Global injury morbidity and mortality from 1990 to 2017:Results from the global burden of disease study 2017

Background Past research in population health trends has shown that injuries form a substantial burden of population health loss. Regular updates to injury burden assessments are critical. We report Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 Study estimates on morbidity and mortality for all injuries. methods We reviewed results for injuries from the GBD 2017 study. GBD 2017 measured injury-specific mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) using the Cause of Death Ensemble model. To measure non-fatal injuries, GBD 2017 modelled injury-specific incidence and converted this to prevalence and years lived with disability (YLDs). YLLs and YLDs were summed to calculate disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Findings In 1990, there were 4 260 493 (4 085 700 to 4 396 138) injury deaths, which increased to 4 484 722 (4 332 010 to 4 585 554) deaths in 2017, while age-standardised mortality decreased from 1079 (1073 to 1086) to 738 (730 to 745) per 100 000. In 1990, there were 354 064 302 (95% uncertainty interval: 338 174 876 to 371 610 802) new cases of injury globally, which increased to 520 710 288 (493 430 247 to 547 988 635) new cases in 2017. During this time, age-standardised incidence decreased non-significantly from 6824 (6534 to 7147) to 6763 (6412 to 7118) per 100 000. Between 1990 and 2017, age-standardised DALYs decreased from 4947 (4655 to 5233) per 100 000 to 3267 (3058 to 3505). Interpretation Injuries are an important cause of health loss globally, though mortality has declined between 1990 and 2017. Future research in injury burden should focus on prevention in high-burden populations, improving data collection and ensuring access to medical care.</p

Estimating global injuries morbidity and mortality:Methods and data used in the Global Burden of Disease 2017 study

Background: While there is a long history of measuring death and disability from injuries, modern research methods must account for the wide spectrum of disability that can occur in an injury, and must provide estimates with sufficient demographic, geographical and temporal detail to be useful for policy makers. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 study used methods to provide highly detailed estimates of global injury burden that meet these criteria. Methods: In this study, we report and discuss the methods used in GBD 2017 for injury morbidity and mortality burden estimation. In summary, these methods included estimating cause-specific mortality for every cause of injury, and then estimating incidence for every cause of injury. Non-fatal disability for each cause is then calculated based on the probabilities of suffering from different types of bodily injury experienced. Results: GBD 2017 produced morbidity and mortality estimates for 38 causes of injury. Estimates were produced in terms of incidence, prevalence, years lived with disability, cause-specific mortality, years of life lost and disability-adjusted life-years for a 28-year period for 22 age groups, 195 countries and both sexes. Conclusions: GBD 2017 demonstrated a complex and sophisticated series of analytical steps using the largest known database of morbidity and mortality data on injuries. GBD 2017 results should be used to help inform injury prevention policy making and resource allocation. We also identify important avenues for improving injury burden estimation in the future.</p

Population ageing in Europe and Asia: Beyond traditional perspectives

Population ageing is the central demographic concern in Europe and Asia. Traditionalperspectives on population ageing are based on fixed old-age thresholds, such asage 65, which are not ideal for cross-country comparisons, as they do not take intoaccount the multiple dimensions of population ageing. Moreover, previous populationageing studies often ignored the diversity of the ageing processes across countries,men and women, and socio-economic groups.This thesis compared current and future population ageing in Europe and Asiausing new comparative ageing indicators that take into account differentials in lifeexpectancy, health, and human capital across European and Asian populations.This new perspective shows that the differences in the current and the projectedpopulation ageing trends in Europe and in Asia are smaller than were previouslyestimated. However, it appears that this diversity in population ageing trends ismore pronounced across regions, men and women, and educational groups thanwas previously estimated. The share of elderly in the population has been foundto be higher in populations with lagging life expectancy, health, and human capitalattainments: i.e., in most Asian countries, among women in the developing countriesof Asia and in Eastern Europe, and among the lower educated in both continents. Inthe future, levels of population ageing are expected to increase further, particularlyin Asia, where the responsiveness of population ageing to increases in education islikely to be high.Our results suggest that investments in health and human capital, especially amongvulnerable groups, such as the less educated and women in Asia, are needed todelay the onset of ‘old age’ for these groups, and to reduce population ageing and itsnegative societal consequences

