Outcome of gastrointestinal surgery during COVID-19 lockdown in a tertiary care hospital, Nepal

Introduction: Perioperative strategies have been changing due to the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent the risk of postoperative complications and transmission of infection. This study was aimed to assess the outcome of gastrointestinal surgery and the risk of transmission by implementing COVID-19 testing criteria and surgical strategy. Method: This was a retrospective descriptive study conducted at the department of surgery at Patan Hospital, Nepal, during COVID-19 lock-down from 24 march to 15 June 2020. All patients who underwent gastrointestinal (GI) surgery were included. High-risk patients (as defined by the Hospital Incident Command System, HICS) were tested for COVID-19 preoperatively. Surgery was performed in COVID operating room with full protective gear. Low-risk patients were not tested for COVID-19 preoperatively and performed surgery in non-COVID OR. Data from patient’s case-sheets were analyzed descriptively for age, gender, comorbidities, hospital stay, RT-PCR results, surgeries, and postoperative complications. Result: There were total 44 GI surgeries performed; 31(70.5%) were emergency, 5(11.3%) semi-emergency and 8(18.2%) oncology. There were 11(25%) patients tested for COVID-19 preoperatively and were negative. Nine HCWs tested for COVID-19 randomly were negative. Severe postoperative complications developed in 3 patients, with one mortality. Conclusion: Among GI surgeries, there was no increase in postoperative complications and transmission of COVID-19 to the patients or HCWs following the implementation of standard testing criteria and surgical strategy

Shifting the gaze on implementation:examining the association between the implementation of tobacco control laws and prevalence of tobacco using data from a nationally representative survey

Background: Tobacco use and the associated health burden is a cause of concern in India and globally. Despite several tobacco control policies in place, their sub-optimal and variable implementation across Indian states has remained a concern. Studies evaluating the real-world implementation of policies such as Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (COTPA) or National Tobacco Control Program (NTCP) in India and its association with reductions in tobacco use are limited. In this paper, we analyse data from a nationally representative survey to examine how policy implementation is associated with the tobacco use prevalence in India. Methods: We analysed data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS 2016–17) India using multivariable logistic regression. The dependent variables were the use of smoked tobacco, smokeless tobacco, and tobacco in any form. The independent variables were proxies of implementation of the COTPA and the NTCP. We followed a step-wise backward elimination technique to reach the best fit models. Results: People exposed to no-smoking signages had lower odds of using tobacco (OR = 0.70, p < 0.001). People exposed to second-hand smoke (OR = 1.51, p < 0.001) and tobacco product advertisements (OR = 1.23, p < 0.001) had greater odds of using tobacco. Exposure to tobacco advertisements was associated with higher odds of using smokeless tobacco (OR = 1.23, p < 0.001), and smoked (OR = 1.33, p < 0.001) forms of tobacco. Conclusion: We find significant association between the implementation of tobacco control laws/programs and tobacco use in India. Our findings highlight the potential that policy implementation holds in reducing population-level tobacco use thus drawing attention towards the implementation phase of policies. The findings have implications on prioritising enforcement of specific tobacco control measures such as smokefree laws, modifying COTPA signages to encompass all tobacco products including against smokeless tobacco use and strengthening indirect advertising restrictions. Future research could focus on developing and validating predictors specific to policy implementation to support policy evaluation efforts

Strong mosquitocidal Bacillus thuringiensis from Mt. Everest

Abstract Bacillus thuringiensis strains were isolated from soil samples collected from Khumbu Base Camp of the Everest region and characterized by standard microbiological techniques viz. colonial and morphological characteristics, and biochemical tests. Insect bioassay of each isolate was performed by standard method using mosquito larva. Among ten randomly selected isolates, one isolate showed the highest insecticidal activity against Dipteron insects

Synthesis, Structural Properties and Upconversion Emission of Er3+ and Er3+/Yb3+ Doped Nanocrystalline NaNbO3

