/kg, 400mg/kg and 800mg/kg concentration respectively. The extracts did not induce significant change on haematological parameters (P>0.05), while significant elevation in the values of the ALT and AST (P<0.05) was observed and elevation of creatinine (P<0.05) at 800mg/kg. Conclusions: The results support the traditional use of the herbal combination in the treatment of malaria, however the liver cells were impacted by the extracts in bioassay conducted with mice

'We Have the Internet in Our Hands’: Bangladeshi College Students’ Use of ICTs For Health Information

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) which enable people to access, use and promote health information through digital technology, promise important health systems innovations which can challenge gatekeepers’ control of information, through processes of disintermediation. College students, in pursuit of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information, are particularly affected by gatekeeping as strong social and cultural norms restrict their access to information and services. This paper examines mobile phone usage for obtaining health information in Mirzapur, Bangladesh. It contrasts college students’ usage with that of the general population, asks whether students are using digital technologies for health information in innovative ways, and examines how gender affects this

Pulse oximetry and oxygen services for the care of children with pneumonia attending frontline health facilities in Lagos, Nigeria (INSPIRING-Lagos): study protocol for a mixed-methods evaluation

INTRODUCTION: The aim of this evaluation is to understand whether introducing stabilisation rooms equipped with pulse oximetry and oxygen systems to frontline health facilities in Ikorodu, Lagos State, alongside healthcare worker (HCW) training improves the quality of care for children with pneumonia aged 0-59 months. We will explore to what extent, how, for whom and in what contexts the intervention works. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Quasi-experimental time-series impact evaluation with embedded mixed-methods process and economic evaluation. SETTING: seven government primary care facilities, seven private health facilities, two government secondary care facilities. TARGET POPULATION: children aged 0-59 months with clinically diagnosed pneumonia and/or suspected or confirmed COVID-19. INTERVENTION: 'stabilisation rooms' within participating primary care facilities in Ikorodu local government area, designed to allow for short-term oxygen delivery for children with hypoxaemia prior to transfer to hospital, alongside HCW training on integrated management of childhood illness, pulse oximetry and oxygen therapy, immunisation and nutrition. Secondary facilities will also receive training and equipment for oxygen and pulse oximetry to ensure minimum standard of care is available for referred children. PRIMARY OUTCOME: correct management of hypoxaemic pneumonia including administration of oxygen therapy, referral and presentation to hospital. SECONDARY OUTCOME: 14-day pneumonia case fatality rate. Evaluation period: August 2020 to September 2022. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval from University of Ibadan, Lagos State and University College London. Ongoing engagement with government and other key stakeholders during the project. Local dissemination events will be held with the State Ministry of Health at the end of the project (December 2022). We will publish the main impact results, process evaluation and economic evaluation results as open-access academic publications in international journals. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: ACTRN12621001071819; Registered on the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.Comment: Accepted to IJCNLP-AACL 2023 (main conference

MasakhaNEWS:News Topic Classification for African languages

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Bedbug (Cimex lectularius) infestation and its control practices in two selected settlements in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria

Bedbugs are cosmopolitan insects of public health importance. Their characteristic biting and blood feeding activities result in both physical symptoms and psychological distress in affected hosts. This study investigated the incidence of bedbug and control practices among students and indigenes living in two different settlements in Ilorin, Nigeria. Bedbug were surveyed and collected from household materials from fifty apartments randomly selected from each of the new and old student hostels and family houses in Tanke and Oja-Oba area of Ilorin. Bedbugs collected were persevered in 70 % alcohol and identified using taxonomic keys. A structured questionnaire was used to obtain information on respondent’s demography, perception about bedbug infestation and control practices in sampled houses in the study areas. Sampled data were analysis using percentages. Results from the survey revealed that the number of respondents with knowledge of bedbug was not significant (p>0.05) compared with those without. Family houses in indigenous Oja-Oba study location were the only site with bed-bug infestation. Higher numbers of bedbugs were collected on mattresses. Out of the 200 respondents, 20 (10 %) employed the use of chemical method in bedbug control and precisely, 12 (60%) of these use a locally made formulation named otapiapia. The intensity of infestation in Oja-Oba and insignificant knowledge of bedbug among the respondents suggest the need to raise the level of public awareness and also canvass for an improved living conditions in the affected areas.Keywords: Bedbug, Cimex lectularius, Infestation, Control practices, Ilori