EVALUATION OF PALM OIL BASED FATTY ACIDS FOR SYNTHESIS OF EMULSIFIER IN DRILLING FLUIDS

Drilling mud play a major role in the process of drilling and production and one of its main functions is to provide hydrostatic pressure to prevent kick. Drilling fluids could be categorised as oil based mud and water based mud. The oil based mud functionality outweighs the functionality of water based mud though oil based mud requires emulsifying agent to provide stability to it. This project titled: THE USAGE OF PALM OIL BASED FATTY ACIDS AS AN EMULSIFYING AGENT FOR DRILLING FLUIDS is to determine the ability of emulsifying agent, under high pressure and high temperature, to maintain the stability of oil based mud under high pressure and high temperature. This research will be a stepping stone for future research of the potential drilling fluid additives which is obtainable from abundant local resources. The potential usage of palm products from Malaysia as an emulsifying agent for drilling fluids is still in the experimental stage though it has high potential. Through my research I wish to look into the potential of palm oil based fatty acids able to compete with other non-biodegradable products. The problems caused by using current type emulsifier is mostly due to the nature of the product which does not decompose naturally and may cause a significant impact on the environment if proper treatment is not made before disposal. Other than that, concerning the cost of importing the product which is considerably high. This project involves a lot of lab work and experiments in order to test the effectiveness of the product and could potentially help to identify the optimization usage of palm oil based fatty acids as emulsifying agent for drilling fluids used in drilling operation. The main properties that will be investigated are the emulsion stability, plastic viscosity, yield point, gel strength and HTHP of the mud with the new emulsifier. The test results shows some interesting results in favour of the new emulsifier and will be explained in depth in the results and discussion part

A multi-dimensional perspective on the gender gap in health among older adults in India and China:Application of a new ageing measure

A continuous rise of female life expectancy above that of males among older adults in India and China may give the impression that the relative gender gap in health in these countries is decreasing. However, given the systemic gender bias against older females in these countries across multiple dimensions of health, a fuller understanding of the gender gap in health calls for a multi-dimensional perspective. We estimate a multi-dimensional old-age threshold (MOAT) that specifies different old-age thresholds for female and male populations which accommodates multiple dimensions related to physical, intellectual and general health. We use the MOAT to evaluate the multi-dimensional gender gap in India and China by differencing the MOAT for females with that of males. Females in both countries have a lower MOAT than their male counterparts, indicating an earlier advent of ‘old age’ for females. The multi-dimensional estimates of the gender gap are also higher than the estimates based on only one dimension of health. A considerable level of variation is also observed in the gender gap across provinces. The study illustrates the need to understand the gender gap in health in India and China from a multi-dimensional perspective and provides an innovative way to quantify such a gap. Province-specific as well as health dimension-specific interventions are vital in reducing the gender gap among older adults in these countries.<br/

Root cause analysis of COVID-19 cases by enhanced text mining process

The main focus of this research is to find the reasons behind the fresh cases of COVID-19 from the public’s perception for data specific to India. The analysis is done using machine learning approaches and validating the inferences with medical professionals. The data processing and analysis is accomplished in three steps. First, the dimensionality of the vector space model (VSM) is reduced with improvised feature engineering (FE) process by using a weighted term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and forward scan trigrams (FST) followed by removal of weak features using feature hashing technique. In the second step, an enhanced K-means clustering algorithm is used for grouping, based on the public posts from Twitter®. In the last step, latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) is applied for discovering the trigram topics relevant to the reasons behind the increase of fresh COVID-19 cases. The enhanced K-means clustering improved Dunn index value by 18.11% when compared with the traditional K-means method. By incorporating improvised two-step FE process, LDA model improved by 14% in terms of coherence score and by 19% and 15% when compared with latent semantic analysis (LSA) and hierarchical dirichlet process (HDP) respectively thereby resulting in 14 root causes for spike in the disease