Nanocrystalline sodium niobate (NaNbO3) powders doped with Er3+ and Er3+/Yb3+ ions have been successfully synthesized via Pechini sol\u2013gel method for the first time. The prepared NaNbO3 nanocrystalline compounds are single phase, with orthorhombic structure, and have an average particle size of 60 nm. The Raman investigation reveals a disorder nature of the host. Upon near infrared excitation with an 970 nm radiation, an intense green and a weaker red upconversion emission was observed from the 2H11/2, 4S3/2 4I15/2 and 4F9/2 4I15/2 transitions respectively, along with 1.55 !m emission from 4F13/2 !4I15/2 transition for both Er3+ doped and Er3+/Yb3+ codoped NaNbO3. A two photon process is found to be the origin of the upconverted emission. An enhancement of nearly 30 times of the upconverted emission is observed in the Er3+/Yb3+ codoped than the Er3+ doped NaNbO3, suggesting a possible use of the present materials in field where the upconversion properties can be useful, such as in solar cells or biomedical applications

A modified generative adversarial networks with Yolov5 for automated forest health diagnosis from aerial imagery and Tabu search algorithm

Abstract Our environment has been significantly impacted by climate change. According to previous research, insect catastrophes induced by global climate change killed many trees, inevitably contributing to forest fires. The condition of the forest is an essential indicator of forest fires. Analysis of aerial images of a forest can detect deceased and living trees at an early stage. Automated forest health diagnostics are crucial for monitoring and preserving forest ecosystem health. Combining Modified Generative Adversarial Networks (MGANs) and YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) is presented in this paper as a novel method for assessing forest health using aerial images. We also employ the Tabu Search Algorithm (TSA) to enhance the process of identifying and categorizing unhealthy forest areas. The proposed model provides synthetic data to supplement the limited labeled dataset, thereby resolving the frequent issue of data scarcity in forest health diagnosis tasks. This improvement enhances the model's ability to generalize to previously unobserved data, thereby increasing the overall precision and robustness of the forest health evaluation. In addition, YOLOv5 integration enables real-time object identification, enabling the model to recognize and pinpoint numerous tree species and potential health issues with exceptional speed and accuracy. The efficient architecture of YOLOv5 enables it to be deployed on devices with limited resources, enabling forest-monitoring applications on-site. We use the TSA to enhance the identification of unhealthy forest areas. The TSA method effectively investigates the search space, ensuring the model converges to a near-optimal solution, improving disease detection precision and decreasing false positives. We evaluated our MGAN-YOLOv5 method using a large dataset of aerial images of diverse forest habitats. The experimental results demonstrated impressive performance in diagnosing forest health automatically, achieving a detection precision of 98.66%, recall of 99.99%, F1 score of 97.77%, accuracy of 99.99%, response time of 3.543 ms and computational time of 5.987 ms. Significantly, our method outperforms all the compared target detection methods showcasing a minimum improvement of 2% in mAP

Fluorescence properties of Nd3+-doped tellurite glasses

The compositional and concentration dependence of luminescence of the F-4(3/2) -> I-4(J) (J = 13/2, 11/2 and 9/2) transitions in four Nd3+-doped tellurite based glasses has been studied. The free-ion energy levels obtained for 60TeO(2) + 39ZnO(2) + 1.0Nd(2)O(3) (TZN10) glass have been analysed using the free-ion Hamiltonian model and compared with similar results obtained for Nd3+ :glass systems. The absorption spectrum of TZN10 glass has been analysed using the Judd-Ofelt theory. Relatively longer decay rates have been obtained for Nd3+-doped phosphotellurite glasses. The emission characteristics of the F-4(3/2) -> I-4(11/2) transition, of the Nd3+ :TZN10 glass, are found to be comparable to those obtained for Nd3+ :phosphate laser glasses. The non-exponential shape of the emission decay curves for the F-4(3/2) -> I-4(11/2) transition is attributed to the presence of energy transfer processes between the Nd3+ ions