Global Health Security in an Era of Explosive Pandemic Potential

Pandemics pose a significant risk to security, economic stability, and development. Annualized expected losses from pandemics are estimated at $60 billion per year. Despite the certainty and magnitude of the threat, the global community has significantly underestimated and underinvested in avoidance of pandemic threats. We cannot wait or continue with the status quo, in which we pay attention to infectious disease threats only when they are at their peak and then are complacent and remain vulnerable until the next major outbreak. To reinforce and sustain international focus, funding, and action, it is crucial that pandemics rise to the level of “high politics,” becoming standing agenda items for political actors. In this article, we make the case for fundamental reform of the international system to safeguard global health security. We build on the action agenda offered by four international commissions formed in the wake of the Ebola epidemic, calling for the recommended “peace dividend” (an annual incremental investment of$4.5 billion – 65 cents per person) to strengthen global preparedness, for the United Nations to play a greater role in responding to major global health and humanitarian emergencies, and for an effective and efficient R&D strategy with multiple stakeholders—governments, academics, industry, and civil society—identifying R&D priorities and leading a coordinated response. If our action plan were adopted, it would safeguard the global population far better against infectious disease threats. It would reap dividends in security, development, and productivity

Warm inflation in presence of magnetic fields

We present preliminary results on the possible effects that primordial magnetic fields can have for a warm inflation scenario, based on global supersymmetry, with a new-inflation-type potential. This work is motivated by two considerations: first, magnetic fields seem to be present in the universe on all scales, which rises the possibility that they could also permeate the early universe; second, the recent emergence of inflationary models where the inflaton is not assumed to be isolated but instead it is taken as an interacting field, even during the inflationary expansion. The effects of magnetic fields are included resorting to Schwinger proper time method.Comment: Published in AIP Conf. Proc. 1548, 288 (2013), IX Mexican School on Gravitation and Mathematical Physics: Cosmology for the XXIst Centur

Measuring inequality and dependences between income sources with administrative data and survey data

Producción CientíficaThis paper aims at analyzing the effects of changing from survey to administrative data on inequality and its structure. Taking advantage of the Spanish Survey on Income and Living Conditions (ECV) that continued asking households for their income despite assigning them the income data provided by the Tax Agency and the Social Security administration, different analyses are carried out. By using copula functions we pay special attention to the effect on the dependences between income sources. We find a significant growth in the disposable income of households when using administrative data. The incomes of both tails of the distribution increase considerably more than middle incomes, and administrative data produce significantly lower levels of inequality. Using administrative instead of survey data also gives rise to changes in the structure of inequality by income sources, rising the contribution of capital income. Both methods of data collection also produce significant differences in the observed dependences between income sources.Economía Aplicad

Welfare Benefits in Highly Decentralized Fiscal Systems: Evidence on Interterritorial Mimicking

This paper analyzes the determinants of welfare benefit levels within a highly fiscally decentralized context. More specifically, we analyze the role of mimicking as a driver of the institutional design of subnational government policies in the absence of federal co-ordination and financing. Empirically we focus on the welfare benefit programs of Spanish regional governments during the period 1996-2015. Our results strongly support the significant role played by mimicking: regional public agents observe what their peers are doing and act accordingly, and this takes place even in a context of low mobility of households. Moreover, we find evidence of vertical externalities: even in a completely decentralized framework, regions consider the benefits set by the central government as a benchmark when determining their own welfare benefit level

YBX1 Modulates Drug Resistance in Liver Cancer

According to the Texas Cancer Registry, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most common cause of cancer death. In 2015, Texas had the country\u27s highest incidence rate and the fourth highest mortality rate. Texas Hispanics (87% of Mexican origin) showed the highest incidence and mortality rates compared to the overall US Hispanic population, with individuals of Mexican origin having the highest rates. The Rio Grande Valley, which is predominantly Mexican, is extremely affected by this fact, which exacerbates the need to address this issue within our community. A major challenge in improving patient therapy in liver cancer is Sorafenib resistance. Sorafenib is a tumor-suppressing drug that is used as a first-line treatment for late-stage liver cancer and is especially prescribed to patients presenting relapse and recurrence of HCC. In addition, we have identified a transcription factor, YB1, which is a common element in poorer patient outcomes across breast, colon, liver, and other types of cancer. We are proposing that YB1 plays an important role in the development of Sorafenib resistance in liver cancer. Our models to study the mechanism of the development of Sorafenib resistance are HCC cell lines from the American Type Culture Collection, enhanced with overexpression of YBX1. We analyzed the Sorafenib IC50 by performing molecular assays to validate the upregulation of drug resistance by YBX1 in HCC. Additionally, we will show that overexpression of YBX1 increases cell viability, thus cancer progression, in the presence of Sorafenib, as well as overexpression of YBX1 in the Sorafenib resistant cell lines

Continous parental care models after elective caesarean section : effects on infants’ wellbeing, onset of breastfeeding, and on gender equal parenting