EVALUATION OF PALM OIL BASED FATTY ACIDS FOR SYNTHESIS OF EMULSIFIER IN DRILLING FLUIDS

Drilling mud play a major role in the process of drilling and production and one of its main functions is to provide hydrostatic pressure to prevent kick. Drilling fluids could be categorised as oil based mud and water based mud. The oil based mud functionality outweighs the functionality of water based mud though oil based mud requires emulsifying agent to provide stability to it. This project titled: THE USAGE OF PALM OIL BASED FATTY ACIDS AS AN EMULSIFYING AGENT FOR DRILLING FLUIDS is to determine the ability of emulsifying agent, under high pressure and high temperature, to maintain the stability of oil based mud under high pressure and high temperature. This research will be a stepping stone for future research of the potential drilling fluid additives which is obtainable from abundant local resources. The potential usage of palm products from Malaysia as an emulsifying agent for drilling fluids is still in the experimental stage though it has high potential. Through my research I wish to look into the potential of palm oil based fatty acids able to compete with other non-biodegradable products. The problems caused by using current type emulsifier is mostly due to the nature of the product which does not decompose naturally and may cause a significant impact on the environment if proper treatment is not made before disposal. Other than that, concerning the cost of importing the product which is considerably high. This project involves a lot of lab work and experiments in order to test the effectiveness of the product and could potentially help to identify the optimization usage of palm oil based fatty acids as emulsifying agent for drilling fluids used in drilling operation. The main properties that will be investigated are the emulsion stability, plastic viscosity, yield point, gel strength and HTHP of the mud with the new emulsifier. The test results shows some interesting results in favour of the new emulsifier and will be explained in depth in the results and discussion part

A multi-dimensional measure of population ageing accounting for Quantum and Quality in life years:An application of selected countries in Europe and Asia

Population ageing measured through a fixed old-age threshold like 60+ or 65+ ignores the other important dimensions of ageing. There has been changes among the older persons in multiple dimensions that corresponds to quantity of life years lived as well as the quality of life. The existing multi-dimensional measures also consider the characteristics within a fixed old-age threshold framework which does not account for significant improvements in life expectancy over the years. We propose a new Multidimensional Old Age Threshold (MOAT) measure that accommodates different dimensions of quantity and quality of older persons. We achieve this through a modified framework of the Characteristic Approach. Our measure incorporates a forward-looking approach to measure ageing and specifies an old-age threshold for different countries after accounting for different dimensions of life expectancy, health and human capital. This method is more suitable for comparison across countries with distinct demographic and health achievements. The empirical application of our method using selected countries from Europe and Asia shows that the relative performance of countries differs in terms of MOAT in comparison to estimates based on existing measures, primarily due to the inclusion of the quality dimensions. Countries that have better performance in life expectancy, health and human capital have higher values of MOAT and a lower ‘burden’ of older persons in a cross-country perspective in comparison to the existing measures

Environmental Studies: Bottlenecks and Prosperities

The environmentalists of the entire world are crying by forecasting the depletion of biotic and abiotic resources at an accelerating rate which may make the survival of life on earth questionable. The main cause of this disastrous degradation is due to unmindful anthropogenic activities. The present generation is unaware of consequences of environmental degradation and the need for the conservation of species and their habitats. It is an imperative need and responsibility to inculcate the culture of loving and living with nature among the youth. The University Grants Commission as per the directions of the Honourable Supreme Court of India directed all the Universities and Colleges to include Environmental Studies course in the curriculum. Accordingly, all the institutions have introduced this course in their curriculum. Nevertheless, there are several constrains in teaching this course to all students in letter and spirit of the law. Though there are certain constrains, there is scope for the enhancement of teaching and learning efficacy. This paper briefly describes the need for the introduction of the course, challenges in teaching and possible solutions

A method to remove Ammonia using a Proton-Conducting Ceramic Membrane

An apparatus and method for decomposing NH{sub 3}. A fluid containing NH{sub 3} is passed in contact with a tubular membrane that is a homogeneous mixture of a ceramic and a first metal, with the ceramic being selected from one or more of a cerate having the formula of M' Ce{sub 1-x} M''O{sub 3-{delta}}, zirconates having the formula M'Zr{sub 1-x} M''3-{delta}, stannates having the formula M'Sn{sub 1-x}M''O{sub 3}-{delta}, where M' is a group IIA metal, M'' is a dopant metal of one or more of Ca, Y, Yb, In, Nd, Gd or mixtures thereof and {delta} is a variable depending on the concentration of dopant and is in the range of from 0.001 to 0.5, the first metal is a group VIII or group IB element selected from the group consisting of Pt, Ag, Pd, Fe, Co, Cr, Mn, V, Ni, Au, Cu, Rh, Ru and mixtures thereof. The tubular membrane has a catalytic metal on the side thereof in contact with the fluid containing NH{sub 3} which is effective to cause NH{sub 3} to decompose to N{sub 2} and H{sub 2}. When the H{sub 2} contacts the membrane, H{sup +} ions are formed which pass through the membrane driving the NH{sub 3} decomposition toward completion