Background: Birth by caesarean section is still seen by some as a reason for separation of mother and newborn with the child being placed in a cot or in an incubator separated from the mother. This was the situation in Chile in 2009 to 2012 when this research programme was begun. The overall aim of this research programme was to compare different Continuous Parental Caregiving Models of newborn infants after Elective Caesarean Birth. The specific aim were to determine the effect on the newborn's physiological adaptation, wellbeing, onset of breastfeeding and parents’ experiences and perception of the care provided. Methods: Immediately after caesarean section birth, 95 infants were randomised and assigned to one of three groups with 32 infants in a cot with the father besides, 34 clothed infants in the father’s arms, and 29 in skin-to-skin contact with the father from 45 minutes to 120 minutes after birth. After a second allocation at the end on the time with the father, before the reunion with the mother from 130 to 205 minutes after birth, 56 infants were randomised to be clothed and placed in the mother’s arms and 39 to be placed in skin-to-skin contact with the mother. The neonatal state of wakefulness, rooting and sucking was assessed using the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, physiological parameters and the time to first breastfeed were recorded. The 95 mothers’ and fathers’ experience and perceptions were captured with open questions to be completed by each subject. The quantitative data were analysed with descriptive statistics, and the qualitative data were analysed using systematic text condensation as described by Malterud. Results: The results from the RCT studies (Studies I - II) were that, regardless of the model of care, all infants were found to display normal physiological patterns while being cared for by the fathers during maternal-infant separation with some advantages being observed for the skin-to-skin cared for group (Study I). Reunited with the mother after being cared for by the father, the infants were in a wakeful state, breastfeeding was initiated, and the infants showed stable physiological patterns. A continuous model of parental care after caesarean section was considered by the mothers to be a beneficial family practice for the baby and the whole family, during mother-child separation (Study IV), confirmed by the experience of the fathers caring for the child during maternal-infant separation. The emerging parenting process is described in study III, and both the mothers and the fathers confirmed that a continuous model of parental care after caesarean section enhances equal parenting. Conclusion: Newborn infants can be cared for safely and appropriately by their parents after elective caesarean section, and if maternal-infant separation occurs, skin-to-skin contact with the father enhances the child's wellbeing, facilitates the onset of breastfeeding and has a positive effect on the parents’ experience. Clinical implication: There is no good reason for separation between a healthy newborn infant and its parents after an elective caesarean section. Training of health care providers in the implementation of a continuous model of parental care after caesarean section as a caring model enhancing extrauterine adaptation during mother-child separation needs to be prioritized

Formal methods for motion planning and control in dynamic and partially known environments

This thesis is motivated by time and safety critical applications involving the use of autonomous vehicles to accomplish complex tasks in dynamic and partially known environments. We use temporal logic to formally express such complex tasks. Temporal logic specifications generalize the classical notions of stability and reachability widely studied within the control and hybrid systems communities. Given a model describing the motion of a robotic system in an environment and a formal task specification, the aim is to automatically synthesize a control policy that guarantees the satisfaction of the specification. This thesis presents novel control synthesis algorithms to tackle the problem of motion planning from temporal logic specifications in uncertain environments. For each one of the planning and control synthesis problems addressed in this dissertation, the proposed algorithms are implemented, evaluated, and validated thought experiments and/or simulations. The first part of this thesis focuses on a mobile robot whose success is measured by the completion of temporal logic tasks within a given period of time. In addition to such time constraints, the planning algorithm must also deal with the uncertainty that arises from the changes in the robot's workspace during task execution. In particular, we consider a robot deployed in a partitioned environment subjected to structural changes such as doors that can open and close. The motion of the robot is modeled as a continuous time Markov decision process and the robot's mission is expressed as a Continuous Stochastic Logic (CSL) formula. A complete framework to find a control strategy that satisfies a specification given as a CSL formula is introduced. The second part of this thesis addresses the synthesis of controllers that guarantee the satisfaction of a task specification expressed as a syntactically co-safe Linear Temporal Logic (scLTL) formula. In this case, uncertainty is characterized by the partial knowledge of the robot's environment. Two scenarios are considered. First, a distributed team of robots required to satisfy the specification over a set of service requests occurring at the vertices of a known graph representing the environment is examined. Second, a single agent motion planning problem from the specification over a set of properties known to be satised at the vertices of the known graph environment is studied. In both cases, we exploit the existence of o-the-shelf model checking and runtime verification tools, the efficiency of graph search algorithms, and the efficacy of exploration techniques to solve the motion planning problem constrained by the absence of complete information about the environment. The final part of this thesis extends uncertainty beyond the absence of a complete knowledge of the environment described above by considering a robot equipped with a noisy sensing system. In particular, the robot is tasked with satisfying a scLTL specification over a set of regions of interest known to be present in the environment. In such a case, although the robot is able to measure the properties characterizing such regions of interest, precisely determining the identity of these regions is not feasible. A mixed observability Markov decision process is used to represent the robot's actuation and sensing models. The control synthesis problem from scLTL formulas is then formulated as a maximum probability reachability problem on this model. The integration of dynamic programming, formal methods, and frontier-based exploration tools allow us to derive an algorithm to solve such a reachability problem